This interdisciplinary study looks at how gender roles are sustained on the basis of corporeality using as reference testimonial material generated by petitions for divorces and marriage annulments during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Lima. To that end, this analysis has been based on documents petitioning divorces and marriage annulments found at the Archbishops Archives in Lima. Such material was selected with the aim of capturing the ideal scenario for gender relations in conflictive situations where individuals expressed their need to resolve their lives, and of showing how these relations, institutional power, and fear act as leitmotifs that reveal the mentality of the time. These texts have been approached as horrified accounts that bring out a discourse rich in details on the private life where the body is a key theme.

The theoretical direction for this research is mainly led by the hermeneutical philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, and the ideas of Pierre Bourdieu in regards to how language and social power intersect. The contents of these letters in question represent a narrative fiction of the everyday reality. Paul Ricoeur states that our own understanding is fiction because it is subject to the imagination of how we interpret things. According to Ricoeur, everything starts and is explained by language. The research suggests that women and men can be redefined through the manifestations of both sexuality and physical and verbal violence. In other words, the body appears as a metaphor of key concepts such as honra, doncellez, and honor, and how these are reinforced and embedded in the colonial mentality. To this end, Elizabeth Grosz provides a line of analysis in regards to the body that has been incorporated into this work; on the other hand, Judith Butler's views on language and gender are important points of reference for the position of the sexes. In general, the normative practices that restricted women to certain social spaces and that required them to maintain discreet conducts did not silence them completely, as these petitions became important platforms of expression.