Butterflies Will Burn: Prosecuting Sodomites in Early Modern Spain and Mexico (review)

Despite its promising title and the study of a broad sample of legal cases against sodomites in Spain and Mexico during the early modern period, Butterflies Will Burn leaves the reader with a feeling of disappointment. Tackling important issues such as the legal code in Spain, strategies of self-preservation used by practitioners of anal sexual intercourse, the complexities of homosocial and homosexual desire, its perceptions and misunderstandings, and the extreme cases of torture experienced by many of the accused sodomites requires theoretical and sustained analysis that the author does not deliver. The book does have value, but such value is not related to the theoretical claims it seeks to further.

Butterflies Will Burn begins with a clear demarcation of the book's scope. Garza Carvajal studies "discourses of Spanish manliness" written primarily by what he consistently calls the moralistas, whose intentions were to foment "the politics of empire in Spain-New Spain" (2). However, the term moralistas is applied indiscriminately to a good number of intellectuals, making it encompass the entire "Spanish intelligentsia" at the time (16). This reading irremediably arrives at the conclusion that all writers were moralistas whose main function was to help construct an ideal of man (Vir) in order to promote conquest and colonization. Such considerations contradict the author's disclaimer that this almost exclusively male group should not be considered a monolith. Unfortunately, that is precisely the way in which Garza Carvajal treats them. In fact, many of the key texts that helped construct images of man during the early modern period reflect diverse purposes that cannot be reduced to an imperial function. Some of them, such as Castiglione's Book of the Courtier (a crucial book in Spain after its translation by Boscán), are complex works that do not make easy distinctions between, for example, a courtier and a soldier, or between what a woman is or should be. In this case, the book's function is quite localized within the small circles of court societies in Europe. Garza Carvajal could have profited from Norbert Elias' notion of a civilizing process as a way of constructing subjectivities that is not necessarily related to macro-political aims such as empire or conquest.

In the Prologue, Garza Carvajal claims that his study reflects the latest tendencies developed by postmodern theories, along with the new historical trends and, more significantly, postcolonial criticism. Butterflies Will Burn then becomes for Garza Carvajal "an unabashedly subjective and quintessentially political interpretation of sodomy prosecutions in early modern Spain-New Spain." The major intellectual shortcomings of this book are, paradoxically, generated by such statements. The tendency (and desire) to be "political" sometimes tends to narrow and cloud the critical language and instruments of knowledge being used, giving the impression that every textual construction of masculine, feminine, or homosexual "identities" necessarily responds to words such as "Empire" or "Colonial" expansion. Whatever these terms designate, their main force resides in the subsummation of all data to an imperial project that, in its trans-Atlantic thrust, determined and prescribed the writings and representations of gender that dominated an epoch, both discursively and in its activities in the physical world. This is what I would call a "totalizing cultural reading," one that pretends to provide the reader with a full account of the complexity of a cultural formation. Such renditions of extremely complex cultural processes naturalize data in ways that render a whole culture one-dimensional, incapable of expressing anything outside its imperialistic tendencies.

But to do justice to the project, we must give a proper account of the whole book. In Butterflies Will Burn, Garza Carvajal examines approximately 300 criminal cases against sodomites between 1561 and 1699 that were prosecuted in locations such as Seville, Cádiz, Granada, and Mexico City. The book is divided into four chapters, with an epilogue and three appendixes that contain examples of representative legal documents. The main purpose of chapter 1 is...