Masculinity in Conflict: Desire, Encounter, and Race in Early Modern Travel Literature 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
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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
