Deviant and Useful Citizens: The Cultural Production of the Female Body in Eighteenth-century Peru by Mariselle Meléndez (review)

Mariselle Meléndez’s study of cultural representations of the utility and productivity of the female body in eighteenth-century Peru provides a valuable hermeneutical tool to understand the utilitarian political agenda of the Spanish Bourbon regime in one of its most important viceroyalties in the Americas. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach in order to examine “textual and visual representations of female colonial bodies” (174), Meléndez relays on an array of sources, including legal documents on the execution of Micaela Bastidas, the wife of the Inca leader Túpac Amaru II; a visual history of the Peruvian province of Trujillo; a religious chronicle of the history of a monastery in Lima; and newspapers articles from Mercurio peruano, the first newspaper founded by native Peruvians.

Meléndez pays special attention to the attempt by colonial authorities to “read” female colonial bodies as “cultural text[s]” (2) in which women’s place in society is defined as that of bearing healthy and productive citizens for the homeland. Any female body that falls outside this narrow definition is deemed as deviant and submitted to corrective measures. Meléndez’s approach shows its indebtedness to Michel Foucault’s examination of the intricate relation between discourse, power, and knowledge, and its manipulation by authoritarian systems in order to control, regulate, and track its subjects.

This becomes particularly evident in chapter 1 with the notion of Bastidas’s brutal fate of torture, mutilation, and death at the hands of Spanish colonial authorities as an act of politicization of her body destined to produce what Foucault would call “docile bodies.” In the same way that Bastidas’s body had been a “site of rebellion,” upon her capture, it had to be turned into a “site of punishment” and a cautionary tale for other potential rebels. Meléndez offers the concept of “rational passion” in order to illustrate an intriguing historical irony; the same fear that Bastidas had to endure in face of her violent death, as well as the one endured by the crowd made to witness the “spectacle” of her execution, is the same fear she had consciously employed to ensure adherence to the cause of the insurrection. The notion of fear as a “rational” rather than an “uncontrollable” passion is very suggestive (23), especially in the case of a larger-than-life figure like Bastidas, and warrants more elaboration than it is given in this book.

Chapter 2 examines the process of commoditization of the female body in Bishop D. Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón’s Truxillo del Perú, a nine-volume manuscript with water-color illustrations. Among them, depictions of female colonial bodies as “material instruments to achieve economic prosperity” (74) show pointed differences in representation marked by factors such as race and social class. This pragmatic notion of female bodies as producers of economic progress entails a fascinating paradox, namely that in objectifying these women with his classificatory activity, the bishop winds up rendering a picture of strong and independent women capable of fending for themselves, particularly in the case of women from lower social strata. Unfortunately, no analysis of this point is offered. Lastly, while the examination of the visual texts is primarily done from the viewpoint of the connection between power and knowledge in Martínez Compañón’s classificatory activity, one following the curatorial logic of a museum (a word that actually appears in the subtitle of his chronicle), the role of observation is not developed as much. The inclusion of some theories of the gaze would have certainly aided readers to reflect about their own role, as well as that of the bishop, as observers of this visual compendium.

Chapter 3 renders an image of the female religious body as national patrimony. The notion of “religious body” entails a dual meaning in the chronicle Historia de la fundación del...