The American Indian Quarterly

Although the Spanish invasion of the Andes has frequently been figured as a cultural collision, what remains less chronicled is that it was also a gender collision. For embedded within that confrontation between two vastly different worlds - European and native American - was an encounter between peoples who held dissimilar beliefs about what it meant to be a woman and what it meant to be a man. The purpose of this article is to: (1) explore how gender roles, gender relations, and sexuality varied in Inca and Spanish societies; and (2) to measure how the imposition of Spanish colonialism affected indigenous gender systems, resulting in significant changes in the societal positions of both women and men, but especially women, by the end of the sixteenth century.

Gender Parallelism and Gender Complementarity

Before the Spanish arrival, the peoples of the Andes put together societies that were characterized by gender parallelism and gender complementarity. In gender-parallel societies women and men operate in two separate, but equivalent spheres, each gender enjoying autonomy in its own sphere. For example, in Inca society, women had their own religious and political organizations with their own female hierarchies of priestesses and officials, as did men in their sphere. Although men and women functioned in separate, gender-specific spheres, their worlds were highly interdependent and were joined together at the apex of the political system through the rule of a paramount lord and his council. The gender divisions of society were not intended to divide women and men into two opposing camps but rather to create balance and harmony by ascribing different, but complementary, roles to each gender.

Gender complementarity was also a major feature of Andean cultures. These were societies in which women and men performed distinct social, political, and economic roles, but roles that were perceived as equally important [End Page 511] to the successful operation of the society, whether performed by women or by men. Women's roles were not seen as subordinate to or less significant than those of men; instead women's and men's contributions were equally valued, considered essential one to the other and to the whole of society; that is, they were complementary. ¹ Women's roles were not auxiliary; rather women and men were partners in the business of life.

The societal division of the Inca world along gender lines is perhaps most fundamentally exemplified in the concept of parallel descent. In the Andes, men were thought to be descended from a line of men, while women were descended from a line of women. In accordance with this parallelism, women's property, ritual status, and other inheritable entities were transmitted along the female line from mothers to daughters, while men received their inheritances through the male line from their fathers. There were also other mechanisms for the transmission of resources from one generation to another, but those of parallel descent ensured that women would have access to the means of subsistence, independently of their male relatives.

Political Organization

The political organization of the Inca empire was also based on gender parallelism. In the Andes, the Coya, the sister/wife of the Inca, ruled over all the empire's women, while the Inca ruled over the empire's men. Two political hierarchies existed side by side, one consisting of ranked female officials and the other of male officials. Political power over women emanated from the Coya, or queen, in Cuzco, the capital of the Inca empire, and radiated out to the provinces through a hierarchy of regional and local female officials, while the same pattern existed for men with the Inca king at the pinnacle of the system.

The gender-parallelism of imperial organization does not, however, imply gender equality, since men always held the highest status positions at the apex of the system where the spheres were joined. That is, women were not usually permitted to hold supreme power as paramount rulers. However, as wives...