Megan Gargiulo from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese received the Marianne A. Ferber Scholarship for her dissertation project, entitled "Race, Gender, and Recogimiento: Discursive Negotiations of Space, Sexuality, and Productivity in Late Colonial Mexico."  Here is her abstract:

This project examines recogimientos de mujeres [“enclosures for women”] in colonial Mexico between 1700 and 1821. Recogimientos were government institutions that punished and reformed women who did not conform to hegemonic femininity, frequently poor women of African or indigenous ancestry. They aimed to subdue and contain “scandalous” and “public” women accused of moral or civil crimes. My dissertation utilizes an interdisciplinary approach to study a variety of archival and textual sources, noting how race, class, and gender influenced the representation of space, illness, sexuality, and productivity within recogimientos.

My dissertation includes four chapters. My first chapter draws on scholars of urban planning and spatial theory to examine the locations and physical spaces of the recogimientos. Chapter 2 utilizes a critical disability studies framework to argue that sickness was strategically deployed in recogimientos by colonial authorities. My third chapter uses sexuality studies to consider how recogimientos, whose putative purpose was to reform female sexuality, served instead to enact sexual violence on recogidas. My final chapter examines how recogimientos punished individual entrepreneurial attempts by women and instead engaged them in a system of racialized capitalism. Finally, my conclusion will draw parallels between recogimientos and current detention situations in Mexico and at the US-Mexico border.

My project contributes to an understanding of colonial biopolitics, the deployment of race and gender in nascent capitalism, and Enlightenment rhetoric in colonial Mexico. Understanding how the church and state disciplined and regulated marginalized women through gendered, racialized, and class-based mechanisms of biopolitical control is crucial to a greater understanding of colonialism and colonizing methods, both in Mexico and in other contexts.