In recent decades, historiography on Spanish American Catholicism has studied at some length the political changes that the Bourbon reforms, the wars of independence and the liberal revolutions brought about for the episcopate, its institutional organization, religious devotions and cults, the fundamental concepts of ecclesiastical life, and, of course, its assets and administration. However, studies of the Catholic Church in Latin America have shown relatively little interest in a gender perspective. This is despite the fact that Catholicism has clearly been fundamental to the establishment and preservation of a society based on the naturalization of gender roles and the patriarchal family. Topics such as the process of the feminization of Catholicism, which is well known in other historiographies, and the problem of clerical pederasty, whose historical dimension has been taken up in recent studies, such as the 2021 report of the French CIASE, have not been addressed with the depth that would be desirable in Ibero-American historiographies. Within the framework of the 59th ICA, we invite the community of researchers on the history of Catholicism and the Catholic clergy to present ongoing research or general overviews of the way in which religion and its actors construct gender. Among the lines of work we would like to explore, we highlight: studies of the discourses and normative devices used to reinforce both female and male gender models; case studies of transgressions of these models by the clergy, but also by the Catholic laity, and their repression and attempts at resistance; public criticism of the clergy’s relationship with the female gender; analysis of the construction of clerical masculinity, female and male views of the priesthood, and the role of women in the religious sphere.
