Changes

In ''Genealogical Fictions'', Martínez charts the rise of racial categories in Spain's colonies. Martínez details the origin of this system in the Iberian peninsula, then charts the transformations and problems that emerge when this system is imposed onto a diverse and distant population. One of the central pillars of this book is the focus on gender and sexuality. As a system concerned with biological reproduction, female sexuality was central to determining legitimacy, hierarchy, and purity. But Martínez goes even further to detail how gendered descriptions were fixed to colonized peoples--ultimately cementing their fixed positions in the Spanish racial hierarchy.

[[File:Good_Wives.jpg|thumbnail|left|200px|[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0807846236/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0807846236&linkCode=as2&tag=dailyh0c-20&linkId=9e26aecaa275dd4059382ba0a2772904 Good Wives, Nasty Wenches & Anxious Patriarchs]]]

This book is, in many ways, a challenge to Edmund Morgan's ''American Slavery, American Freedom''. In it, Brown argues that gender became a category of difference before race really entered American colonists' vocabulary. Beginning, of all things, with colonial tax law, Brown argues that the way that Virginia colonists perceived African and black women differently from English women helped to create a system of racial difference that ultimately led to racial slavery. A must read.

In ''Rape and Sexual Power in Early America'', Sharon Block provides a comprehensive analysis of rape accusations and prosecutions from approximately 1700-1820. Block examined more than 900 documented incidents of "sexual coercion" to illustrate the dynamics of sexual power in play in British North America. According to Block, definitions of rape or assault were more frequently based on the identities of the parties involved. Through her analysis of these documents, Block argues that the way official persecuted these infractions worked to preserve the social, racial, gender, and political hierarchies of early North America.

In this fascinating book, Lyons centers her analysis on the sexual practices of "the rabble," and explores the limits of freedom and individualism. Like Block, Lyons argues that sex and gender were crucial to reconstituting social hierarchies.