Research and teaching interests
My research and writing falls under the working book title, Deadly Virtue: Protestant Identity, Sexual Violence and Race in First Encounters with Indigenous Americans. My thesis is that though many of the individual Europeans who met indigenous Americans found them to be sympathetic, the process of defining a new Protestant identity required resistance to indigenous American people and cultures that resulted in sexual violence and developed into modern racism. I contextualize these encounters within the history of Christianity, the body, and early modern identity politics of gender, race, and sexuality.
Currently I am writing an essay titled “The Gender Amazon: Indigenous Female Masculinity in Early Modern European Representations of Contact,” which has been accepted for presentation at the Newberry Library Seminar on Women and Gender. This essay argues that English and French men exploring the Americas for the first time carried expectations of encountering Amazons: physically powerful, martial women with a great deal of sexual and political agency who lived in matriarchal societies. As a result, when they encountered real indigenous American women within cultures that provided them with sexual, spiritual, and political agency, these travelers were able to partially recognize alternatives to the western gender system.
This research and my academic training draw upon a broad array of early modern historiography, theoretical approaches, and historical methodologies that prepare me to teach early modern Atlantic World History, comparative colonialisms, cross-cultural encounters, the history of science, the history of women, gender, race, class, masculinity, and sexuality, as well as postcolonial, queer, gender, and critical race theory.
HIS 565: Readings in Gender, Race, and Class
W: 4-6:30 pm
LA 203
Dr. Heather Martel
Gender and sexuality are historically and culturally specific descriptions of relations of power in the West that are dependent on metaphors of embodiment, which intersect with other arrangements of power, in class, race, age, faith, monarchy, and colonialism. This course will explore methods and models for theorizing and historicizing gender and sexuality in the early modern Atlantic world. While focusing on this geographic time and space, the course will also provide students with strategies useful in their research in other areas. Readings will include: Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigary, Elizabeth Grosz, Kathryn Schwarz, Joan Scott, Judith Butler, Anne Fausto Sterling, Andrea Smith, Oyeronke Oyewumi, Michel Foucault, David Halperin, and Thomas Lauquer.
“Colonial Allure: Normal Homoeroticism and Sodomy in Sixteenth-Century French-Timucuan Encounters in Florida” Journal of the History of Sexuality (Invited to Revise and Resubmit)
Why would anyone choose to write something like that????