230185 Americus meets America: Colonization as En-Gendering (Contemporary Research Paradigms) (S) (SoSe 2015)

The encounter between the European conquerors and the inhabitants of the conquered spaces has often been depicted as an encounter between two genders. On the one hand, in numerous cartographies and travel narratives the territory itself is imagined as female. Anne McClintock e.g. speaks of Columbuses‘ "breast phantasies", while in Theodor Galle's famous copper engraving America is allegorically depicted as a woman. On the other hand, many narrations reduce the violent conquest to a romantic love story between a European conqueror and an "indigenous" woman, e.g. in relation to figures like La Malinche or Pocahontas. Conquered masculinity is often represented in figurations of noble savages or helpless children.

By discussing theoretical and exemplary cultural texts (postcolonial and decolonial theories, gender approaches, travel narratives, pictures, maps, cartoons, films), the seminar asks how colonial domination could be made intelligble and justified through the transference to the gender hierarchy and how the own superiority could be constituted against the backdrop of a "female" and thus inferior Other respectively. The structural analogy between colonial and gendered inequalities shapes images of Latin America (and other formerly colonized spaces) as well as those of "Latin American" masculinity and femininity.

Teilnahmevoraussetzungen, notwendige Vorkenntnisse

Starts: 15.4.2015

Literaturangaben

McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather. Race, Class and Sexuality in the Colonial Context. New York and London: Routledge, 1995 (excerpt).