Gender and sexuality in indigenous North America, 1400-1850
By: edited by Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Columbia, S.C
Language: eng
Number of pages: 202
ISBN-13: 9781570039966
Subjects: History; Psychology; Indians of North America; Two-spirit people; Sex role; Social conditions; Sexual behavior; Gender identity; Biography; Indian women
Description: "Prior to the arrival of Europeans in the New World, Native Americans across the continent had developed richly complex attitudes and forms of expression concerning gender and sexual roles. The role of the "berdache," a man living as a woman or a woman living as a man in native societies, has received recent scholarly attention but represents just one of many such occurrences of alternative gender identification in these cultures. Editors Sandra Slater and Fay A. Yarbrough have brought together scholars who explore the historical implications of these variations in the meanings of gender, sexuality, and marriage among indigenous communities in North America. Essays that span from the colonial period through the nineteenth century illustrate how these aspects of Native American life were altered through interactions with Europeans.

Representing groundbreaking scholarship in the field of Native American studies, these insightful discussions of gender, sexuality, and identity advance our understanding of cultural traditions and clashes that continue to resonate in native communities today as well as in the larger societies those communities exist within."--pub. desc.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Subverting gender roles in the sixteenth century : Cabeza de Vaca, the conquistador who became a Native American woman / M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo; title: "Nought but women" : constructions of masculinities and modes of emasculation in the New World / Sandra Slater; title: Revisiting gender in Iroquoia / Jan V. Noel; title: Who was Salvadora de los Santos Ramirez, Otomi Indian? / Dorothy Tanck de Estrada; title: Hannah Freeman : gendered sovereignty in Penn's peaceable kingdom / Dawn G. Marsh; title: Women, labor, and power in the nineteenth-century Choctaw Nation / Fay A. Yarbrough; title: Womanish men and manlike women : the Native American berdache as warrior / Roger M. Carpenter; title: Two-spirit histories in Southwestern and Mesoamerican literatures / Gabriel S. Estrada.