Isa Cruz

Early Wednesday evening in Moulton Union, Kristen Block, professor of history at the University of Tennessee, gave a lecture on the convergence of sexuality, disease and healing in colonial Caribbean society. Hosted by the Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies Program, Block advocated for a holistic approach to the history of medicine, pulling ideas from a book she is writing called “Desire, Corruption and Healing in Early Caribbean Transcultural Flows.”

Block offered insight on the culture of the colonial Caribbean, focusing on thematic intersections of desire, power and survival.

“I’m telling stories of disease and healing that allow us to understand a few things shared across cultures of the Caribbean like intimate barriers, local innovations [and] persistent inequalities that are related to public health or community responses to affliction,” Block said.

Framing her lecture, Block introduced the term “dis-ease”—borrowed from colonial and post-colonial historian Ann Stoler—as a manifestation of the archival imbalances favoring elite mindsets that historians must grapple with.

“Colonial ‘dis-ease’ is one of the first concepts I applied in my new book project,” Block said. “I think it really allows historians to put emotional, spiritual and physical health into conversation with the history of medicine. It’s not just focused on the body but on relationships.”

Through a study of heterosexual relationships, both sanctioned and illegitimate, Block explained the commodification of women in colonial societies.

“Gender complementarity, this idea that men and women have separate spheres that complement one another, was very common in pre-capitalist cultures across the world,” Block said. “We see from feminist histories that patriarchy globally tended towards an ideal of trade in women. This is a way that men could strengthen their legal control over people, over land, creating those strategic alliances that would help support their power.”

However, as Block emphasized, this dynamic gave way to unique ways for women to reclaim power and agency.

“Women of lower status needed remedies when their affections were strained, whether by broken promises, by financial hardship, by violence or by estrangement,” Block said. “Women practicing certain types of ‘love magic’ had a lot of power to turn the social order upside down.”

In her research, Block presents conclusions drawn from archival readings of the Thomas Thistlewood Papers, eponymously sourced from a British plantation overseer in Jamaica who kept a collection of diaries from 1748 to 1792. The Papers offer insight into the power and sexual dynamics of colonial Caribbean society.

“One of the things I’m doing … is hoping to write a more nuanced analysis of the gender components of the sexual economy of emotions that took place on one plantation,” Block said.

According to Block, shifting conversations toward marginalized colonial experiences is an essential part of understanding the dynamics of heterosexual relationships.

“It’s urgent that as historians, we reconsider male author texts like Thistlewood’s and take on the perspective of women who … took matters into their own hands when it came to sexual relationships they did or did not want,” Block said. “In cases of duress, whether it was rape, intimate partner violence, sexually transmitted disease or unrequited love, women came together in communities of support.”

Through community building, Block said, women in colonial societies were able to reclaim power.

“[The women] found ways for themselves and for others to control their own reproduction,” Block said. “They shared with one another ways to evade the notice of an aggressive suitor, to attract the men or even women that she wanted to experience sexual transcendence with. Women met together to divine the innermost thoughts of their beloved so that they might together experience greater harmony.”

Attendee Ben Vinocur ’28 remarked on the importance of the study of history, especially of women’s agency throughout history, in understanding our modern world.

“Women found a way, and if they didn’t find it, they made it, especially enslaved women,” Vinocur said. “Right now, especially with everything going on in the news, we see a lot of reversion of norms. People are trying to take away rights that we’ve had now for hundreds of years. I think that going back to the basics can certainly help.”

Block concluded her lecture by highlighting the need for an intersectional approach to colonial history, because otherwise, the role of women outside the boundaries of heterosexual relationships is often overlooked.

“Women found ways to come together to ease their own emotions and anxieties about their desires for intimacy and fulfillment,” Block said. “The dis-ease of coercive and unwanted sexual relationships is not the only story to tell, even if it cannot be denied as a basic reality of life in enslaved societies and colonial studies.”