Intimately Bound

Intimately Bound: Gender in the Inca World explores the core concept of Andean duality through the lens of Inca ideas about gender during the rapid expansion (1438-1532 CE) of the largest Indigenous empire in the Americas, asking visitors to consider a different way of gendering. As the Inca saw the world around them to be alive, active, and agentive, including what we might think of as inanimate objects or even ephemera, everything also had a gender identity. However, that identity was rarely fixed. Instead, most things constantly switched between genders seeking to form complementary pairs.

Andean people understood the world as individual parts seeking to pair with one another to create a harmonious whole. They believed balance was achieved through yanantin, Quechua for “opposites intimately bound together,” while femininity and masculinity were the most fundamental opposites in the Inca world. Their meeting point, called tinkuy, held tremendous power, as it was the very tension between them that created balance. This was more than an ideal, but rather a cosmic necessity for an empire stretching across steep valleys, snowcapped mountains, lush jungles, and searing deserts.

The exhibition begins by establishing a clear binary of opposites, before exploring the dynamic character of the individual parts to switch between gender identities depending on the context in search of harmony. Finally, the show looks into the power of the in-between or tunkuy and invites visitors to create their own yanantin pairings seeking balance.