Mariselle Melendez. Deviant and Useful Citizens: The Cultural Production of the Female Body in Eighteenth-Century Peru
This book is an addition to the growing literature on the perception of women in the Age of Enlightenment in colonial Hispanic America. Mariselle Melendez has written an interesting book that highlights the possibilities and difficulties of a literary-studies approach to historical phenomena. It takes as its subject die social construction of the female body as it appears in political, scientific, and religious discourses in late eighteenth-century Peru during the Bourbon reform period. The author's contention is that the female body, interpreted as a "type of cultural text," was read either "as an instrument of disorder, fear, deviance and danger," or of spirituality and usefulness (p. 8). Melendez organizes her book around four themes or discourses drawn from published primary and secondary sources, which illuminate how female bodies were used "as tools" for political purposes. The first chapter delves into episodes of the life of Micaela Bastidas and the great Andean rebellion of 1780, offering a largely uncritical narrative of the insurrection. As Melendez explains, Micaela, who was Tupac Amaru's wife and co-leader of the rebellion, became created fear for both the rebels under her command and royal authorities. Michaela's assertive personality caused trepidation among the rebels, so much so that the colonial authorities used her tortured and dismembered body to produce terror among the population. However, considering that Tupac Amaru and members of his family suffered the same fate at the hands of the colonial government, the uniqueness of Micaela's case requires a gender perspective.