Description
Book SynopsisBrings together a broad community of scholars to explore the history of illicit and alternative sexualities in Latin America's colonial and early national periods. This title examines how the unnatural came to inscribe certain sexual acts and desires as criminal and sinful, including acts officially deemed to be against nature and more.
Trade Review"This volume greatly expands the range of non-normative-although not necessarily rare-behaviors that shaped the sexual landscape of Spanish and Portuguese America. Bookended by contributions from Lavrin and Pete Sigal, this is a self-aware contribution to the historiography of sexuality. ... With its collection of sharp essays based on truly exceptional archival sources, this collection will be a must-read for scholars interested in the history of sexuality in the Iberian American colonies." H-Histsex (H-Net)
Table of ContentsForeword, 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
