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Epilogue: He Died of a Broken Heart
- University of Texas Press
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EPILOGUE He Died of a Broken Heart n this book, I have attempted to demonstrate how the prosecutions of sodomites in Spain/New Spain were intertwined with perceptions of manliness, a historical phenomenon inextricably linked to cultural shifts—religious, political, economic—in the imperial sphere. The first royal sodomy Pragmática of the early modern period, issued in 1497, marked a rupture with the libertinism afforded sodomitical practices in the peninsula in previous decades . This decree, in addition to subsequent royal sodomy Pragmáticas and other historical occurrences, such as the reconquest of the Spanish peninsula from the infidel Moors, the exile of Jews, and the discovery of America Septentrionalis in 1492—all represented political disruptions that would signal the emergence of Spain’s quest for empire. If the year 1492 had represented the “invention” of “América”—the descriptions of a continent and its inhabitants as defined by Spanish customs and laws—it also marked the start of Europe’s attempt to assimilate the “other.”1 In short: the other in one’s self; the otherness of groups within the society in which one lives and to which one does not belong; and the other in terms of language and customs. Todorov sensed a correlation between the violent denial of the exterior other in America and the discovery of an inner other within European society and within the European individual.2 Columbus initiated the fictionalization of the Indias based on earlier models of the exuberant and the unknown attributed to the other. Midsixteenth -century humanists like Campanella, who championed a Spanish universal monarchy to defend Christendom, or Vitoria, who described the Indios as barbarians, provided Spain with many of its underpinnings in support of empire that were termed “just causes” for colonial domination . Other Spanish sycophants like Ginés de Sepúlveda, Bartolomé de las Casas, López de Gómara, or those self-fashioned moralists who associated themselves with the Second Scholastic “loathed the unknown and the culturally different, sometimes described as savage, monstrous, even contra natura.” Their writings would spearhead the peninsula’s attempt to reconfigure its politics and culture(s).3 [ 184 ] I The perfect Spanish Vir envisioned by the early modern moralists and the sodomite drawn as impotent by many colonial manuscripts functioned in different, often contradictory historical contexts, but also as part of the same historical process—the changes of Spain–New Spain’s “global political economy.” Contextualizing historical formations like Spanish manliness or sodomites within this global category of analysis has allowed one to go beyond “reductive choices” in political critiques concerned with isolated aspects of social relations.4 A contextualized study of the interactions among a manly Spaniard, sodomy, and effeminate sodomites has demonstrated that metropolitan and colonial histories are both often constituted by the history of imperialism . Perceptions of manliness and of sodomites are best understood in relation to one another or as constitutive of each other and not from the framework of discrete national cultures. My focus on notions of manliness as the site for understanding the organization of power in Spain– New Spain attempted a fuller understanding of the “multiplicities of political, economic and ideological domination and subordination in a colonial setting.”5 The recasting of these political formations within a broader paradigm also refines the historiography on Spain–New Spain by shedding light on their own interaction in an age of imperialism. Imperialist-colonialist politics have demonstrated that perceptions of manliness had as much to do with racial, class, religious, and national differences as with sex difference .6 In this sense, I have recognized the “imbrication of gender in a variety of different axes of power—to one that does not proceed from a priority given to gender and expanded to include other social relations.”7 The sodomy narratives discussed in the previous chapters provided some examples of how religion, xenophobia, and ethnicity complicated the politics of imperialism and its intersection with gender perceptions. Whereas my discussion of Bartholomé-Mule highlighted xenophobic politics as an important context for manliness, the Mexican narratives exposed gender identities in terms of the role of class and ethnic identity as the important contexts for understanding manliness. Perceptions of sodomie and of sodomitas differed and changed in context both in the peninsula and in the viceroyalty.8 One commonly held assumption of colonial Latin American society is that postconquest institutions and values crystallized at the end of the sixteenth century and remained stable until the middle of the eighteenth...