From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire (review)

From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire. By Pete Sigal. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. 368 pp., figures, line drawings, halftones. $45.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

Pete Sigal's From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire addresses two very different questions that are important for scholars involved in colonial studies. First, in the face of European colonization, how do indigenous people negotiate changing cultural and political realities while maintaining a traditional sense of self? Second, to what degree can scholars use contemporary theoretical approaches—such as those found in gender studies and queer theory—to reconstruct colonial indigenous thought? The colonial Maya "self" under examination is one that is heavily reliant upon precontact indigenous notions of sexual desire and shifting categories of gender. According to Sigal, with the arrival of the Europeans, sexual desires and gender, as well as the multiple directions that they may take, were transformed. Evidence of the resultant hybrid identities is to be found in the texts (and subtexts) of various indigenous and nonindigenous colonial sources.

The focus of Sigal's study is the hybrid deity, the "Virgin Mary Moon Goddess," who is a conflation of the precontact Maya Moon Goddess, Ixchel, and the Virgin Mary. Since both the Moon Goddess and the Virgin Mary were central in the signification of sexual and gender identities for their respective cultures, the conjoining of the two seems a logical result of colonization. Sigal carefully demarcates the components of Maya and Spanish religions and cultural practices that are the source of hybrid religious beliefs and examines the process of and vehicles through which hybridization occurs. His discussion of the bigendered (and possibly bisexual) nature of the precontact Maya Moon Goddess is especially important, for it is in the conversation between alternating sexual categories and their motivations (desire) that the merit of Sigal's theoretical approach becomes apparent. By deliberately graying black-and-white notions of bipolar gender categories, the author is able to explore and map shifting identities and their sites. In this regard, it is unfortunate that while much attention is paid to the Moon Goddess, less is paid to the Virgin Mary. A closer exploration of this archetype would have revealed a sixteenth-century polyvalency in which Mary was viewed not only as the mother of Christ but also as a manifestation of and a doctrinal response to Eve. Additionally, Renaissance and medieval scholars have shown the Virgin (and Christ) to be as conceptually bigendered and bisexual as the Maya Moon Goddess. Surely this commonality also functioned as an essential link in the process of hybridization.

Sigal's ability to read and demonstrate Maya agency and the maintenance of former social constructions is remarkable. In one documented account, the Maya consciously turned the tools of Catholicism (and European sexual codes) against the Spanish clergy. Superficially, the complaint lodged against the priests seems one of sexual misconduct, which kept the churchmen from the performance of their priestly duties. Sigal reveals that the true infraction, from the Maya perspective, was that through their negligence the priests denied the body of Christ (the host) to the Maya. By blocking access to spiritual/sexual communion, the priests were understood by the Maya not only to be usurpers of the body of Christ but also men who had falsely placed themselves in the structural position occupied earlier by Maya rulers (bygone mediators to the ancestors and gods). Because of this falseness, the priests were viewed as illegitimate—lacking parents and, therefore, devoid of true humanity.

Throughout his text, Sigal fully recognizes and comments upon the cultural specificity of sexual and gender terminology and attempts to offset his use of modern theory/vocabulary by defining Maya sexual vocabulary and attitudes wherever possible. However, the same contemporary theoretical tools that he employs so successfully in illuminating Maya sexual desire create certain difficulties in comprehension...