Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America brings together a broad community of scholars to explore the history of illicit and alternative sexualities in Latin America’s colonial and early national periods. Together the essays examine how ‘the unnatural” came to inscribe certain sexual acts and desires as criminal and sinful, including acts officially deemed to be “against nature”—sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation—along with others that approximated the unnatural—hermaphroditism, incest, sex with the devil, solicitation in the confessional, erotic religious visions, and the desecration of holy images. In doing so, this anthology makes important and necessary contributions to the historiography of gender and sexuality. Amid the growing politicized interest in broader LGBTQ movements in Latin America, the essays also show how these legal codes endured to make their way into post-independence Latin America.
Table of Content
Foreword, by Asunción Lavrin Acknowledgments
Introduction: Unnatural Bodies, Desires, and Devotions
Zeb Tortorici
Part I. unnatural heresies
1. Archival Narratives of Clerical Sodomy and Suicide from Eighteenth-Century Cartagena
Nicole von Germeten
2. Sacred Defiance and Sexual Desecration: María Getrudis Arévalo and the Holy Office in Eighteenth-Century Mexico
Nora E. Jaff ary
3. The Devil or Nature Itself? Desire, Doubt, and Diabolical Sex among Colonial Mexican Women
Jacqueline S. Holler
4. Female Homoeroticism, Heresy, and the Holy Office in Colonial Brazil
Ronaldo Vainfas and Zeb Tortorici
Part II: unnatural crimes
5. Experimenting with Nature: José Ignacio Eyzaguirre’s General Confession and the Knowledge of the Body (1799–1804)
Martín Bowen Silva
6. Prosecuting Female-Female Sex in Bourbon Quito
Chad Thomas Black
7. Sodomy, Gender, and Identity in the Viceroyalty of Peru
Fernanda Molina
8. Incestuous Natures: Consensual and Forced Relations in Mexico, 1740–1854
Lee M. Penyak
9. Bestiality: The Nefarious Crime in Mexico, 1800–1856
Mílada Bazant
Epilogue: Unnatural Sex?
Pete Sigal
Contributors
Index
About the author
Zeb Tortorici is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University. He recently coedited Centering Animals in Latin American History as well as two special issues of Radical History Review on the topic of "Queering Archives."
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