ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the complex ways in which sweetness, increasingly consumed in the form of colonial sugar, shaped ideas of femininity in eighteenth-century Spain, at the time of slavery and the growing consumption of sugar. Drawing on a wide range of moral, medical, and literary treatises, among others, it shows that sweet food served to describe women's sensibilities and tastes, but it also accounted for women's weak constitution and greediness. Using sugar as a case study, it interrogates how gustatory taste created, and intersected with, various perceptions, emotions, pleasures, and anxieties over bodies, and behaviours in relation to gender, race, and social status in the eighteenth century.
