To Cross the Sexual Borderlands: The History of Sexuality in the Americas

In 1994, during my final year in graduate school, I decided to teach courses related to the history of sexuality. My agenda was openly political: I wanted students to become more aware of the AIDS pandemic, fight for various sexual freedoms, and oppose the ascendant religious right. I also believed that historians paid far too little attention to issues of sexuality. ¹

The first course I taught, "Queer Bodies/Queer Histories," focused on the ways in which gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender identities had been formed historically. The course emphasized the relationship between "queer theory" (see below) and historical discourse. This course went extremely well as students (under half of whom were openly queer) engaged the material in a very exciting way: even "straight" students felt comfortable discussing their own sexual lives and theorizing about how the historical material related to their identities.

Still, the course left me somewhat unsatisfied. I was trained academically as a colonial Latin American historian, but only a small section of the course related to colonial Latin America, and the material for that section was hardly inspiring (it is only recently that early Latin American historians have begun researching sodomy and similar issues). I then taught a course on gender and sexuality in early Latin America. While I believed strongly that students must understand colonialism in order to comprehend sexuality in the Americas, I still found myself wondering if the students who did not take both courses would be able to make those connections.

The course went through several incarnations at three institutions before finally, two years ago, I developed a course that resolved some of these issues: "Sexuality in the Americas." My current institution, California State University, Los Angeles, is an urban campus made up primarily of working-class students. About half the students are Latino/a. "Sexuality in the Americas" is an upper-division history course. The students who take it are primarily history and Latin American studies majors, although some students take the course as an elective. Each time the course has been taught, about twenty-five students have enrolled. The diversity of the student body presents many opportunities. Most students in the class had themselves lived in Latin America and/or had family members still living there.

I created this course with the idea of advancing a comparative historical approach. In order for students to understand globalization, imperialism, and colonialism, they must be able to break down the ways in which historical discourse is based on the nation-state. The increasing importance of globalization to the political elite of our society shows just how vital it is for students to be able to understand and challenge this process. As a professor who teaches a student body whose very existence shows that "the border" is not an impermeable physical entity, I believe in the necessity of a political and academic project to challenge that border. Additionally, comparative history is particularly appropriate in the case of sexuality, as it allows students to see various ways in which societies have constructed sexual desires, behaviors, and regulations.

Further, most students have misperceptions about sexuality in both the United States and Latin America. The comparative framework allows me to challenge those misperceptions in a particularly aggressive manner. I think that it is important, even for those teaching the history of sexuality from within a U.S. framework, to emphasize a comparative approach in order to prevent students from believing that people enjoying "sex" is a recent phenomenon that has occurred only in the most Europeanized countries.

The course takes the Americas as a geographical frame of reference set into being through the colonization of indigenous societies by Europeans. The course begins by analyzing sexuality in early modern Europe, Africa, and the Americas before the conquest. I then move to a discussion of conquest itself, and particularly I relate warfare to the sexual symbolism that Europeans and...