Introduction to the Special Issue

Introduction to the Special Issue

This issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality devoted to Latin American sexualities had its genesis as a conference sponsored by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at the University of California, San Diego, of which I was then the director. Our conference goals were to engage scholars working in this broad field of study and to discover how the field was developing, what major research questions were being asked, which methods were being employed to answer them, and what stories the archives were yielding in the hands of younger historians. The result of the conference was the production of a number of important essays, not all of which are published here, on topics such as religion and erotic desire, witchcraft and love magic, the transformation of indigenous understandings of Spanish sexual practices, elite platonic friendships, plebeian sexual ideology and practices, sexual anxieties and the national security state, and state constructions of sexual identities. These essays cover an astounding temporal and geographical sweep, from the early seventeenth century to the end of the twentieth and from California and New Mexico to Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, and Argentina.

The study of sexuality in Latin and Latino America has gained scholarly attention in substantial ways only in the last twenty years. The field emerged out of the disciplines of anthropology and sociology, both of which had spent decades sending students into the field to gather large bodies of empirical information on sexual taboos, practices, and ideals as well as on behavioral infractions, criminal behavior, and activities that were deemed criminal and pathological. Anthropology, with its initial concern with the formal mapping of marriage and kinship structures around the world, set the agenda for the first generation of Latin American and Latino historians committed to writing about sexuality. The first major scholarly anthology devoted to sexuality in Latin America, published under the collective authorship of the History of Mentalities Seminar, was convened in 1979 by the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City and had as its title Familia y sexualidad en Nueva España (Family and Sexuality in New Spain).¹ Much of the seminar's theoretical inspiration came from the French Annales school. Indeed, several of the group's members were French historians working in Mexico: Solange Alberro, André Burguière, Serge Gruzinski, and Jacques Revel. Their goal, as the volume stated, was to understand the operations of power in a preindustrial society, collective and individual responses to social control and repression, the norms of family and sexuality in daily life, the nature of societal infractions, and the experiences of marginality.

Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, edited by Asunción Lavrin in 1989, was the first English-language anthology on sexuality.² With one exception, the anthology's authors were all Americans. The volume contained essays on marriage and divorce and on the Catholic Church's production of manuals to instruct clerics on how they should counsel and confess their flocks, including how they should preach and punish to insure that married couples lived happily and that all individuals avoided occasions to adultery, bigamy, sodomy, bestiality, and an extensive assortment of lust-born sins.

Monograph-length studies of the history of sexuality at this time also took their theoretical and thematic lead from anthropology. The Spanish- and Brazilian-based German anthropologist Verna Martínez-Alier (now Stolke), through her highly celebrated 1974 book Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth Century Cuba, inspired a great number of scholars to study the history of sexuality.³ Under Martínez-Alier's mentorship and sponsorship by the international Social Science Research Council, a number of doctoral students were encouraged to immerse themselves in the study of marriage, kinship, and sexuality in Latin America, eventually producing a series of books in the late 1980s and early 1990s: Sylvia Arrom's La...