Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain by Zeb Tortorici (review)

This book is not just about (shocking) sexual acts and crimes, although it contains plenty of them. It is also about the archiving of sexual behavior, deviance, and desire. Zeb Tortorici has mined the archives of New Spain to see how regulatory mechanisms became archival practices, how the archive as a contact zone created and distorted its subjects, and how acts connected (or failed to connect) to recording processes. Tortorici argues that archival explorations are a form of queer temporality in which sex and desire can reveal the contours and limits of colonial hegemony. He further exhorts readers to examine their complicity in the recording and consuming of the archived past, thereby challenging anew the complacent dismissals of sex as an important category of historical inquiry.

In six chapters Tortorici organizes his analysis around themes that are illustrated through archival finds. The first theme is articulated in a chapter on the visceral, and Tortorici uses the provocations of disgust found in cases of necrophilia and "sucking semen" to tease out the disjuncture between the past and present. Disgust, incomprehension, and ambivalence (especially about repressing or exposing deviance) mark these cases from inception, through the judicial process, and into the archive. Tortorici elucidates how affective responses to viscerality produce emotions that can impede but also enhance analysis of the past. The intensity of response can alert the researcher to politics of the archive. What has been saved, how it has been recorded, and who is implicated in reading and writing about it are always partial and incomplete processes, but attention to (rather than avoidance of) the visceral can provide analytical purchase.

The implications of self-awareness deepen as Tortorici moves on to his second theme, the human. Over two chapters, Tortorici explores archival misinscription apparent in a sodomy case and in the subsequent production of narrative. Drawing on Jacques Derrida's notion of inscription as the traces of a life deposited in an archive, Tortorici reveals the ways that those traces are altered, deformed, incomplete, and "mutilated" (50). Desire and what actually happened are often distorted. Class, race, torture, language/translation, misunderstandings about gender performance, efforts to deflect culpability, incomplete historical records, and the affect of archivists and historians all produce misinscription. Nonetheless, in chapter 3 Tortorici analyzes how sodomy became visible through corporeal signs. Denunciation usually rested on visual clues, but tactile, olfactory, and aural ones mattered as well. Medical evidence was often ambivalent, as were power dynamics. While the privileged often escaped dire penalties, more vulnerable individuals, as defined by age, class, or race, could claim coercion, lessening or eliminating punishment. Gendered gestures—male effeminacy and female masculinity—did not always lead to accusations but could provide part of the basis for a charge. Rare written signs of affection between men accused of sodomy are replete with malleable meanings. The processes of investigation and punishment are familiar, but Tortorici brings out the radical uncertainty of meaning because of the multiple dynamics from act to accusation to the archive.

Tortorici shifts to his third theme, the animal, with bestiality cases, featured in chapter 4. Despite the scholarly distaste that bestiality typically elicits, Tortorici argues that it offers important lessons about the archive. From the ways that animals were used as documents, to their erasure by being killed for sexual acts forced upon them, to the ironic fact that this erasure was to "deaden the memory of the act" (130), which was then memorialized in the archive, bestiality cases reveal the social dynamics of colonial sex law. Contemporaries understood bestiality as reflecting a loss of human reason, and courts routinely ascribed failures of reason more readily to indigenous, African, and mixed-race populations. Defendants claimed that ignorance, alcohol, and the devil made them do it, although many seemed to have been seeking sexual experience. As an act, bestiality crossed the species barrier but remained "heterospecial" in that men typically...