Bad examples: The troubled futures of kinship in colonial Spanish America

Abstract

Bad Examples: The Troubled Futures of Kinship in Colonial Spanish America explores the impact of colonialism on articulations of gender and sexuality in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century transatlantic Spanish world. It shows that Spanish and indigenous subjects employed discourses of kinship to explain their social pasts and to imagine more favorable political futures. While friars worked to extirpate the perceived idolatries of indigenous and African peoples, the Crown proposed legislation to curtail abuses by Spanish landholders, and Incan elites argued for their legitimate sovereignty over the Spanish-held Andes. Bad Examples argues that kinship sets the terms for these visions of social disorder and their possible transformation. It collates and analyzes an expanded repertoire of kinship paradigms—schemas that colonial administrators perceived as threats to normative family politics—in readings of conquest histories, indigenous texts, literary works, and archival documents from Spain and the Viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru. These colonial actors\u27 mutable theories of generation, inheritance, and descent undermine a scholarly tendency to analyze colonial gender and sexuality as the imposition of oppressive Spanish and Christian norms on New World peoples. To that end, Bad Examples is organized around four concepts of affiliation through which colonial subjects described and negotiated malleable social hierarchies: use, exemplarity, relations, and habits. It gathers these prominent terms from the colonial Spanish Americas to describe not what kinship is, but rather what kinship does. As an historiographic method, Bad Examples returns uncertainty to the archive by taking seriously the struggles of colonial subjects to codify, deploy, and repurpose kinship for diverse political ends. The textual production and emotional labor that went in to these attempts for alternate colonial orders challenge the model of an inevitable future guaranteed by reproductive union.