Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain

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Description

In Sins against Nature Zeb Tortorici explores the prosecution of sex acts in colonial New Spain (present-day Mexico, Guatemala, the USA Southwest, and the Philippines) to examine the more than one ways bodies and desires come to be textually recorded and archived. Drawing at 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 take a look at those accused of sodomy, bestiality, masturbation, erotic religious visions, priestly solicitation of sex right through confession, and other types 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 have an effect on 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’re mediated during the colonial archive, Tortorici recasts Iberian Atlantic history during the prism of the unnatural even as showing how archives destabilize the bodies, desires, and social categories on which the history of sexuality is based.

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