Lost images in the Amazons river. Conquest and Gender

Abstract

The present piece of work stands for an activity in an attempt to recover and ponder over
the cultural ethnical identitics construction mechanism. I shall work with the male imaginary
expressed by some croniclers and their accounts of expeditions to the Amazons, among them
fray Gaspar de Carvajal (1541-42) and father Acuña (1638-39).
The importance that one tried to invest the Amazon Myth with, centers on presenting a
society consisting of only females, by means of idealizing an organization which would identify
itself wth “desorder”. These accounts express the male-female representations which would
condition the ethnical and gender relationship in the New World. By way of this interpretation
a few questions, have been put to us: the gender relationship historicity, the male-female
identity images dynamic construction, colonizad-colonizer through an internal process of mutual and simultaneous influence representative-represented, the stabilities and modifications they go
through, how they go about weaving the power relations fabric, how the imaginary interacts
with social experience which could reflect, express and/or conceal their contradictions.