The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism

Chelsea Schields, Dagmar Herzog

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780429999918
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Unique in its global and interdisciplinary scope, this collection will bring together comparative insights across European, Ottoman, Japanese, and US imperial contexts while spanning colonized spaces in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Indian Ocean, the Middle East, and East and Southeast Asia. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives from cultural, intellectual and political history, anthropology, law, gender and sexuality studies, and literary criticism, The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism combines regional and historiographic overviews with detailed case studies, making it the key reference for up-to-date scholarship on the intimate dimensions of colonial rule. Comprising more than 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into five parts:

• Directions in the study of sexuality and colonialism
• Constructing race, controlling reproduction
• Sexuality in law
• Subjects, souls, and selfhood
• Pleasure and violence.

The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism is essential reading for students and researchers in gender, sexuality, race, global studies, world history, Indigeneity, and settler colonialism.

PART I

Directions in the study of sexuality and colonialism

1

Old empires, new perspectives

Sexuality in the Spanish and Portuguese Americas

Nicole von Germeten

As oceanic crossings began in the fifteenth century between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas, the Spanish and Portuguese crowns oversaw movements of people and, along with their bureaucrats, functionaries, and intellectuals, filed thousands of cubic feet of texts and documents preserving their imperial interpretations of sexuality. The focus here will be on such documentation from areas most affected by Iberian institutions, most importantly in the viceroyalties of New Spain and Peru, and the undertakings of the Catholic Church.¹ These institutions promoted Iberian understandings of gender, justice, and family life, which shaped the unfolding of the history of sexuality as captured in the written record. The intellectual trajectory of the modern disciplines of history, literary studies, and anthropology derives from imperial ways of thinking about sexuality, and therefore early modern approaches and sources continue to affect today’s scholarship. Some of the strongest subfields include case studies of non-heteronormative sex and sexual fantasies, as well as analysis of the processes for negotiating illegitimacy and contesting race labels applied at baptism.²

Europeans transcribed their visual impressions of indigenous Americans, creating a voyeuristic imperial archive from the very first moment of contact. Take, for example, the letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha, written during a 1500 landing on the coast of Brazil. This missive describes the genitals of girls in what appeared to Europeans as their completely innocent nudity.³ Europeans wavered between this Edenic interpretation of pre-Fall indigenous purity to an opposing vision of demonically influenced corruption, but both extremes highlight how imperial authorities attempted to dehumanize and exert power over conquered peoples, cataloguing them within biblical referents. The written archive of indigenous sexuality grew as the first priests and friars composed confession manuals that voiced their perspectives on how they envisioned the new populations encountered in highland Mexico and Peru and how other clerics should further shape their verbal interactions with them.⁴ The Spanish presence in these heavily populated areas also led to the purposeful creation of knowledge around indigenous civilizations. For example, in Mexico City, Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún collected information from local people, some of whom remembered the times before the Spanish invasion. These informants guided the views of the Florentine Codex, which included a particular interpretation of pre-conquest sexuality.⁵ Later on, colonized commentators of indigenous descent trained by Europeans, such as Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, wrote their own treatises on their ancestors’ history, sometimes bemoaning what they viewed as a decline in sexual morality since the coming of the Spanish.⁶

To contextualize this early creation of various written sources dealing with sexuality, scholars note that medieval and early modern Spaniards used sexual ideologies as essential organizing principles for the strengthening of their monarchs’ rule and territorial expansion, understandings of justice, and elite cultural expressions. This Old World framework long predated Castilian conquest and rule of the Americas. One of the most important sections of the Siete Partidas, the fundamental Spanish medieval law code, deals with inheritance laws, which were highly complex in this non-monogamous culture.⁷ Spanish literary classics obsessively dramatized sexual matters, from the fourteenth-century Libro de Buen Amor (focusing on a cleric’s numerous love affairs, often arranged by his alcahueta, or go-between) to the Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, better known as La Celestina, in honor of the unforgettable central character of a murdered bawd.⁸ Later, in the era of Iberian expansion, dramas about honor killings drew popular audiences to the corrales de comedias. But these works of fiction perhaps represent sexual fantasy more than popular understandings of sex within daily life, especially for the poor majority of the population.⁹ Historians of early modern Spain have aptly noted that “women’s propensity to engage in non-marital relationships and bear illegitimate children strongly challenges the two major frameworks for understanding early modern Spanish sexuality: the Mediterranean honour code and the Catholic Reformation.”¹⁰

While this quote refers to peasant women in remote Galicia, these tensions between the Christian ideal of chastity and the complexity of sexual practice existed at all levels of society and regions under Spanish control. Castile’s rise to domination over the Iberian Peninsula emerged out of fifteenth-century rumors of royal impotence. Hapsburg kings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries consulted with renowned mystical women to help sustain the sometimes-precarious Hapsburg dynasty in a unified Spain, and asked for their prayers as they arranged multiple marriages that resulted in procreation with their young teenage nieces.¹¹ Around the same time, the most Spanish of all saints, Teresa de Avila, forever memorialized the sexually suggestive bliss of mystical ecstasy in her evocative descriptions of an arrow deeply piercing her heart. In her more practical observations, Teresa strongly cautioned her peers about the “special friendships” between enclosed nuns.¹² One of the most obvious manifestations of the contrast between clerical projects and Iberian grassroots understandings of sexuality is the popular rejection of the sinfulness of “simple fornication,” or sex between consenting, unmarried, lay adults.¹³

In the Americas, nuns, priests, and friars also wrote on sexuality, weaving their pious statements into a web of imperial rhetoric that featured frequent royal decrees regarding what were viewed as women’s highly seductive styles of clothing and their tendencies toward constant “pecados publicos,” or widely known sins such as adultery, non-monogamy, and transactional sex.¹⁴ Despite the very well documented and researched sexual contradictions obvious in early modern Spain, historians of Latin America often have focused on these proscriptive approaches to sexuality, with an approach to women’s history that emphasizes the institutions that enclosed women, especially nunneries, but also houses of voluntary as well as involuntary enclosure, known as recogimientos.¹⁵

One of the most famous of all the early modern commentators is the ever-fascinating poet, dramatist, philosopher, and intellectual leader Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1648 to 1695), whose life and work have inspired analyses of viceregal women’s sexuality going back at the least to the pseudo-Freudian perspectives of Ludwig Pfandl, published in German in 1942.¹⁶ Octavio Paz popularized Sor Juana’s biography in the 1960s, with an emphasis on his interpretation of sexually repressive viceregal society.¹⁷ The 1980s ushered in a new robust era whose productivity flourishes to the present, as ongoing scholarship mines a bountiful treasure of writings by a wide range of religious women.¹⁸ Sor Juana’s sexuality continues to fascinate readers, who disagree on labeling her a lesbian or a skilled poet who strategically dedicated love poems to her powerful patronesses.¹⁹

Around the time of increasing historical and literary studies inspired by Sor Juana, scholars started to produce the works of family and women’s history which began to more seriously explore viceregal sexuality. More than 30 years have passed since the publication of Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, edited by Asunción Lavrin, but this collection of essays (the first of its kind in English) remains an essential source.²⁰ While providing key insights into marital life, it also pioneered studies of non-normative sexuality for colonial Latin America and set the stage for further exploration of women’s sexual agency and complex understandings of laws and traditions. Silvia Arrom and Patricia Seed’s masterworks from this era also helped make possible a rather rapid transition from classic women’s history to new approaches to the history of gender and sexuality, especially for New Spain.²¹

While the 1980s and early 1990s heralded the beginning of a robust era in literary, ethnographic, and historical studies of sexuality in viceregal Latin America, some rather heated debates also took place during these decades. Despite the immense contributions of Lavrin, Seed, Arrom, and later Ann Twinam, perhaps the most famous and controversial works of history in the 1990s dealing with gender and sexuality were written by men. In contrast to the major publications from the aforementioned women in this era, the sweeping books written by Steve Stern and Ramon Gutiérrez concentrated their analysis on power and violence as related to their views of sexual conquest and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endrosements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Sex, intimacy, and power in colonial studies
• PART I: Directions in the study of sexuality and colonialism
• PART II: Constructing race, controlling reproduction
• PART III: Sexuality in law
• PART IV: Subjects, souls, and selfhood
• PART V: Pleasure and violence
• Index