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

Seduction, in a number of different guises, provides von Germeten with the conceptual framework for contemplating the creation, over three centuries, of the archive of transactional sex in colonial Mexico – it also describes the stakes in doing so. This is a book that is centrally about writing, especially the production of laws and legal codes, judicial expedientes, history, and fiction, and how all seem capable both of seducing readers as well as being marked by seduction. Among the many textual seductions in the book are the following: of historians, including herself, by the sources and the archive; of colonial scribes, by both dominant discourses and by those women accused of trading in sex that insisted on complicating their own lives and inscribing themselves in the archive on their own terms as best they could (even if by means of these very scribes); and of readers, by both historians and other writers who use sex and/or the "allure" of a deponent in a legal case (for example) to elicit affective and narrative reactions. One of the strengths of the book is that it historicizes these scribal seductions, and their enduring consequences.

While the archive is certainly interrogated, encompassing the concerns of those focusing on "fiction in the archives" and the inscription onto bodies of legal and discursive categories, von Germeten makes her engagement with sources apparent to readers in order to highlight the need to carefully weigh the interpretive burden such written sources as legal records are being asked to bear. Only in this way can the paradox of ambiguous and illegible archival records be squared with the ubiquity of transactional sex. If von Germeten fully embraces the archival turn, it is not principally with the intent of making the archive the sole subject of her analysis; in fact, much of her contribution lies elsewhere. Offering a "renarration" of the textual inscriptions of selling sex over three centuries, she stresses the complex humanity of those women appearing (or not appearing) in the archives. She does so by always insisting on the complexity of their lives and of the categories and multiple identities by which they inscribed themselves and/or the ends they went to avoid being written into the archive in such terms. Hers is a history firmly grounded in the present, one in which mislabeling, criminalizing, and stigmatizing continue to underwrite ongoing violence against sex workers on a daily basis.

Von Germeten charts the conceptual shifts in archival understandings of transactional sex that preceeded the world of the increasing regulation and inscription of women selling sex after Independence in Mexico. Her interest is not only in the emergence of such categories but how their uses, by all involved, led them to accrue meanings. In the sixteenth century, in contrast to re-Christianized zones of the Iberian Peninsula, where the flourishing of legal brothels generated extensive records, legal and otherwise, in New Spain the fragmentary evidence of transactional sex located such exchanges in domestic and familial settings. At this time, the vocabulary of bawds and procuring (alcahueta, consentidora) predominated. Von Germeten regards the seventeenth century as one of transition, where terminology began shifting from the immoral and sinful whore toward the creation of the criminalized and/or victimized prostitute. That century also witnessed the closing by royal decree (in 1623) of all brothels in the Spanish empire, making the selling of sex an open secret, a regular part of daily life that could not, nevertheless, be acknowledged by royal bureaucrats. The gradual emergence of the word prostitute in the archives occurred over the course of the eighteenth century. Used increasingly as a label implying "disdain and censure or pity and objectification" (37), prostitute as a label meant a greater emphasis on trading money for services if not the criminalization of transactional sex at this point. Such terms and to whom they should be applied formed the grounds of constant and ongoing textual skirmishes, the outcomes of...