Editors’ Note

Economies of Desire

The essays in this issue historicize narratives of desire—across time, across racial boundaries, across physical space, and across the airwaves—by focusing on the lives of women in the grip of relationships over which they had more or less control, and which are emblematic of the affective economies in which they circulated. From late–seventeenth–century Massachusetts to the Mexican telenovela of the 1990s, the women who figure here illustrate how intimacy, sexual and otherwise, became a site for public spectacle in local community settings and for translocal audiences. Taken together, they map a number of material and symbolic economies in which desire for and by women is not just evident, but functions as a prism through which a variety of other historical subjects—cultural memory, interracial marriage, sexual violence and national politics—can be accessed. In so doing, these essays make a powerful case for desire itself as a critical domain of historical inquiry and an indispensable analytical tool in the project of women’s history.

Barbara Cutter’s “The Female Indian Killer Memorialized” sets the stage for this argument by excavating the story of Hannah Duston, a late–seventeeth–century Massachusetts woman abducted and later scalped and killed by Native Americans (the particulars are sketchy, the narratives about it dense with the trauma of white womanhood violated). Well–known at the time, this particular capture narrative was revived in the nineteenth century not only in print culture but in stone as well, with no fewer than three monuments erected to her memory. Cutter explores Victorians’ desire to memorialize Duston, tacking it to a familiar narrative of the urgency of white female virtue. But she presses the limits of this paradigm, suggesting that the appeal of Duston was bound up with a greater need for evidence of a particular, even exceptional, American innocence: a desideratum that Duston’s story was made to fulfill in the context of U.S. imperial frontier violence and ongoing depredations against native peoples.

In the story that Angela Wanhalla excavates we are able to see desire across racial lines that is ultimately thwarted, disrupting a range of relationships and aspirations even as it allows us a rare glimpse into indigenous communities a world away from the colonial United States. Her essay, “One White Man I Like Very Much,” tells the tale of early–nineteenth–century New Zealander Irihāpeti Pātahi, who defied local custom and became involved with a whaler, Edwin Palmer. The trauma, both personal and social, which ensued in the wake of the failed relationship underscores the complex economies of desire that interracial sex both grows out of and, of course, produces: for Irihāpeti Pātahi’s “well–being” in both emotional and material terms was at risk when Palmer subsequently entered into Christian marriage with a European woman.

In Joseph Genetin–Pilawa’s essay, “All Intent on Seeing the White Woman Married to the Red Man,” the object of desire is as much a Native American man and his public embodiment of the middle–class ideal of American manhood as it is his white spouse. The marriage of Ely Parker, a Seneca sachem and Civil War general, to Minnie Sackett, a young white socialite, made them the “it” couple of 1867 in Washington DC, generating tremendous press at a historical moment when the fate of the union—national union—hung in the balance. The power of the title’s quote is worth dwelling on: it is not difficult to read the intensity of public desire for the spectacle of white and red joined in marriage (“all intent”)—a phenomenon not attributable to Parker’s celebrity alone, given the variety of such interracial unions that attracted regional and national publicity in the postbellum period. As Genetin–Pilawa’s reading suggests, both desire and disavowal were at the heart of postwar nation–building, and at the affective center of assimilationist thinking as well.

Mary Ann Villarreal’s “Becoming San Antonio’s Own” catapults us into the vibrant world of 1930s Texas, where Rosita Fernández—a self–made local emblem of Mexican–American authenticity—played out a...