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

Two DECOLONIZING QUEER TROPES OF SEXUALITY

Two DECOLONIZING QUEER TROPES OF SEXUALITY Chronicles and Myths of Conquest Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that. —michel foucault, The Order of Things Queer tropes of sexuality appear in the pages of Conquest narratives from the first expeditions to the Americas. The sodomitical tropes recorded in this colonial discourse are more than mere ‘‘medieval artifacts,’’ as I understand Mark Jordan’s use of the term in his theological history of sodomy.1 To understand the full impact of the trope, Jordan’s use of ‘‘artifact’’ needs to be complemented by the word’s secondary meaning: ‘‘any object made by human work; esp. a simple or primitive tool, weapon, vessel, etc.’’2 Rather than remaining static and relegated to medieval archives , the primitive sodomy trope reappeared at the dawn of the premodern period, paradoxically invoked to do the work of a tool or weapon in a medieval enterprise that belied the passage of time. Sodomy became one of the rhetorical armaments that the Spanish employed to justify the invasion and colonization of the Andes; it was a moral instrument wielded in the conversion of the indigenous colonial subjects. For the reader today, the sodomy trope is also a vessel that holds a history of marginalization and transculturation of gender and sexuality, for the history of sodomy, its theological ‘‘invention,’’ was not confined to the scholastic seminaries or the inquisitional courts of Europe; this elusive trope crossed the ocean and was employed in the pacification and evangelization of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. These tropes characterized as queer figures those Andeans who threatened the moral order of the Old World and embodied the anxiety related to the inherent instability of hegemonic Iberian masculinity discussed in the last chapter. To glean meaning from these textual artifacts we must decolonize the tropes through deconstruction and re- Queer Tropes of Sexuality 69 interpretation from a more Andean perspective of indigenous culture and society. The textual fragments I consider in this chapter are vestiges of a process that brought together these medieval European values and indigenous Andean cultures, whose language, ritual practices, and myths represented different sexual moralities. Because of the power imbalance implicit in colonial discourse, what we can know of Andean same-sex practices in this historical and spatial context is limited. The colonial representation of indigenous gender and sexuality was a process of literary transculturation that left behind textual artifacts neither wholly European and medieval nor exclusively indigenous and pre-Hispanic. Also of interest here, beyond the reconstruction of a transculturated subjectivity, is how the writers of the times, both Spanish and native, portrayed gender culture and sexuality in this conflictive colonial context. We will see, on the one hand, a Christian soldier-chronicler, Pedro Cieza de León, come to terms with an American ‘‘heterotopia,’’ that ‘‘disturbing’’ place of the Other that Foucault has contrasted to the comforting utopias of one’s fantasy. Confronted with the real differences of Andean culture, Cieza de León’s challenge was to narrate with a language limited by its origins and ideologies. To obtain the information he recorded, he had to engage with native informants, Andeans with their own political and social agendas, that is, agents in the process of transculturation. Indeed, what he saw and heard in the Andes undermined the language of conquest and challenged the writer to find a ‘‘third space’’ from which to narrate his chronicle. His struggle to find commonality in order to communicate these differences was reiterated some fifty years later by native ladino writers whose narratives reflect nearly a century of transculturation (the subject of Chapter 3). In all of these texts, the authors grapple with different cultural codes in their reinterpretation of Andean culture. The writers left us fragments of third-gender subjectivity , pieces of a heterotopic gender culture distorted by prejudice and fear.3 gender and sexuality in spanish conquest politics In one of the first reports from Pizarro’s early expedition along the Ecuadorian coast, Juan Ruiz de Arce describes his shock and disgust at an apparently different gender/sexual culture. Featured prominently in his account is a disdain for those elements of the culture consid- 70 Decolonizing the Sodomite ered feminine in the Spanish mentality. His descriptions reveal a conquistador who was, as James Lockhart has commented, ‘‘given to...