Religion, Reproductive Knowledge, and Resistance in the Colonial Hispanic World
HDS 2341
Subject & Catalog Number
Course Information
Description
This seminar examines how religious doctrine shaped—and was shaped by—understandings of female reproduction in colonial Latin America and early Modern Iberia. Reading across colonial religious reforms, Inquisition records, confessional manuals, medical and obstetrical treatises, literary writings, and midwifery records and testimonies, we will study how the female body operated as a primary terrain where evangelization, biopower, and resistance converged. Students will explore the ways in which the Catholic Church attempted to regulate conception, childbirth, and gynecological care, while women and trans subjectivities—lay and religious, European and Indigenous—negotiated, subverted, or preserved their own embodied knowledge. All required texts will be in English, but supplemental readings in Spanish will be optional.
Course Notes
For permission to enroll, please email a paragraph to Prof. Uparela describing your interest in the class and any relevant background.
Available for BTI Cross Registration
Available for Harvard Cross Registration
Gender, Sexuality, and Religion
Religions of the Americas
Religion, Literature, and Culture
Humanism
Indigenous Religions
Humanism
Indigenous Religions
