Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America

Zeb Tortorici explains that gender and sex were defined in colonial Latin America according to bodily designations. Drawing on the growing field of early modern science studies, the editor and the nine contributors work to explain how distinctions between natural and unnatural ordered inhabitants of the Iberian Americas. The volume, as a whole, asks how colonial authorities and church officials described people who did not present as gender normative or engage in procreative sexual activities, heteronormative marriage arrangements, and patriarchal ordering of family.Turning away from a recovery of gay history to understand how queer sex worked within theological conceptions of sin, the chapters as a whole communicate why bestiality (as explored in Mílada Bazant's chapter), incest, sodomy, and masturbation were considered unnatural acts in the colonial era. In his riveting contribution, Martín Bowen Silva argues that a Chilean elite cataloged his sins according to the distinction of natural versus unnatural while at the same time “constructing his own knowledge of the body” (p. 105). With evidence from the rare archival find of this young elite man's journal, Bowen Silva claims that José Ignacio Eyzaguirre's masturbation and sexual experimentation with others was part of his Enlightenment drive to create knowledge. Fernanda Molina's brilliant chapter examines Inquisition prosecutions of the sin and the crime of sodomy to explain how men such as Luis de Herrera—who boldly named himself as a “puto”—articulated a shared community that forged erotic and emotional bonds through hugging, holding hands, and caressing among men who shared bedrooms and lives (p. 155). Engaged in foundational and current queer theory, including that of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and others, Molina's work joins that of Bowen Silva and Nicole von Germeten to identify a vibrant and contentious collectivity of queers.Among the greatest contributions of the volume is the deep exploration of women's sexuality, based in astonishing archival research and astute interpretation. Unsurprisingly, colonial inhabitants incorporated Catholic practices and beliefs into their sexual habits. Jacqueline S. Holler suggests in her chapter that the devil figured prominently in unnatural activities, especially for women, whom the Catholic clergy understood as especially susceptible to evil temptations. Simultaneously, women invoked the devil—whether he appeared as a black man or a friendly dog—as a superior lover. Moreover, the volume is filled with examples of women who “play[ed]” with, seduced, kissed, cohabited with, and courted other women, including inserting “instruments” into willing vaginas and available anuses (pp. 82–83). A majority of these examples were shrouded within clerical and judicial doubts of what Zeb Tortorici has described as “penetrational ambiguity” (p. 121). Nevertheless, Chad Thomas Black illuminates two rare secular prosecutions of “female sodomy” in eighteenth-century Quito of women who were known publicly as lovers and partners (p. 120). As such, the volume expands on an emerging scholarship regarding feminine, queer, and trans sexuality in the colonial period that has been previously explored by some of this volume's contributors such as Asunción Lavrin and Pete Sigal, but also Martha Few and the late María Elena Martínez.The collection carefully outlines the power of patriarchy over people with effeminate gender presentations, as does von Germeten in her examination of an inquisitorial prosecution of clerical sodomy. The case highlights the repeated sexual predation that women of color especially experienced in the vibrant Caribbean port of Cartagena. While clearly recuperating queer sex acts among men, von Germeten underlines the racial and class hierarchies that allowed a Spanish-descent cleric to harass, assault, and objectify black women, men, and children. Indeed, the contributors repeatedly remind us of the limitations facing historians since, as Ronaldo Vainfas and Tortorici explain, sex among females was generally dismissed, or misunderstood, as not counting as a crime of heresy (abandoning an article of faith) or sodomy (anal penetration with ejaculation) and therefore left undocumented (pp. 78, 81). Lee M. Penyak's chapter additionally reveals the overwhelming patriarchal power of fathers and husbands to rule their households but also to be pardoned from their sexual crimes against daughters and wives. Nonetheless, Nora E. Jaffary's insightful explanation of why a lower-status woman in late eighteenth-century Mexico did not threaten the Inquisition even as she inserted images of saints into her vagina underlines the erasure of women as sexual agents but reveals a glorious world of sexual activity (p. 49).The authors' treatment of racial hierarchies, however, required keener attention to violence within slavery and the sexual exploitation of women of color throughout the Americas. Sexual activities between a slaveholder and an enslaved person of their household are unfortunately discussed in the same register as relations between elite schoolboys in urban Santiago. The book nonetheless remains remarkably teachable. The essays are filled with concise but vivid stories of individuals deeply located within specific historical contexts, further encouraging us to investigate the vast terrain of sex throughout colonial Latin America

Colonialism · Elite · Enlightenment · Homosexuality · Human sexuality · Latin Americans · Political science · Politics · Queer · Sociology · Sodomy · Theology · Gender Studies · History · Latin American history and culture · Law · Philosophy