A Latin American Casanova? Sex, Gender, Enlightenment and Revolution in the Life and Writings of Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816)

Abstract

This paper looks from a gender perspective at the elusive figure, complex personality and myth of Francisco de Miranda, enlightened traveller and Precursor of Latin American independence. By analysing Miranda's personal archive as his own carefully crafted creation, it pursues three closely connected issues insufficiently interpreted in historical perspective: the forms of masculinity he embodied and those from which he distanced himself, his connections with women and the role that gender played in his assessments of the countries he visited and wrote about. Miranda's trajectory and self-image trace an evolution (from mondain seducer and enlightened reader and thinker, to revolutionary sympathiser with women's intelligence and even women's rights, to his embracing more traditional domestic arrangements), not exempt from contradictions that shed new light on the complex dynamics of gender in the Enlightenment and the Atlantic revolutions. The ambivalences of his life and writings tell us much about the different and at times conflicting ways of being a man and relating to women in both the Hispanic world and the broader European and American context of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century.