Description
Book SynopsisDrawing on over 300 prosecutions of sex acts in colonial New Spain between 1530 and 1821, Zeb Tortorici shows how courts used the concept against nature to try those accused of sodomy, bestiality, and other sex acts, thereby demonstrating how the archive influences understandings of bodies, desires, and social categories.
Trade Review"
Sins Against Nature is a true tour de force. Zeb Tortorici has painstakingly searched numerous archives in Mexico. He has provided detailed notes and has integrated significant theoretical findings into his analysis. Tortorici has written an outstanding book that will, no doubt, shape the scholarly debates within Latin American history and sexuality studies for many years to come." -- Anderson Hagler * Transmodernity *
"The cases in
Sins against Nature . . . are equally rich in their layering of cultural complexity: religious versus secular, indigenous versus colonial, action versus desire. Tortorici helps us appreciate the challenges of understanding sexuality, not only in colonial New Spain but also in the present." -- Vernon Rosario * Gay & Lesbian Review *
"Tortorici has written an expansive, thoughtful, provocative, and innovative encyclopedic work. . . . While Tortorici generously invites his readers to peruse the documents themselves in a digital archive that he has made accessible, his book should stand for many years as an indispensable contribution to the history of so-called unnatural sexuality in New Spain. . . . With this book, Tortorici has singlehandedly raised the historiographical standard for the topic of viceregal sexuality and also made an important contribution to archival theory." -- Nicole Von Germeten * Hispanic American Historical Review *
"
Sins against Nature fills a critical need for queer methodological approaches to colonial Spanish American history. Tortorici conducts rigorous and historically specific analyses of colonial Spanish America while insisting on a self-reflexive and fluid approach to the research process itself. The book provides scholars both a way for thinking about archives, sexuality, and desire under Spanish colonialism and, as important, guidance on the ethics and implications of historical research in the field and beyond." -- Matthew Goldmark * TSQ *
"You will never forget your first time reading Zeb Tortorici’s excellent book. . . . There is so much to praise in
Sins Against Nature that it is difficult to know where to begin. . . .
Sins Against Nature belongs in your hands and on your bookshelf." -- Jarett Henderson * Itinerario *
"This book stayed with me long after I had read it. Tortorici has a gift for bringing to life the people involved in these archival cases and humanizing many of them and the communities from which they came." -- Stephanie Kirk * Early American Literature *
"Tortorici has produced a well-written and deeply-researched book that will spark conversations, appeal to specialists, and work well in graduate seminars on historical methods and gender and sexuality in colonial Latin America." -- Evan C. Rothera * Journal of Global South Studies *
"Tortorici presents a carefully researched, soundly supported, erudite work of scholarship." -- Aimee E. Hisey * Journal of Social History *
"Tortorici’s innovative work is essential reading for historians of colonial sexuality, detailing as it does the ways in which the 'unnatural' was defined and catalogued in New Spain." -- Linda A. Curcio-Nagy * American Historical Review *
"Tortorici's intimate narration of both the case and his own archive experience opens consideration and conversation of fundamental ethical questions in the discipline.… The seduction, the titillation of archival discovery is not limited to research on sex. For many historians, it is the experience of research itself. And for that reason,
Sins against Nature holds broad appeal, not only for colonial Latin Americanists or historians of sexuality but also for anyone teaching or practicing the craft of history." -- Chad Black * H-LatAm; H-Net Reviews *
"Tortorici has provided us with one of the best single books on the history of Latin American homosexuality.… It will become a classic of queer history in Mexican historiography." -- Martin Nesvig * EIAL *
Table of ContentsA Note on Translation ix
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. Archiving the Unnatural 1
1. Viscerality in the Archives: Consuming Desires 25
2. Impulses of the Archive: Misinscription and Voyeurism 46
3. Archiving the Signs of Sodomy: Bodies and Gestures 84
4. To Deaden the Memory: Bestiality and Animal Erasure 124
5. Archives of Negligence: Solicitation in the Confessional 161
6. Desiring the Divine: Pollution and Pleasure 197
Conclusion. Accessing Absence, Surveying Seduction 233
Appendix 255
List of Archives 261
Notes 263
Bibliography 297
Index 309
