The Berdache of Early American Conquest Essay -- Spaniards Spanish His

The Berdache of Early American Conquest Methodological IntroductionThis paper attempts to link the facet of lie in wait theory that explains sexual urge and sexuality as culturally constructed identities, with the presence of the berdache in the New World at the time of the Spanish conquest. By analyzing the construction of gender and sexuality among the native peoples, in contrast to the ideologies of the Spanish, I found a clash arose which explained, in some sense, the incompatibility of the two cultures. The differences between the two cultures gender construction ceremonious support for the very unnatural or inessential nature of gender, sexuality, and the body as a means of self-identity. By realizing the issue of source and where it lies within individuals and societies, hierarchical social constructions are revealed to be connected with sexual roles. This dominant/subordinate relationship present in both cultures defines and substantiates the role that power plays in th e cultural context. The use of queer theory to elucidate these complicated social and sexual relationships helps to explain the way this power structure maps onto the native peoples relationship with the berdache. This paper will show how the Spaniards mapped their conceptions of power and sexual relationships onto the natives. It will address this conception by carefully analyzing the presence of hermaphrodites in Theodore de Brys copper etchings. By visualizing the berdache through the eyes of the Spaniard, the concept of sexualizing the foreign natives is revealed to be thickly imbedded in their own gender norms.This argument is two-fold. First, I will support the queer theory view of gender construction by employ the native berdache as a... ...he with queer theory, the misconceptions of the Spaniards and the persecution of this particular group as sodomites, becomes valuable in defining where specified roles of gender and sexuality are really established. plant life CitedBuche r, Bernadette. Icon and Conquest. University of Chicago shake up Chicago, (1981). Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Robert Hurley (ed). (New York, 1990). Klages, Mary. Queer Theory http//www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages /queertheory.html (April 9, 1998). Kowalski-Wallace, Elizabeth (ed.). Encyclopedia of Feminist Literary Theory. Garland Publishing, Inc. New York, (1997). Sedgewick, Eve Kosofsky. The Epistemology of the Closet. University of California Press Berkeley, (1990). Trexler, Richard C. Sex and Conquest. Cornell University Press Ithaca, (1995). Illustrations