What aspects of Aztec art intrigue you the most?

My principal concern in my work has been to understand how Aztec art worked within an imperial, hegemonic state with marked social classes but no standing army or police force. What purposes could/did art serve under those conditions? The Aztecs did not have a highly developed writing system, nor did they have telephones, television, or computers. How, then, did the state communicate and reinforce its official ideology—that is, its version of history; its theory of man’s relation to the natural world and his social “others”; its justification for aggression and forced tribute; its claim to fealty and cooperation from its citizens and allies? I see what we call “art” as having played a major role in helping to reinforce the Aztec state “from above,” so to speak, at the same time that it probably resisted imperial authority “from below.” Art was a spectacular weapon in this place and time, and although we now accord it much less political and economic clout than it seems to have once had, we can learn from studying its earlier forms and uses something about its capacity and strategies for empowering people.

What drew you to the study of gender issues? How is the gender paradox expressed in pre-Columbian art?

In the course of my research, like several other scholars, I became aware that certain objects in Aztec culture had been themselves gendered. Some of these are relatively easy to understand, such as when a jar filled with liquid is compared to a pregnant woman’s belly. Since women were the principal cooks in pre-Columbian times, this comparison of a domestic object to a woman’s body makes sense to us. I was surprised, however, to find my data also suggesting that war shields, which we think of as quintessentially male implements, were likewise symbols of femininity. I explained this paradox by showing that in many places in the Americas, women are seen as the “protectors” of their men and children, and their private parts are described, metaphorically, as “shields.” The value of knowing this is that it alerts us not to assume that Pre-Columbian peoples viewed gender—and used gender categories as tropes—in the same ways we do. It also helps, I think, to explain why some Aztec (and other Mesoamerican) goddesses in charge of domestic, marital, and reproductive matters were depicted in pre-Columbian and colonial imagery bearing, not just weaving battens and spindles—quintessentially female tools—but also war shields.

What interests you now about gender issues? How does “gender rhetoric” play out in the context of Aztec and Mexican art history?

My interest in gender issues dates back to the 1978 discovery of the Coyolxauhqui in Mexico City. This monument, the second largest Aztec sculpture to have survived intact from the pre-Columbian era, takes the form of a giant disc depicting, on the upper surface, a bound, dismembered, beheaded, nearly naked woman of royal blood. The image alone would have been sufficient to pique anyone’s curiousity, but more stunning was the fact that the disc had been placed at the foot of the stairs to the Aztecs’ principal temple, or Templo Mayor. Moreover, it was directly below the shrine housing the statue of the Aztecs’ patron god, Huitzilopochtli, who was said to have led his people from their original homeland into the Basin of Mexico. Because attempts to block the migrants were obstructed at numerous points along the way, Huitzilopochtli was also the patron of Aztec warriors. The Aztecs therefore placed a huge, expensive image of a battered woman at the foot of the largest and most sacred building in their empire. Since this is something that we would hardly expect to find in our own Capitol, the question that logically followed from this discovery was “why?”

The immediate answer to this question was provided by Mexican scholars, who quickly linked this woman’s visage to colonial accounts of a legendary sister of Huitzilopochtli who had paid for challenging her brother’s leadership during the migration with her life. The question of why official Aztec histories attributed this sedition to a woman, however, remained unaddressed. Regardless of whether there ever really was an evil woman named Coyolxauhqui, it seems clear that she had, in death, acquired symbolic value for the Aztec state. What, at the level of the symbol—or the sign—did the female gender signify for the Aztecs? How did it operate within an official discourse of Aztec manifest—and male—destiny?

This was the problem that I set out to solve, and which has preoccupied me, for over two decades. When I write of Aztec gender “rhetoric,” in other words, I am referring to the power of gender—be it female, male, or “none of the above”—to function as a “key symbol,” or a “sign.” Thus I am equally interested in the ways in which gender served as a trope for colonial authors in their often biased, Eurocentric writings, and how its function shifted over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries according to who was using it and why. Unlike most scholars interested in Aztec gender, I am not specifically interested in recovering the role that women played in Aztec society, nor even in female imagery alone, but rather in the ways in which gender—all genders—“worked” within and for official—and popular—ideologies.

My ongoing interest in body symbolism began when I was researching my dissertation on the use and meaning of frontality in Mesoamerican pictorial imagery. I argued in my dissertation that the frontal face, in particular, often functioned as a “sign” of completion and death. It alerted me to the semiotic function of body parts in general and I went on to write an article on the social symbolism of intestines and another on the moral connotations of excrement! At present I’m working on legs and feet. I think this predisposition to look at bodies as signs factored into my interest in the Coyolxauhqui relief.

What prompted you to organize the “Gender in Pre-Columbian America” conference? How will the forthcoming proceedings contribute to knowledge of the topic?

When one probes a new area of interest, one naturally tends to look around to see whether there are other scholars who have common interests. When I agreed to organize and chair a conference on “Gender in Pre-Columbian America” at Dumbarton Oaks, I did so because I realized that there were others working along similar lines to mine who, I thought, would surely benefit from being brought together in one place to share their findings. That conference, which took place in 1996, provided such an opportunity. The conference was stimulating, even provocative, and served to generate a debate that continued long after the conference had ended. Its proceedings, with some discussion of the debate itself, is being published by Dumbarton Oaks and should be out this summer.