Скачать или смотреть Maya Living Legacy presents Dr. Traci Ardren

Originally presented virtually on March 19, 2025 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

"Family" Politics: Harnessing Female Sexuality and Dynastic Reproduction in the Lives of Classic Period Maya Queens

Royal Maya women played much more diverse roles than just marrying the king and producing heirs. Recent scholarship has acknowledged the importance of female patronage in sustaining a dynasty. Anthropological studies of queenly influence show it is always contingent and situated at the (often) paradoxical intersection of gender and power. Classic Maya queens were relatively common but their roles varied tremendously across the polities of the lowlands, leaving behind a wide variety of data from which to explore the material and ideological ramifications of their presence in Classic society. Their role in the reproduction of dynastic heirs has overshadowed an equally potent participation in political and cosmological reproduction. The stranger-queen is a particularly interesting phenomenon in the Classic period. High-status women who traveled to marry and live in distant polities are known from many sites, and recall the observation of Marshall Sahlins, “the remarkably common fact that the great chiefs and kings of political society are not of the people they rule” (Sahlins 1985:78). These remarkable women inverted gendered norms in order to recreate order (in the form of dynastic success) out of chaos. Maya conceptualizations of power accommodated the stranger-queen, who through her embodiment of foreign legitimacy, could birth or secure a dynasty and thus uphold her role as semi-divine.