Read more
"A tantalizing and fascinating collection of first-rate scholarship that interrogates the category of the natural in terms of sex and highlights new directions of historical investigation."—Martin Nesvig, author of Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico
"These keen essays on sexuality, the natural, and the unnatural in colonial Latin America provide a much-needed broadening of vision for all readers and researchers of sexual history." —Jonathan Ned Katz, Co-Director, OutHistory.org
"Building on strong foundations, Tortorici brings together an impressive cast of historians who explore the edges of normative sexuality in colonial Latin America, uncovering hidden corners of private lives and the desires and passions that animated men and women. This book will become required reading for anyone interested in the history of sexuality."—Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, author of Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750–1856
List of contents
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."
Summary
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. This title examines how "the unnatural" came to inscribe certain sexual acts and desires as criminal and sinful, and more.
Additional text
"The volume is an absolute success. . . . Tortoricci has brought together an excellent array of scholars and scholarship, making Sexuality and the Unnatural a welcome addition to the literature about colonial Latin America."
