Venus in Transit: Gendered Violence and the Production of Natural History (Early American Studies)

An analysis of how naturalist knowledge was shaped by sexual violence and how African descended and Indigenous women and girls formed their own ecological insights

In the eighteenth century, men of science relied on the knowledge of African descended and Indigenous women and girls, who were trafficked along naturalist paths of exploration and throughout settler-occupied Indigenous lands, as well as within the routes of transatlantic and transpacific voyages. Venus in Transit employs the interpretative methods of literary analysis to demonstrate that although naturalist processes of capturing nature were articulated through systemic gendered violence, women living under colonial occupation theorized their own knowledge and relationality with the environment against the regimes of natural history.

Elizabeth Polcha follows narratives of women, girls, and Two-Spirit people from across the Atlantic world and through a range of genres. Each chapter considers narratives in the colonial archive, from unprinted correspondence and personal writings, to the print culture of travel narratives, natural histories, and naturalist engravings, to the visual and material culture of paintings, dye, cloth, and collected specimens, spanning from the late 1600s to the early 1800s. Venus in Transit bends the rules of naturalist recordkeeping, tracing women’s movement, speech acts, and collective actions as openings to knowledge systems unrecognized in a colonial perspective.

Polcha ultimately shows that the authorial power of European naturalists has been overstated, and without the labor of free and enslaved Black and Indigenous cultivators, there would be no curiosity collections of specimens or life-sized copperplate engravings of plants circulating across Europe or on display in the homes of elite collectors.