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Butterflies Will Burn: Prosecuting Sodomites in Early Modern Spain and Mexico

Amazon.com Price:  $32.77 (as of 06/05/2019 01:22 PST- Details)

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Description

As Spain consolidated its Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, discourses about the very best Spanish man or “Vir” went hand-in-hand with discourses about another roughly man, one who engaged in the “abominable crime and sin against nature”—sodomy. In both Spain and Mexico, sodomy came to rank second only to heresy as a cause for prosecution, and hundreds of sodomites were tortured, garroted, or burned alive for violating Spanish ideals of manliness. Yet in fact, as Federico Garza Carvajal argues in this groundbreaking book, the prosecution of sodomites had little to do with issues of gender and was once a lot more a concomitant of empire building and the wish to justify political and economic domination of subject peoples.

Drawing on prior to now unpublished records of a few three hundred sodomy trials conducted in Spain and Mexico between 1561 and 1699, Garza Carvajal examines the sodomy discourses that emerged in Andalucía, seat of Spain’s colonial apparatus, and in the viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico), its first and largest American colony. From these discourses, he convincingly demonstrates that the idea that of sodomy (more than the actual practice) was once an important to the Iberian colonizing program. Because sodomy opposed the ideal of “Vir” and the Spanish nationhood with which it was once intimately associated, the prosecution of sodomy justified Spain’s domination of foreigners (many of whom were represented as sodomites) in the peninsula and of “Indios” in Mexico, a totally subject people depicted as effeminate and prone to sodomitical acts, cannibalism, and inebriation.

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