About Us

Focused on global knowledge production, this network aims to bring together scholars and early-career researchers who work on women and gender in the Iberian worlds. We focus on women's knowledge production across different regions of the Iberian domains, creating a space for dialogue and the development of a global history of women. We seek to contribute to changing perspectives on the participation of women in shaping our world by uncovering the mechanisms used to render women invisible in history and bringing together women's history, gender history, and global history.

Since the 1970s, scholars of women’s history have revealed that history has long been gendered male. Women have been absent from history, from accounts of how humanity has shaped the world and constructed societies. There has been a silence in the archives surrounding women's experiences and presence, an absence of women from accounts of political influence, and a lack of recognition of their contributions to global and local economies. Nevertheless, these efforts have not yet been sufficient to change the way we understand women in the past. In response, our network takes gender seriously as an analytical category in the production of knowledge—including normative, emotional, spiritual, and healing knowledge, produced in different social settings, such as convents—and asks what it meant to be a woman and how gender relations can be characterised. What mechanisms were used to construct a gender system that can also explain women's invisibility in the past? Our network places women's experiences at the centre, treating women as historical agents rather than merely as objects of study, and seeks to challenge their representation as instruments of 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 a single analytical framework and to demonstrate that gender, as a system of knowledge and power, is constructed socially through everyday practices at both local and global levels. Gender is constructed locally, but always in relation to its wider cultural contexts. Human behaviours are cultural, and their meanings are socially constructed within groups, through social relations and human experience.

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