The re/formation of the female body: Gender, law, and culture in colonial New England and New Spain (Massachusetts, New Mexico, Mexico)

My dissertation, The Re/Formation of the Female Body: Gender, Law, and Culture in Colonial New England and New Spain, explores the ways in which women were persecuted for premarital sex and adultery in colonial New England and New Spain. Concentrating on court cases, sermons, laws, journals, and testimonies written in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Massachusetts, New Mexico, and Mexico, my dissertation reveals how the discourses, punitive measures, and social consequences of sexual aberrance codified the male and female body in culturally and historically specific ways. Despite clear historical, religious, and “national” differences, New England and New Spain both experienced a comparable shift in the modes of codification from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. In the seventeenth century, women were viewed primarily in terms of gender; by the eighteenth century, women were differentiated according to race and class. Once women were classified by race, the corporeal inscription of idealized virtue within the white female body allowed for the transference of visceral, female sexuality to the erotic “other.” The result of my study concludes that, by the eighteenth century, white women were effectively desexualized and domesticated, women of color eroticized, and men no longer named in cases of consensual, heterosexual sexual misconduct before and outside marriage. The “desexualization” of the white woman during the eighteenth century—as characterized by the closure of her orifices and the displacement of her sexual pollutants to the racialized and sexualized bodies of “darker” women—allowed for the later creation of the virginal and mothering body that would eventually be inscribed with and by nineteenth-century American paradigms of civic and domestic virtue.