Reciprocal Contracts: Reconstructing Sexual Consent in Late Colonial Lima

Abstract: To date, much of the scholarship on sexual violence in Latin America has centered on honor, on women’s involvement in the legal system, and on marriage. Research has also revealed a great deal about domestic violence and crimes against women. From this research, it becomes clear that sexual coercion of women was not an infrequent occurrence and that women and families sought to redress these issues both informally and through the legal system. However, despite this wealth of information, current scholarship has yet to examine the paradigms by which women and legal authorities determined that a violation of sexual consent had occurred, in part because few of the written laws spelled out a formal definition for consent. This article, focused on late-eighteenth-century Lima, Peru, fills this gap by approaching sexual consent as a “reciprocal contract” between two people, separate from but related to the Spanish Catholic understanding of marriage. In court, Lima’s women used this contractual language to advocate for justice when their male partners violated their arrangements (and thus their consent). Families of violated women and the accused men themselves also presented their written arguments in contractual terms. Enslaved women, who had no claims to social or familial protections, articulated a sense of personal violation when their masters forced them to acquiesce to sexual relations, and attempted to use these coercive interactions as a path to manumission. Understanding these definitions and dynamics encourages scholars to alter their approaches to sexual consent, recentering survivor narratives and cultural context in historical discussions of sexual violence.