About Us

Focused on the Global Knowledge Production, this network aims to bring together scholars and young researchers who work on women and gender in the Iberian Worlds. We center on women's knowledge production throughout various places in the Iberian domains, making a space for dialogue and construction of a women’s global history. We desire to contribute to change the perspective about the participation of women in shaping our world by unraveling the mechanisms used for invisibilizing women in history, by putting together women’s and gender history and global history.

Since the 1970s, women's history has revealed the fact that history has had a gender, and it is male. Women were absent from history, from the way humanity built their world and constructed society. There has been a silence in the archives for women’s experiences and presence, an absence from political influences and a blackout from world and local economies. Notwithstanding, all these efforts are not yet enough to change the way we see women in our past. Differently, our network takes gender seriously as an analytical category in the production of knowledge - such as normative, emotional, spiritual, healing, in different social spheres as convents - and asks what a woman was and how gender relations can be characterized. What are the mechanisms used to build a gender system that can also explain women’s invisibility in our past? It puts women’s experiences in the center, women as historical agents, and not as another object of study, to end their objectification as mere instruments in historical processes.
 

To do so, the history of the Iberian Worlds serves as our empirical core, allowing us to connect and compare different parts of the Empires. This enables us to include various parts of the world within one analytical framework and to prove that gender as a system of knowledge and power is socially, daily, locally, and globally constructed. Gender is constructed locally, but always in connection with their cultural contexts. Human behaviors are cultural, and their meanings are constructed socially within groups, in the empirical realm of social relations and human experience