"Alien to my sex": Enslaved Women and Their Gendered Notions of Abuse in Eighteenth-Century Lima, Peru

Spanish imperial law empowered enslaved men and women to accuse slaveholders of abuse and have those complaints investigated and adjudicated by colonial magistrates. This article explores how enslaved women in eighteenth-century Peru began to articulate visions of slavery, fair treatment, and abuse as profoundly gendered in accusing their owners of abuse and how such articulations became reflected in imperial law. Women (and their advocates) advanced such claims of gendered abuse in terms of violations of colonial gendered notions of labor and colonial codes of sexual honor and as a result of sexual violence.