Decolonizing the Sodomite: Queer Tropes of Sexuality in Colonial Andean Culture

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION Transculturating Tropes of Sexuality, Tinkuy, and Third Gender in the Andes The chieftains and settlers [ from Carabaya] bring a chuqui chinchay, an animal painted in all the colors. They say that it was the apo [deity] of the jaguars, under whose protection were the hermaphrodites, or Indians of two genders. [Los curacas y mitmais (de Carabaya) trae a chuqui chinchay, animal muy pintado de todos colores. Dizen que era apo de los otorongos, en cuya guarda da a los ermofraditas yndios de dos naturas.] —santacruz pachacuti, Relación de antigüedades deste reyno del Perú These ruinous people are all sodomites . . . there is not a chief among them who does not carry with him four or five gallant pages. He keeps these as concubines. [Es gente muy bellaca son todos someticos no ay principal que no trayga quatro o cinco pajes muy galanes. Estos tiene por mancebos.] —juan ruiz de arce, Relación de servicios en Indias In the late fifteenth century there was a crisis in the succession of Inca rulers in Tawantinsuyu—a pachacuti (cataclysmic change) that became a liminal moment in the cultural reproduction of the Andean social body and in the transition of Inca imperial bodies from one generation to another.1 As recounted in the first epigraph above, to mediate the tension created during this time of change, the Inca summoned to Cuzco a queer figure, the chuqui chinchay, or the apo de los otorongos, a mountain deity of the jaguars who was the patron of dual-gendered indigenous peoples.2 While we do not know precisely why the chuqui chinchay was called to Cuzco that day, we can now appreciate that this apo was a revered figure in Andean culture, and its human huacsas, or ritual atten- 2 Decolonizing the Sodomite dants—third-gendered subjects—were vital actors in Andean ceremonies. These quariwarmi (men-women) shamans mediated between the symmetrically dualistic spheres of Andean cosmology and daily life by performing rituals that at times required same-sex erotic practices. Their transvested attire served as a visible sign of a third space that negotiated between the masculine and the feminine, the present and the past, the living and the dead. Their shamanic presence invoked the androgynous creative force often represented in Andean mythology. The third gender’s body was a sign in a semiotic system that privileged representation and communication on a corporeal plane rather than on the written page. The Andeans’ collective memory depended on oral transmission and interpretation aided by mnemonic devices such as quipus (multicolored knotted cords used to record historical and other data in the Andes), textiles, natural topography, rituals, monumental architecture, ceramics, and sculpture. Above all, this memory depended on the people who performed their culture’s ritualized history rather than on print technology and standardized alphabets, a significant cultural difference that would have far-reaching effects when the Spanish invasion, another pachacuti , was unleashed in the Andes. The impermanence of the human body and its vestments reflected the relative fragility of Andean cultural memory . When sacred figures like the chuqui chinchay and its third-gender ritualists are inscribed as diabolical and deviant subjects in Spanish colonial writings, scholars are presented with a challenge. The Spanish ‘‘Conquest’’ and colonization of the Andes was recorded for posterity in the legendary ‘‘books of the brave,’’ narratives that created the infamous ‘‘lettered cities’’ (ciudades letradas) in the shadows of the ‘‘darker side’’ of Renaissance humanism.3 These familiar metaphors for Spanish literary hegemony in the Americas have in common an assumed masculinity of the writing subject, a masculinity often naturalized in the original colonial texts, later historiographies, and literary criticism.The relationship between colonial literature and the dominant masculine subject personified by the Renaissance’s ideal man—one of arms and letters—finds its roots in Iberian medieval culture and literature. This subjectivity was central to shaping the colonial narratives that tried to make sense of the invasion, colonization, and indigenous resistance in the first century after Francisco Pizarro penetrated the west coast of South America. Yet, the ‘‘brave,’’ ‘‘lettered ’’ men of the time, some more or less touched by the nascent humanist philosophies, expressed an implicit instability of Spanish male sexuality in their writings, an instability revealed in performative discursive iterations of the ideal masculine subject once again under siege by a cultural Other, Introduction 3 this time by the indigenous Americans rather than...