“It’s hard to frame Miranda in a single label”, says Bolufer, a professor in the Department of Early Modern and Modern History. “Delving deeper in the contradictions of his thinking and his life is a way to better understand the Enlightenment and the revolutions he lived”, says the researcher.

The article has been published in the framework of the European project CIRGEN (Circulating Gender in the Global Enlightenment: Ideas, Network, Agencies), funded with an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) of 2.5 million euros. Its conclusions do not classify Miranda but raise the paradoxes of the Enlightenment and revolutions. Despite advances in politics, enlightened and revolutionary men were reluctant to admit political, intellectual, an even more, sexual equality between men and women.

The researcher has focused this historical analysis on three areas: the presence and treatment of gender in Francisco de Miranda’s travel diaries, his relationships with women, and the way he constructed his own masculinity.

The image of working-class women with whom he had sexual encounters is constructed in his writings from his privileged position as a man attentive to his pleasures; he almost never mentions even their names. However, given the context in which he was born and the world in which he lived, it is worth noting his comments in favour of single mothers, whom he defended from social ostracism, an unusual position at the time. “To present him as a Latin lover, as has sometimes been done, means to take for granted the stale stereotypes that relegate the private lives of ‘great men’ to the realm of anecdotes. What is needed is to analyse them in their cultural and political contexts”, says Mónica Bolufer.

Francisco de Miranda appreciates intellectual conversations with intelligent women, sometimes from a paternalistic position. He shows some awareness of the unequal roles and demands that are attributed to each gender. On some occasions, he admits that civil rights should be recognised for women, although he did not include them in his plans for post-revolutionary society.

“This analysis of the figure of Francisco de Miranda from the point of view of gender history, biography and the history of subjectivity is revealing. Until now, his figure had been studied as a cosmopolitan, enlightened traveller across the New and Old Worlds, and an activist and military man who lived through the U.S. War of Independence and participated in the French Revolution. The only mentions of the model of masculinity he represents and his relationship with women were the rather commonplace references of his active sex life”, concludes the UV expert.

Article: Mónica Bolufer. «A Latin American Casanova? Sex, Gender, Enlightenment and Revolution in the Life and Writings of Francisco de Miranda (1750–1816)». Gender & History, Vol.0 No.0 March 2021, pp. 1-20. ISSN: 0953-5233

Annex photo caption:

Mónica Bolufer, professor of the Department of Modern and Contemporary History of the University of Valencia.