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One B ARBUDOS, AFEMINADOS, AND SODOMITAS Performing Masculinity in Premodern Spain In this chapter I trace the performance of gender and sexuality in the Iberian Peninsula from medieval to early-modern times by reading primary texts from different genres and different historical moments . In addition to contextualizing these readings in a history of the treatment of non-normative sexuality, namely, sodomy, as it relates to the future colonizing power, premodern Spain, it is important to explore the constructs of masculinity and femininity as they appear in the protonational Spanish discourse. While it is clear from the historiographic record that premodern authorities, both ecclesiastical and civil, proscribed sexual acts, this historiography does not always lend itself to understanding notions of gendered subjectivity. By reading foundational literary texts, however, we can further understand the prohibitions on bodily acts while also examining how we might perceive gender and sexuality as ‘‘performative ’’ categories of subjectivity. sodomy: from medieval artifact to early-modern trope As we will see throughout this study, gender transgression and sodomy became tropes in the rhetoric of conquest and colonization of the Andean region, in both civil and ecclesiastical discourse. These tropes have a particular history rooted in the Western tradition dating from Hellenist and Roman times and crystalizing in the medieval and early-modern periods, a history which is beyond the scope of this chapter. Here I wish simply to highlight a few characteristics of ancient and medieval sexuality so as to understand the ideas behind these tropes as they reappear in the early-modern period.1 Early philosophers’ concern with the ethics of personal pleasure constitute the roots of an attitude toward sexuality, 30 Decolonizing the Sodomite a morality that will inform Christianity’s influence in medieval and early modern writings.2 This classical problemization of personal sexual conduct announces a tendency toward austerity that was intensified by the Romans and was an important antecedent to the tropes of masculinity performed in later times.3 The medical discourse of these times began to reflect a greater preoccupation with the body in general (Foucault, Care of the Self, 103) and with the dangers of sexuality in particular, dangers related to the violent tension and the physical exertion involved in the sexual act (ibid., 113). To restrain these dangers, philosophers began to rework the classical ideals of sexual austerity into a new emphasis on marriage in which ‘‘a stylistics of living as a couple emerges from the traditional precepts of matrimonial management : it can be observed rather clearly in an art of conjugal relationship, in a doctrine of sexual monopoly, and in an aesthetics of shared pleasures’’ (ibid., 149). This shift from a stylistics of the love of boys as the Platonic ideal to a new preoccupation with marital fidelity marginalizes the place of same-sex erotics, but does not yet consider them unnatural (ibid., 239). As a result, there is an overall distrust of the body and physical pleasure, experiences that must be confined to marriage in order to guard against the dangers to one’s ethical self. Analogies to later Christian morality emerge, yet, as we will see below, what was but a suggested ‘‘style’’ of sexual conduct in the early centuries of our era became under Christian philosophy, in the words of Foucault, ‘‘other modalities of the relation with self: a characterization of the ethical substance based on finitude, the Fall, and evil; a mode of subjection in the form of obedience to a general law that is at the same time the will of a personal god; a type of work on oneself that implies a decipherment of the soul and a purificatory hermeneutics of the desires; and a mode of ethical fulfillment that tends toward self-renunciation’’ (ibid., 240). State interpellation of the subject on matters of sexuality did not occur until the late Roman imperial and early medieval Christian institutions of authority began to codify appropriate behavior; until that time there were no laws of sexual behavior in the Greek and Roman cultures.4 Boswell argues that it was not until the late empire, as the individual self-regulation described by Foucault gave way to increased ‘‘theocratic despotism,’’ that Roman law began to address sexuality through legal codes (Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, 121–123). Here we begin to see the formation of a normative sexuality that drew on the evolution of ideas from the Greeks and early Romans, but whose rigid, proscriptive nature represented a fundamental...

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