ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I examine the religious dynamics of knowledge production and circulation in colonial Mexico (XVI–XVIII). This chapter seeks to identify the religious agents who generated and promoted knowledge as well as the institutions they constructed and then maintained to control the circulation of erudite and literary culture as a mechanism of power. Both power and knowledge were clearly gendered as male and here I seek answers to a series of key questions regarding this gendered relationship and the construction of the masculine fictions of superiority employed to justify it. Elite Creole masculine subjects built exclusionary mechanisms of colonial religious power in the seventeenth century, employing it to exercise supremacy over racialized and gendered marginal subjects. In order to elucidate these mechanisms, I draw on the work of Nelson Maldonado, Enrique Dussel, María Lugones and Raewyn Connell among others to demonstrate how and why Creole authors constructed these models of epistemological and religious subordination in their writings and how some challenged these same models.
