Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico by Nicole von Germeten (review)

Elegantly written and on a topic difficult to track, Nicole von Germeten’s book provides a fine narrative of textual inscriptions of selling sex over the course of three centuries, for New Spain and beyond. Aware of the ambiguities and limitations of documenting the histories of public women, whores, and prostitutes, she comes to grips with the history of sexuality via written sources. Over time (the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries), we learn about changes in the recording of sexuality, with a general trend towards increased regulation, criminalization, and the political polarization of modern global transactional sex. The story of how the judicial identity of women changed over time. The centuries discussed delve into a continuous (and still continuing) morphology of the victim-versus-criminal dichotomy.

Throughout seven splendid chapters, the author blends trial narratives with the fictional imaginings of literature, allowing her to alternate between imagined and archival texts. Most remarkable is her detection of how deponents borrowed from literature to fit their autobiographies into such enforced narratives, thus creating an ethnography of the archive itself, instigated by the earlier works of, among others, Laura Ann Stoler and Kathryn Burns. Von Germeten tells us that the way sex was phrased changed, and it also mutated into several disguises. Providers are seen in an array of roles as girls, ladies, entertainers, escorts, courtesans, and sex workers. They mainly defend and argue about honor, family, and racial difference rather than the sex act itself. Morality rather than sexual behavior is key to the scrutinized perpetrators and their judges.

With civil and ecclesiastical authorities usually looking the other way, prostitution, the prototype of transactional sex, was widespread, although with divergences as to class and race. In the author’s reading, this was how women of African and indigenous descent shaped Spanish American understandings of how to negotiate and carry out “illicit” relationships, especially in the familiar, popular, and sometimes lucrative occupation of bawdry (chapter 1). On the Portuguese side, there seems to be a parallel to barraganía, a form of pseudo-marriage with non-white concubines, in the early stages of (male) colonization.

The following chapters provide a detailed account of how the crowns of Europe framed their motivations for closing regulated brothels and the pertaining negotiations as to how sexual transactions were made illegal, beginning in the seventeenth century. With the Bourbon Reforms in Spain and in the colonies, the multiple illegal transactions became more visible, and the multilayered range of sex for sale became extensively discussed in archival records, in tandem with modern mechanisms for urban policing.

Whereas chapters 1 and 2 provide the reader with a historical and juridical background to explain the early modern categorization of women as “prostitutes” in the 1700s, chapters 3, 4, and 5 elucidate the differences between streetwalkers, middle-class mistresses, and elite courtesans. For “kept women” (chapter 3) and elite courtesans (chapter 4), an increased surveillance tended to be overshadowed by a benign paternalism. Especially among the latter, transactional sex interests tended to coalesce with professional theater and dance. These were women “who wrote themselves into the archives due to their self-promotion and their own materialism, libertinism, and social ambition” (12). Two very interesting case studies (chapter 5) showcase personal maneuverings in these complex worlds, looking at women who fashioned themselves as respectable ladies.

Street-working women, together with drunks, solicitors, and vagrants, met stricter law enforcement. They were returned to their homes or jobs as servants, the very situations they had escaped from, blurring the lines between social rebuff, personal suffering, and occupational options. In short, these chapters illustrate the differing worth of sex capital.

In the last chapter (7), we find parents and sisters selling younger sisters into prostitution, sometimes by running brothels in a family house. Such images of women as the passive objects of desire, their “fatal suffering,” their weakness and sexual passivity, emerged in the late viceregal context, when royalist...