Abstract

CURLEY, Robert. The Archive, the Nun and the Problem of War Rape in the Mexican Revolution, 1914. Hist. graf [online]. 2021, n.57, pp.59-94.  Epub July 03, 2021. ISSN 1405-0927.  https://doi.org/10.48102/hyg.vi57.346.

This article has two goals: first, to show how the construction of historical archives is a gendered act of power; and second, to render visible a group of women whose lives have remained previously marginalized in Mexican historiography. Both threads of this story are situated in 1914 at an inflection point of the Mexican revolution. This is a doubly invisible history, once because it is a history of women, and again due to their religious vows. The topic that guides the argument is the testimony produced around the rape of some religious women at the hands of Constitutionalist Army soldiers. It is read in multiple ways through the lens of the subaltern, and teases out the differences between the sacred and the profane, purity and contamination. This strategic reading of the sources opens distinct but related windows on the history of revolution as war, and violence as a sexed phenomenon.

Keywords : Mexican Revolution; Gender Violence; Catholicism; Methodology; Religious Orders; Gender History; Junior Studies; Mexico History; Twentieth Century.