Queering Transculturation

If decolonization requires taking into account precolonial practices as well as colonizers' representations of the indigenous other, the decolonization of Andean culture encounters a problem: there are no written accounts produced before the Spanish conquest. Thus the culture of what is now southern Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile before the arrival of Francisco Pizarro is particularly opaque to researchers. In addition, colonial-era texts that record the testimony of indigenous Andean informants about sexual practices reflect the moral and theological prejudices of the Spanish colonizers and the cautious silences and distortions learned by native informants from their experience in what Mary Pratt has termed the "contact zone," a "space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict."¹

In his choice of the term "third gender" and his discussion of gender performativity in the colonial context, Michael Horswell draws upon queer theory debates about the historicity of sexual identity (Foucault), the performativity of gender (Butler), and postcolonial theory (Bhabha). He uses the term "third gender" to refer to "gendered subjectivities outside dimorphic gender categories but whose intelligibility depends on cultural specificity" (21). Cultural specificity in this case is elusive, obscured by the documents produced under colonial rule: chronicles of conquest, catechisms translated into indigenous languages, guides for confessors, surveys of religious and sexual practices conducted by the vice-royalty of Peru, legal codes, and literary works. Horswell reconsiders gendered aspects of ritual practices in the region from southern Colombia to Chile in light of the indigenous Andean concept of tinkuy, the union of complementary binaries through ritual mediation. Drawing on Irene Silverblatt's research on gender and the feminine in particular in Andean culture, Horswell gives considerable attention to the status of female deities and women, for whom colonization and evangelization meant a significant loss of status and power. Not only does Horswell examine the complementary function of gender binaries in Andean culture, but his book is organized according to traditional Andean textile design. The volume has five chapters, divided into two complementary pairs flanking a central discussion that serves as the chaupi, both boundary and meeting place. Of the two metaphoric tinkuys, chapter 2 focuses on Pedro Cieza de León's protoethnography, and the fourth addresses the use of indigenous informants in viceroy Francisco de Toledo's extirpation-of-idolatry campaigns. The third (middle) chapter is the most detailed in its elaboration of modes of transculturation in the Huarochirí Manuscript, a uniquely detailed account of myths and ritual practices compiled by an anonymous ladino scribe, a Spanish-speaking Indian whose respondents had not yet learned self-censorship. The book begins and ends in Spain: chapter 1 lays the groundwork in a medieval masculinist culture that depicted the Muslim other as sodomite during the Christian conquest of the peninsula, and chapter 5 addresses the Comentarios reales de los Incas (1609) of the mestizo chronicler Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, a self-taught humanist. Horswell questions the view of the Inca Garcilaso as resistant subaltern author of an anticolonial text by noting the "machofication" of the Incas at the expense of women and feminine deities, and the scapegoating of the cross-dressed temple attendants (240). Inca Garcilaso replaces the temple attendants mentioned in mid-sixteenth-century texts with sodomites, and their punishment by the Incas is clearly modeled on Inquisitorial punishments (249–51).

Transculturation affects the speech and customs of the colonizers as well as the colonized. In particular, Horswell argues that the earlier inclusiveness of the Spanish term sodomy was narrowed to refer to same-sex practices in the process of characterizing Andean culture as barbaric. Applied to sacred rituals, the term sodomy served two purposes: first, as justification for the conquest, and second, in the campaign of extirpating idolatries. Exceptionally violent language and threats of cruel punishments for traditional Andean practices involving third-sex and transvested temple attendants were effective weapons in evangelizing indigenous communities. The Spanish...