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

Four CHURCH AND STATE

Four CHURCH AND STATE Inventing Queer Penitents and Tyrannical Others It is one thing to be erased from discourse, and yet another to be present within discourse as an abiding falsehood. —judith butler, Bodies That Matter Andean notions of the feminine and the androgyne, ritually represented by third-gender subjects and analyzed and characterized in Chapters 2 and 3, experienced a transformation in the waning years of the sixteenth century. Rather than being erased by the more stringent civil and ecclesiastical texts, indigenous gender culture was transculturated and left in colonial discourse as ‘‘an abiding falsehood.’’ Indeed, as we have seen, one cannot speak of ‘‘sodomites’’ or ‘‘third genders’’ without recognizing these figures as discursive constructs, tropes with a history, or performative subjects of ritual liminality. The textual descriptions offered in the preceding pages, drawn from chronicles, relaciones, histories, dictionaries, and pre-Hispanic ceramic iconography were the phantasmagorical originals of what I shall suggest became a new, regulated subject of coloniality. As Butler has theorized, gender is constructed, negotiated, and contested in a long stream of iterations, or imitations of phantasms of ‘‘original’’ gender constructs.1 In this chapter, I continue to trace this stream of iterations in order to explicate the mechanics of transculturation of the phantasmagorical originals in a new colonial context, that of the Toledo viceroyalty. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo, who governed Peru from 1569 to 1581, initiated an effort to regulate the colonized indigenous Andeans in part by controlling their bodies; that effort is represented in two powerful discourses : the civil ordenanzas and visita reports, and the ecclesiastical Doctrina christiana. My reading of these documents suggests that Michel Foucault’s genealogy of the relationship between power and sexuality can be traced back farther than the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Ann Laura Stoler has suggested, Europe’s discourses on sexuality cannot be examined 168 Decolonizing the Sodomite on that continent alone: ‘‘In short-circuiting empire, Foucault’s history of European sexuality misses key sites in the production of that discourse, discounts the practices that racialized bodies, and thus elides a field of knowledge that provided the contrast for what a ‘healthy, vigorous bourgeois body’ was all about’’ (Race and the Education of Desire, 7). Indeed, I hypothesize that it was the colonial discourse of Spanish empire, a full two centuries prior to the period Foucault studies, that created ‘‘sodomites’’ from third-gender subjects, much in the same way Foucault proposed that the ‘‘homosexual’’ as a recognizable and regulatable identity was born out of the discourses of modernity. While Rudi C. Bleys’s provocative Geography of Perversion has pushed back Europe’s ‘‘new cognitive definition and classi fication of sexual desire’’ (2) to the Enlightenment, I will highlight rhetorical moments in which this cognition occurs even earlier. Bleys recognizes this early discourse on same-sex behavior and cross-gender identities reported in colonial chronicles and other travel narratives outside the West as a ‘‘pre-Enlightenment legacy’’ that informed a cognitive shift in European thought as it related to same-sex sexuality. He studies how the European ‘‘ethnographic imagination,’’ beginning in 1750, initiated a linking of male-to-male sexual practices to cross-gender identity that ultimately led to the European construction of the effeminate homosexual as a distinct identity (ibid., 44). In this chapter, I explicate the colonial practices that formed the context of these later writings, of this knowledge that traveled back to the ‘‘Old World,’’ historicized and naturalized in Enlightenment narratives. Moreover, the legacy effect was actually more immediate, as I explore in Chapter 5; we will see how transculturation of indigenous gender and sexual norms finds its way into the foundational historical text of Peru as early as 1609, in Inca Garcilaso’s Comentarios reales. By critically reading the Toledo-era ordenanzas and visita reports and the viceroy’s official history and by analyzing the Spanish catechists’ resemanticization of indigenous language words (in Quechua and Aymara), I demonstrate how power asserted in the political and religious discourses initiated in Toledo’s administration cites and then reconstructs same-sex sexuality and third-gender subjectivity in the Andes. Again, as in the previous chapters, I focus on third gender in the larger context of colonial discourse’s transculturation of indigenous gender culture. I posit the feminine as ‘‘abject outsider’’ to Toledo’s colonial discourse’s construction of a masculine reordering of Andean space. The queer tropes of sexuality from earlier descriptions of indigenous culture are mobilized in the discourses...