More on the sexual fantasies of settlers: María Laura Martinelli, Settler Colonial Fantasies: Scenes of Captivity and Desertion in the Southern Cone of Latin America, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

More on the sexual fantasies of settlers: María Laura Martinelli, Settler Colonial Fantasies: Scenes of Captivity and Desertion in the Southern Cone of Latin America, PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2025

10Sep25

Abstract: This dissertation explores the entanglements of colonialism, discourses of sexuality, and eroticism in the Southern Cone of Latin America through an interdisciplinary lens that includes historical anthropology of the borderlands, settler colonial studies, political theory, gender and sexuality studies, and psychoanalysis. It centers on the persistent colonial fantasies surrounding white women allegedly captured during Indigenous raids in the regions that now comprise Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. I conceptualize these narratives—combining the figure of the captive woman (la cautiva), Indigenous raids (malones), and the borderland setting—as “scenes of captivity.” These scenes form a rich and evolving cultural and literary archive that spans from the seventeenth century to the present. The dissertation argues that placing the erotic language of these scenes within settler colonial contexts reveals how domination is imagined and reproduced through cultural forms in unexpected ways, often entangled with narratives of sexuality and desire. This approach traces the legacy of Spanish colonialism into the contemporary political imagination. Rather than interpreting la cautiva as a mere allegory of emerging nation-states, I situate scenes of captivity within a global settler colonial framework. Drawing on a constellation of texts—including colonial chronicles, Jesuit writings, 19th-century essays, serialized fiction (folletines), novels, and contemporary erotic literature—I examine how these narratives have sustained, and at times subverted, settler colonial imaginaries across centuries. The dissertation begins with an analysis of Ruy Díaz de Guzmán’s Historia of the conquest of the Río de la Plata and its resonances in Jesuit texts from the Araucanía and Tucumán borderlands, where Indigenous desire was portrayed as excessive and threatening, and sexuality served as a key tool in the racialization of Indigenous peoples. It then turns to 19thcentury texts by Chilean politician Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna and Argentine writer Eduarda Mansilla—Elisa Bravo (1884), Lucía Miranda (1860), and Pablo, ou la vie dans les Pampas (1868)—to examine the economies of desire that animated these scenes during contested military occupations of Mapuche and Rankulche territories. Finally, the dissertation explores contemporary imagination of the Pampas as heterotopic spaces in works such as Osvaldo Baigorria’s “Semen indio” and Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Las aventuras de la China Iron. By tracing how these scenes reappear and shift across time and media, the dissertation argues that they not only use sexualized narratives to justify colonial domination, but also paradoxically inform visions of gender and sexual liberation. From their colonial origins to contemporary re-elaborations, scenes of captivity are accompanied by gestures of desertion that destabilize their logic. These gestures, I argue, open possibilities for gender liberation that exist in tension with, and sometimes in contradiction to, Indigenous sovereignty. By situating captivity and desertion at the intersection of gender and Indigenous liberation, this research reveals the enduring and unresolved tensions between these emancipatory projects—tensions that remain central to the most radical political struggles in Latin America today.

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