Women agencies, knowledge of normativity and sexualities: uses of justice in the Río de la Plata (17th-18th centuries)

The project will investigate the uses of justice by women in the colonial contexts of the Ro de la Plata, between Spanish and Portuguese Americas through lawsuits of moral crimes.

The ultimate aim is to untangle the trials by detecting features both in and beyond the descriptions registered in the lawsuits, seeking to discover which were the uses of justice by women, what were their agencies to the different types of crimes, which knowledge they had, shared and manipulated, which behaviors reveal ways of resistance, and which were the strategies they developed to achieve their interests through justice institutions.

The focus is on women's agencies and the knowledge of normativity they carried and shared, addressing the norms that circulated across and were produced by interpersonal conflicts prosecuted by the secular and ecclesiastic courts.

It will be possible to access the processes of retro-influences between different sorts of knowledge and how they were used by women in a colonial frontier space.

The research will produce new empirical knowledge regarding women and justice by developing an interdisciplinary approach between History, Law and Criminology: it will further develop the cut-crossing bias from Womens History, Feminist Jurisprudence and Feminist Criminology.

The concept of knowledge of normativity will be used in accordance with Thomas Duves perspective, the analysis of the lawsuits will be guided by the method of the indiciary paradigm (Ginzburg) and the nuances of double fragmentation (Farge).

The sources that will be analyzed are from both the secular and ecclesiastical courts from the platina region in the 17th and 18th centuries: from the village of Paranagu (Brazil) and the city of Asuncin (Paraguay) until the villages of Colony of Sacramento and Montevideo (Uruguay), encompassing Santa Fe, Chaco, Misiones, Corrientes, Entre Ros, and part of the Buenos Aires region (Agentina).