Literature | Boryana Ivanova

By Boryana Ivanova

Travel literature written by European men throughout the early modern period has included narratives of sexual desire and gender disorder directed towards non-European women, noting in particular, the presence of Indigenous female bodies, their sexual social practices, and their imagined lasciviousness. The focus of this paper is to consider the implications of this desire for European men’s masculinity and the ways in which this highlights the boundaries and interconnections of sexuality, gender, race, and manhood in the early modern Atlantic world. As a historically contingent social construction, early modern European masculinity was continuously in transit, relational, and flexible. Therefore, confrontation with colonial travel and sexual feelings of desire towards the native women encountered will have affected how masculinity was personally and socially understood and constructed. In turn, this desire defined non-European women through their ‘overtly sexual’ bodies and through patriarchal European standards of beauty and femininity.

As such, this paper will examine how white European masculinity in the seventeenth century was tensely impacted, conflicted, and constructed through interaction, communication, and thoughts of sexual desire presented towards non-European women, using an analytical focus on Richard Ligon’s A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657). Specifically, I will focus on accounts of desire towards African and Amerindian women, as their gender and sexuality were most often discussed by male travellers, such as Ligon. It will ultimately be argued that European masculinity, when confronted with sexualised interaction and desire towards the nonEuropean female body, created new conflicts within the male self and masculine identity. Masculinity was in conflict due to the desire felt for and expressed towards the African and Amerindian women, which reflects the significance and interconnectivity of race, gender, and sexuality upon the white male colonialist masculinity. This text also seeks to highlight the importance of race in masculine sexual identities throughout the early modern Atlantic world. Masculinity cannot be understood without acknowledging its foundations – the racial and gendered oppression and sexual exoticism of African and Amerindian women. The gendered and racial power dynamic inherent in this sexual desire is necessarily and appropriately addressed throughout the text and cannot be isolated from constructions of 23

masculine identity.

Analysis of masculinity in connection with racialised sexual desire must not become one-sided or onedimensional, replicating historical power dynamics. Sensitive considerations of the sexual cultural assumptions discussed and placed upon the women in this historical narrative must therefore be made. Analyses will be grounded in real social power relations and referenced in relation to patriarchal and racial subjugation. While this paper is about masculinity and desire in the early modern Atlantic world, this should not, and does not, relegate the African and Amerindian women discussed to mere objects or variables which are acted on, with no autonomy or agency. Rather, they are historical subjects in their own right, with their own histories, invariably involved in and a part of this painful formation of manhood through a colonialist identity.

With tropes of savagery, sexual deviancy, and racial ‘otherness’, the women these European men encountered and wrote about were positioned as the antithesis to the display of femininity found within Europe. As such, a degrading image of African and Amerindian women was created based both on their race and gender. European men, and the institution of empire, believed Indigenous women to be ‘wild’ and lax in their sexualities, therefore easily persuaded and sexually available. When faced with this imaged overly sexed ‘female Other’, the early modern hegemonic masculinity – which sought selfcontrol, refinement, and restraint – began to crumble. A conflict within the European male traveller therefore appears, as his imagined status as a virile conqueror, of both land and body, skirmishes the boundaries of over sexing oneself and falling ‘prey’ to feminine ideations of lust. The inner management of sexual desire towards the non-European women, then, held social and personal consequences for the white man’s masculinity. Sexual interaction and lustful communication, in any form, with African and Amerindian women warped European men’s self-conceptualisations of their masculinities and created an internal conflict.

Taking the non-European female body as a symbol of both savagery and deceptive beauty, Ligon’s narrative discloses the dangerously seductive potential of the women’s bodies. Ligon’s account, therefore, discusses the boundaries of desire, and its

‘destructive’ potential to masculinity. He presents himself and his masculine identity in stark contrast to the women’s feminised, passive, hypersexualised, and voracious characters. Throughout, he speaks of the beauty and sexual attraction of the women he meets: “a negro of the greatest beauty and majesty altogether that I ever saw in one woman,” stating later that he has met two women who have “such features, as would mar the judgement of the best painters”. In particular, he continuously highlights the breasts of each woman he sees: “their breasts round, firm, and beautifully shaped.” In one instance, he claims that an enslaved African woman’s breasts hang so low to the ground that “you would think they [she] had six legs.” In all examples, Ligon reduces the women he

Illustration by Ruby Tait

meets to their sexualised bodies and appearances; to him and his readers, the women stand as objects of desire and lust, rather than active subjects. In these ways, and in others, white European masculinity was actively produced through the observation and ordering of the Indigenous female body.

Ligon’s recurring descriptive accounts of women’s breasts and beauty alludes to wider seventeenthcentury Europe’s understanding of the female body. Breasts became increasingly politicised during this time, signifying female defencelessness or threat. In particular, the supposed pendulous form of Amerindian and African women’s breasts conveyed a deformed, hyper-sexualised, or animalistic femininity, which was somehow familiar yet simultaneously unfamiliar, signalling the deception of femaleness. As such, the nonEuropean female body was depicted as intrinsically biologically and physically hyper-sexual, an inherent characteristic of Amerindian and African women which reconfigured their femininities as dangerously savage. Ligon actively contributes to this narrative through his textual account of the wider Atlantic world’s conflation of the cultural and the physical as presented as a social fact, and the pendulous breasts of Amerindian and African women comes to signify, and legitimise, the ethnological notion of the female ‘savage’. Reducing the women to their sexual

epistemological meanings in this way situates Ligon as the masculine figure, contrasting with the women’s subjugated place within the gendered colonial relationship.

During his stay in Cape Verde, Ligon spends his time with two Indigenous women where he writes that he trades goods, or, as he calls them, ‘gifts’, in return for their attention. For him, exchanging goods for sexual encounter, interaction, and communication vindicated his masculinity and marked the women as ‘below him’ or as objects which can be bought.

And yet, Ligon’s very sexualisation of the women also speaks of the perceived threats they held against

European men’s masculinity. Sexual desire and interaction between male travellers and the women 24

they encountered were always ‘dangerous’, for they undermined masculine discipline and encouraged degenerative sexualised tendencies among ‘civilised’ men, stimulated by the hypersexualised and animalistic women’s ‘savagery’. Indeed, building on what Bridget Orr has argued, desire towards non-European women rendered visible a collision between ‘uncivilised women and ‘civilised men’ which could alter the way authorities and individual persons perceived European ‘superior’ masculinity. Moreover, this desire apparently illustrated the European men’s uncontrollable sexual prowess and ‘instincts’, which were thought to be on par with the barbarous women encountered.

As masculinity connoted power and sexual dominance, and if Ligon’s very nature was so powerfully sexual, then the imagined overt sensuality of the African and Amerindian women could potentially unhinge him from the path of masculine civility. Ligon’s accounts of the women’s bodies and their association with being over-sexed allude to the threats which may coercively lead European men to effeminacy and weakness. The desire that he presents in his narrative, therefore, towards the nonEuropean women, was also intended to be seen as a potentially dangerous thought which could result in men’s masculinities being challenged or re-ordered along lines of hyper-sexuality.

Richard Ligon is but a microcosm of wider early modern narratives of sexual desire and heightened sexual experience and awakening while travelling throughout the Atlantic. His account speaks of an almost insatiable or uncontrollable lustful desire towards the Amerindian and African women he encountered. Re-ordering their bodies along European conceptualisations of patriarchy, the female bodies are hyper-sexualised, and their femininities characterised as passive, susceptible to European men’s virile masculinities. As such, European travellers also perceived a danger, as their masculinities were so unstable and relationally dependent upon the imagined gender characteristics of non-European women that their manhood was easily conflicted. Desire towards the hypersexualised female body could infer a susceptibility to over-feminine emotions of lust, in turn portraying the man as weak and powerless. Above all, then, desire towards African and Amerindian women evidences the instability of masculinity in the early modern Atlantic world, which was easily and continuously engrossed in inner conflictions when in interaction with the native women.

Consequently, the story of masculinity cannot be understood without also speaking of the women involved in shaping said masculinities. This desire defined African and Amerindian women by their sexual bodies, and their lives soon rested upon and were consumed by the patriarchal standards of European men. Dependent on their imagined masculinities, European men had to subjugate and sexualise the women they encountered and interacted with. They misinterpreted and completely warped understandings of African and Amerindian gender traditions, so that tribal dances were reduced to orgies and polygamy illustrative of the uncontrolled female lust. In an effort to form identities of manhood, European men also re-formed the personal histories and cultural representations of African and Amerindian women. Early modern Atlantic masculinity, therefore, is intimately tied the histories of Indigenous women.

After examining Richard Ligon’s accounts of African and Amerindian woman’s imagined sexualities and bodies, it can be concluded that sexualised communications of desire expressed in whichever form of interaction – physical or otherwise – between the male traveller and Indigenous women caused both an internal and societal conflict of masculinity. With colonial expansion and travel away from the European metropole, an emerging masculine identity faced with sexual desire and endeavour towards non-European, specifically African and Amerindian, women conflicted with established masculinities ‘back home’. The masculine ethos and enterprise of empire and colonialism, as Peter Hulme had brandished it, was soon destabilised by this struggle of masculine identity.