Sins Against Nature

Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain

Zeb Tortorici (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

344 Seiten

2018
Duke University Press (Verlag)
978-0-8223-7132-8 (ISBN)

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In Sins against Nature Zeb Tortorici explores the prosecution of sex acts in colonial New Spain (present-day Mexico, Guatemala, the US Southwest, and the Philippines) to examine the multiple ways bodies and desires come to be textually recorded and archived. Drawing on the records from over three hundred criminal and Inquisition cases between 1530 and 1821, Tortorici shows how the secular and ecclesiastical courts deployed the term contra natura-against nature-to try those accused of sodomy, bestiality, masturbation, erotic religious visions, priestly solicitation of sex during confession, and other forms of "unnatural" sex. Archival traces of the visceral reactions of witnesses, the accused, colonial authorities, notaries, translators, and others in these records demonstrate the primacy of affect and its importance to the Spanish documentation and regulation of these sins against nature. In foregrounding the logic that dictated which crimes were recorded and how they are mediated through the colonial archive, Tortorici recasts Iberian Atlantic history through the prism of the unnatural while showing how archives destabilize the bodies, desires, and social categories on which the history of sexuality is based.

Zeb Tortorici is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University, coeditor of Centering Animals in Latin American History, also published by Duke University Press, and editor of Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America.

A 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

Erscheinungsdatum	12.06.2018
Zusatzinfo	21 illustrations
Verlagsort	North Carolina
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	612 g
Themenwelt	Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Geschichte / Politik ► Allgemeines / Lexika
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Recht / Steuern ► Strafrecht ► Kriminologie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Gender Studies
ISBN-10	0-8223-7132-4 / 0822371324
ISBN-13	978-0-8223-7132-8 / 9780822371328
Zustand	Neuware