Gender, Colonialism, and the Queerness of Dreams: Seventeenth-Century Dreamwork

This essay focuses attention on the cognitive and spiritual work of the dream and the devotional labor of the Jesuit missionary in seventeenth-century Quebec, and views these often passionately opposed spiritual efforts—performed by the various and often passionately opposed peoples of Catholic Fran...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of medieval and early modern studies 2014-01, Vol.44 (1), p.187-213
Main Author: Campbell, Mary Baine
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
17th century
Affect Theory
Cognitive psychology
Colonialism
Cultural Studies
Dreams
Females
Femininity
Gender studies
Medieval and Early Modern Studies
Missionaries
Pre-Modern Studies
Religious Studies
Spirituality
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Summary:This essay focuses attention on the cognitive and spiritual work of the dream and the devotional labor of the Jesuit missionary in seventeenth-century Quebec, and views these often passionately opposed spiritual efforts—performed by the various and often passionately opposed peoples of Catholic France and “New France”—through the lens of gender. In the case of early modern Atlantic dreaming, gender and its confusions in the social imaginary are not tied to the historical practice of female-bodied persons. The femininity investigated here is positional and symbolic. There are many kinds of “female” in the early modern shake-up: the terms of sex and gender lose purchase in an avalanche of novel categories at least transitionally operative in the social and epistemological chaos of the period. Confronted by the colonial New World, European gender and other fundamental categories are visible as fragile arrays of power relations, grounded in opposing forms of consciousness.
ISSN:1082-9636
1527-8263
DOI:10.1215/10829636-2389542