Session Abstract

In recent years, the historiography of sodomy and “homosexuality” in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries has grown considerably. Historians, however, in their explorations of sodomy have tended to privilege same-sex sexual acts (with the primary focus being male-male intimacies), thus obscuring the multiplicity of desires in the past and the ambiguities of the very category of sodomy. Given the current state of sexuality studies in Latin American history, we can now ask: What is essentially missing from this growing body of historiographical literature on sodomy and sexuality in colonial Latin America? Specifically, what desires and corporeal acts fell within the theological category of the “unnatural” (contra natura) but outside the strict confines of “perfect sodomy”? These questions serve as starting points for our panel, as we explore the category of the “unnatural” as it was used by Spanish ecclesiastical and secular authorities in a variety of colonial contexts. In studying the Spanish regulation of sexual practices deemed to be unnatural, we are confronted by terms that are the work of a long institutionalized chain of reasoning going back to the early Church Fathers like Saint Augustine and medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas. As early as the fifth century, for example, Saint Augustine had deemed unnatural and sinful those sexual acts that did not take place in a “vessel fit for procreation.”

The four papers that make up this panel look at a variety of non-procreative corporeal acts—sodomy, bestiality, autoeroticism, sex with the Devil, incest, sexual violence against children, and suicide—in Spanish America, through which we can elucidate some of the intersections between individual, institutional, and communal desires. Specifically, Chad Black explores two eighteenth-century cases of sodomy (one involving two women and the other involving a group of men) from Quito, Ecuador. Jacqueline Holler looks at colonial Mexican representations of the Devil as a (same-sex) lover in cases tried by the Holy Office of the Mexican Inquisition. Robinson Herrera examines the ways in which sexual crimes against children in colonial Guatemala were rendered “unnatural” in popular discourse (as opposed to theological and judicial discourse). Finally, Nicole Von Germeten discusses the microhistorical case of an eighteenth-century Mercedarian friar in Cartagena, Columbia, whose suicide was tied to the circulation of rumors about his solicitations of males and females in the confessional. The panel addresses the fact that the extant literature on sexuality in colonial Latin America does not yet reflect the variety of human desires in the past. While the papers in this panel deal with colonial Spanish America, they have broader implications in terms of historical method and theory relating to the interactions of colonialism, gender, religion, and sexuality.