Colonial racial ranking assumed male blood carried greater potency than female blood.

Evidence

The use of “Spaniard” (in contrast to, say, “Spanish”) conveys the collapsing of national character into racial expression, so widespread in Enlightenment European circles of the day. Notice nevertheless the more subtle, if equally conventional, gendered determination of the rankings of the resultant offspring. A male Spaniard mixing with a mestiza woman whose own background mixture in these terms is Spaniard and Indian would produce a castizo (or light-skinned mestizo) child, one just one-quarter Spaniard (in terms of the presumptuous calculations of racial blood quantum). But a male one-quarter Spaniard (castizo) mixing with a female Spaniard will produce an offspring ranked as Spaniard, even though in supposedly ethnoracial terms the Spaniard percentage involved in the latter mix (0.5 plus 0.125) is less than that in the case of a castizo offspring (0.5 plus 0.25). In the production of “Spaniardness,” male input seems to carry greater potency. A male Spaniard, it would seem to follow, was presumed more ethnoracially fertile than a female one. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1095

Categorization

• XREF: Gendered potency in blood quantum connects to the sumptuary-law chapter material on how sex and status intersect in regulating bodies.
• SEED: Angle: how the Spanish casta paintings encode male-female asymmetry in racial mixing — a visual archive of a patriarchal blood logic.