Vir: Perceptions of Manliness in Andalucia and Mexico, 1561-1699 (review)

Vir: Perceptions of Manliness in Andalucía and Mexico, 1561-1699. By FEDERICO GARZA CARVAJAL. Kleine, vol. 41. Amsterdam: Amsterdamse Historische Reeks, 2000. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. xii, 306 pp. Paper.

Vir is an important contribution to the growing field on Latin American homosexuality, adding to this increasingly sophisticated body of historiography in ambitious ways. Based largely on civil court cases against men for male-male sexual activity, this book traces both a social and legal history. Significantly, this is one of the first full-length monographs on homosexuality in colonial Latin America.

The chapters are arranged thematically and within each are contained vignettes or theoretical points. First and foremost, the book examines the prosecution and religious condemnation of homosexuality in the early modern Hispanic context. In the two introductory chapters the authors explains that understanding the Hispanic "construction" of homosexuality requires more than a social or intellectual history; it can only be done if one considers the overall context of scholastic theology, Spanish imperialism, and anti-Semitism. This point seems to be directed at a broader "queer theory" audience that might be surprised by the author's suggestion that sexual norms are historically contingent. The introductory chapters outline the author's thesis: negative attitudes toward homosexuality were a mixture of xenophobia and religious mentality. In short, sodomy was seen as a kind of "cancer" that "infected" the body politic. This chapter also outlines the montage of theoretical frameworks from which Garza Carvajal works, such as gender studies, postcolonialism, post-structuralism, and subaltern studies. One of the strongest arguments made by this work is that a study of something like homosexuality ought not to be sanitized.

Chapter 1 provides a résumé of the problem of writing the history of homosexuality, rejecting an eternal "gay identify" thesis in favor a historicized identity of "sodomites." Chapter 2 offers a lucid summary of the arguments surrounding sodomy among moralists, theologians, and jurists. Heretofore such a summary has only been available in Spanish and Garza Carvajal provides a valuable service to the academic community in this solid review. Chapters 3 and 4 are more prosaic, with narrative analysis of the bulk of his archival findings. These offer fascinating glimpses not only into the culture of homosexuality for this period but also into the collective mentality of legal and theological opponents of homosexuality. Finally, Garza Carvajal provides transcriptions of excerpts from many of his cases— civil court proceedings dispersed throughout the Spanish empire. That the book is ostensibly about Andalucía and Mexico is misleading, given the fact that a great number of the cases used here come from Peru and Castile.

The greatest strength of this book is its archival scope and ambition. No one thus far has provided the extent of archival analysis of homosexuality for Spanish America that Garza Carvajal offers here, and this will be the enduring value of this study. The transcriptions alone offer a wealth of primary source material that can be used in graduate and undergraduate classrooms, provided the students read Spanish. Moreover, this study is gutsy, and the author is not afraid to challenge some of the field's senior scholars in their assumptions about sexuality in colonial Latin America, although this reviewer thinks that many of the author's conclusions are misguided.

The strengths of this study notwithstanding, the book has major flaws. The introductory chapters, in addition to showcasing plans for a broader, more postcolonial frame of study also demonstrate some of the study's near-fatal flaws. For example, the prose is unwieldy and sentences such as the following do not help the author: "When one emphasizes the culture of New Spain, over that of Spain—with all its classes, religions, and ethnicities—the viceroyalty assumes a "singularized oppositionality," or a site idealized, simultaneously, of 'alterity and authenticity'" (p. 37). The opening chapters are also often inaccurate or plainly wrong. For example, Garza Carvajal claims...