Sexual Practice and Fantasy in Colonial America and the Early Republic

Article Sidebar

PDF
Published: Sep 5, 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14434/iujur.v3i1.23364
Keywords:
undergraduate research

Main Article Content

Richard Solomon

Abstract

The sexual practices of European colonists, Native Americans, and African-American slaves of the American colonies and early republic reflected economic and religious disparities, providing specific cultural phenomena in which power relations are established and reaffirmed. These hierarchies not only prescribed the role of sex in quotidian American life; they created lasting traditions in sexual practices that continue to the present day.  For this thesis, I rely on contemporary and classic historiography, religious studies, and gender scholarship to make claims about the role of women in colonial society and the treatment and fantasy-construction of marginalized peoples: namely, African-American slaves and Native Americans. Specifically, I will show how colonial women leveraged their scarcity and sexual desirability to secure their gender’s procreative role and social utility in Puritan and Southern colonies. I will show how the formation and subjugation of the Black slave class acquired distinct and lasting sexual fault lines, how political pressures and economic incentives to justify and nurture slavery shaped whites’ sexual attitudes and behavior, and finally how national myths of manifest destiny and the fecundity of the land came dominate whites experience of native American sexuality.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Article Details

How to Cite
Solomon, R. (2017). Sexual Practice and Fantasy in Colonial America and the Early Republic. IU Journal of Undergraduate Research, 3(1), 24–35. https://doi.org/10.14434/iujur.v3i1.23364
Issue
Vol. 3 No. 1 (2017): The Indiana University Journal of Undergraduate Research
Section
Humanities

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. Ownership of the copyright shall remain with the Author, subject to IUJUR’s use and the rights granted by the Creative Commons license assigned by the Author. A Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license will be applied to the published work unless otherwise indicated in the Student Author Contract. The CC BY-NC 4.0 license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) lets others remix, tweak, and build upon the published Work non-commercially, and although the new works must also acknowledge the original IUJUR publication and be noncommercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  2. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).

References

Axtell, James. The Indian Peoples of Eastern America: A Documentary History of the Sexes. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Bergon, Frank. The Journals of Lewis and Clark. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.

Block, Sharon and Brown, Kathleen M. “Clio in Search of Eros: Redefining Sexualities in Early America.” William and Mary Quarterly 60, (2003). 5–12.

Block, Sharon. Rape and Sexual Power in Early America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Brown, Kathleen M. “Native Americans and Early Modern Concepts of Race.” In Empire and Others: British Encounters with Indigenous Peoples, 1600–1850, ed. Daunton Martin, and Rick Halpern. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.

Brown, Kathleen M., and Va. Williamsburg. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Callender, Charles, and Kochems, Lee M. “The North American Berdache.” Current Anthropology 24, (1983): 443–70.

Tomlins, Christopher L. Freedom Bound. Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing America, 1580–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.

Coser, Lewis A. “The Alien as a Servant of Power: Court Jews and Christian Renegades.”American Sociological Review 37, (1972): 574.

Davis, Jack L. and Berkhofer, Robert F. The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.

Deloria, Philip Joseph. Playing Indian. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Demos, John. A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Detweiler, Robert. “Shifting Perspectives on the Salem Witches.” The History Teacher 8 (1975): 596-610.

Emilio, John and Freedman, Estelle B. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.

Faery, Rebecca Blevins. Cartographies of Desire: Captivity, Race, and Sex in the Shaping of an American Nation. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999.

Fessenden, Tracy. The Puritan Origins of American Sex: Religion, Sexuality, and National Identity in American Literature. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Fulton, Robert and Anderson, Steven W. “The Amerindian “Man-Woman”: Gender, Liminality, and Cultural Continuity.” Current Anthropology 33, no. 5 (1992): 603–10.

Innes, Stephen. Labor in a New Land Economy and Society in Seventeenth-Century Springfield. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Jacobs, Sue. Two-spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997.

Jordan, Winthrop D., and Va. Williamsburg. White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968.

Lang, Sabine. Men as Women, Women as Men: Changing Gender in Native American Cultures. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998.

Luker, Kristin. Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Nagel, Joane. Race, Ethnicity, and Sexuality: Intimate Intersections, Forbidden Frontiers. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New York: Random House, 2016.

Nanda, Serena. Gender Diversity: Crosscultural Variations. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 2000. Print.

Norton, Mary Beth. “Gender and Defamation in Seventeenth-Century Maryland.” William and Mary Quarterly 44 (1987): 3–39.

Equiano, Olauda. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olauda Equiano, Written by Himself, ed.

Robert J. Allison. Boston: St. Martin’s Press, 1995. Roberts, Dorothy E. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon Books, 1997.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Random House, 1993.

Slater, Sandra. “Sex and Sin: The Historiography of Women, Gender, and Sexuality in Colonial Massachusetts.” Historical Journal of Massachusetts41, (2013): 104-135.

Smith, Sherry L. The View from Officers’ Row: Army Perceptions of Western Indians. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1990.

Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle, and Levernier, James. The Indian Captivity Narrative, 1550–1900. New York: Twayne, 1997.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.

Weisberg, K. Kelly. “‘Under Greet Temptations Heer’ Women and Divorce in Puritan Massachusetts.” Feminist Studies 2 (1975): 183-193.

Williams, Linda. Porn Studies. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004.

Wood, Betty. The Origins of American Slavery: Freedom and Bondage in the English Colonies. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997.