Concubines, Companions, and Convicts : Women in Exile in the Portuguese Empire, 1500-1800

Patel Nascimento, Selina (2025) Concubines, Companions, and Convicts : Women in Exile in the Portuguese Empire, 1500-1800. In: Global Portuguese : Literary, Historical, Sociolinguistic and Anthropological Approaches. European Expansion and Indigenous Response . Brill Academic Publishers, pp. 267-288. ISBN 9789004710504

Abstract

Although women are often hidden in the archival administrative and criminal records, Portuguese women were consistently on the move under Portuguese imperial rule. Questioning the narrative of wives waiting patiently for their husbands to return from other parts of the empire, Selina Patel Nascimento’s chapter explores how female (in)voluntary migration in the Portuguese empire turned on the complex relationships between criminality, domesticity, and sexual relationships. It ruptures gendered constructions of early to mid-colonial migration patterns of predominantly white European men settling abroad with native women by emphasising the role of Portuguese concubines (unmarried female sexual partners) in moving across borders. In doing so it inverts the traditional causality between migration and concubinage, illuminating how concubinage led to exile for Portuguese women. It expands on this by illustrating that through their roles as concubines, accomplices or companions, women sought to maintain family units in any location, forging strong correlations between domestic life and female migratory experiences.