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Antonella’s 3rd Assignment

The first chapter of Jennifer Morgan’s book, Male travelers, female bodies, and racial ideology explains how as the travelers who came to explore the native people’s homeland had begun to see the women as objects of desire and as something that is very much different from the pure white women. Jennifer Morgan has this reoccurring motif in this chapter where the men would always compare the native women to white women. However, on pages sixteen and seventeen the writers of the books about the exploration would focus on the socio-sexual deviance to specify the savagery of Europeans while also applying similar ideals were placed on the native Africans and native Americans for the Europeans to understand their sexual customs in their terms. In the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, the writer would mention that in countries such Africa or Ethiopia the natives would lie down fully naked and that the women have no shame of the men. This may possibly infer to how there is no form of control between native men and women during the act of sex. The author later mentions that the natives would marry but there wasn’t a wife because all the women were common and that when the women have children then the women would give the child to the men that the women is seeing. Morgan begins to talk about Deviant sexual behavior that is possibly caused by the breakdown of the European beliefs on natural laws. Deviant sexual behavior is the concept of an absence of disgrace, an inability to identify lines of inheritance and lineage. The concern with Deviant sexuality is that it is used mainly for the descriptions of women as a theme of the travel writings of the early modern age of Europe and so these explorers and travelers had brought expectations to their voyages to the new world and Africa about women with distended breasts and the expectation that these women have a dangerous sexuality that would allow the travelers to have their way with the natives. The concept of the female body and racism that Jennifer Morgan is elaborating on is that some of the focus of these travelers might be related to the glory of finding island but also finding this sex filled paradise with these native women who have open minded practices about sex and monogamy.

A question I have is how many writings were there about voyages to islands that were publish that was just about the natives they had seen?