Decolonizing the Sodomite: Queer Tropes of Sexuality in Colonial Andean Culture

NOTES

NOTES introduction 1. It is important to understand the physical and cultural spaces and peoples represented in this book as the Andes, Andeans, and Andean culture. Tawantinsuyu , the Inca empire encountered by the Spanish in 1532, was a multiethnic, multilingual region that stretched along the Andes mountains from today’s southern Colombia to northern Argentina; it included territories that spread from the highlands eastward to the Amazonian jungle basin and westward to the Pacific Ocean. The Incas were but one of the many ethnic groups in this region, a group that began an imperial expansion in the middle of the fifteenth century. They quickly established reciprocal governing relationships between their southern, highland capital and their place of origin, Cuzco, and otherethnic centers throughout the Andes. This rise to power was accomplished in an eighty-year period; therefore, many non-Inca cultures retained much of their identity and language. As I discuss Tawantinsuyu and the subsequent Spanish invasion and colonization, I will strive to differentiate the distinct cultural areas. Indeed, I will argue that the diversity of ethnicities presented unique challenges for the Spanish chroniclers ’ portrayal of the Inca and Andean cultures in the sixteenth century and may help explain why and how the subjects of this study, third genders, were objects of transculturation. 2. This anecdote is found in ladino writer Santa Cruz Pachacuti’s Relación de antigüedades. I will analyze this passage in greater detail in Chapter 3. 3. I am referring to three seminal works in Latin American colonial studies: Irving Leonard’s Books of the Brave; Ángel Rama’s La ciudad letrada; and Walter Mignolo ’s The Darker Side of the Renaissance. 4. When I speak of ‘‘locus’’ or ‘‘place of enunciation,’’ I refer to Walter Mignolo ’s use of the term to mean something that ‘‘invites a change of orientation and allows us to think of identification rather than identity, as a process of location related to the place of speaking rather than a description which will capture the correspondence between what one is and what one is supposed to be according to some preexisting cultural realities’’ (Darker Side of the Renaissance, 11). 268 Notes to Pages 4–5 5. These Aymara (ipa) and Quechua (orua) language terms meaning ‘‘third gender ’’ are explicated in Chapters 3 and 4. 6. Marjorie Garber’s Vested Interests is an early recognition of the role that cultural manifestations of ‘‘third’’ positions can have in discourse and the crisis of anxiety they can produce. She emphasizes, in her analysis of cross-dressing, that ‘‘‘third’ is a mode of articulation, a way of describing a space of possibility. Three puts into question the idea of one: of identity, self sufficiency, self-knowledge’’ (11). 7. A ladino is an indigenous person who has learned to read and write colonial languages and has been evangelized in the teachings of Catholicism. 8. William Leap has characterized the queer movement, both in its ‘‘nationalist ’’ and its ‘‘theoretical’’ modes, as a ‘‘claim to space’’ (Word’s Out, 103–104). ‘‘Under this formulation, ‘queer’ is no longer the status of ‘the other,’ as defined by the conventions of the mainstream. Queer is now the starting point for a queer’s own social critique, and the mainstream is now positioned, in spite of its objections, within the margin’’ (ibid., 104). For a discussion of ‘‘queer theory’’ and its application to literature, see ‘‘What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X,’’ by Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner: ‘‘Queer publics make available different understandings of membership at different times, and membership in them is more a matter of aspiration than it is the expression of an identity or a history’’ (344). Another early contribution to queer theory is Alexander Doty’s Making Things Perfectly Queer. Doty parts from the idea that queer positions in mass culture are constructed in specific historical contexts and that the reader has the possibility to adopt a receptive strategy that privileges a ‘‘queer’’ reading of any text. This approach liberates the reader to use his or her imagination in order to reconstruct a history that has been denied for sociohistorical reasons. The ‘‘queer’’ reader reclaims a marginal space from which he or she can read the text. Teresa de Lauretis, in ‘‘Queer Theory,’’ characterizes this strategy as ‘‘a form of resistance to cultural homogenization’’ in order to explore ‘‘otherconstructions of the Subject’’ (iii). Max Kirsch, in Queer Theory and Social Change, cautions scholars about the social...