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OverviewIn Sins against Nature Zeb Tortorici explores the prosecution of sex acts in colonial New Spain (present-day Mexico, Guatemala, the US Southwest, and the Philippines) to examine the multiple ways bodies and desires come to be textually recorded and archived. Drawing on the records from over three hundred criminal and Inquisition cases between 1530 and 1821, Tortorici shows how the secular and ecclesiastical courts deployed the term contra natura-against nature-to try those accused of sodomy, bestiality, masturbation, erotic religious visions, priestly solicitation of sex during confession, and other forms of ""unnatural"" sex. Archival traces of the visceral reactions of witnesses, the accused, colonial authorities, notaries, translators, and others in these records demonstrate the primacy of affect and its importance to the Spanish documentation and regulation of these sins against nature. In foregrounding the logic that dictated which crimes were recorded and how they are mediated through the colonial archive, Tortorici recasts Iberian Atlantic history through the prism of the unnatural while showing how archives destabilize the bodies, desires, and social categories on which the history of sexuality is based. Full Product DetailsAuthor: Zeb TortoriciPublisher: Duke University Press Imprint: Duke University Press Weight: 0.612kg ISBN: 9780822371328ISBN 10: 0822371324 Pages: 344 Publication Date: 01 June 2018 Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional & Vocational Format: Hardback Publisher's Status: Active Availability: In Print This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us. Table of ContentsA Note on Translation ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction. Archiving the Unnatural 1 1. Viscerality in the Archives: Consuming Desires 25 2. Impulses of the Archive: Misinscription and Voyeurism 46 3. Archiving the Signs of Sodomy: Bodies and Gestures 84 4. To Deaden the Memory: Bestiality and Animal Erasure 124 5. Archives of Negligence: Solicitation in the Confessional 161 6. Desiring the Divine: Pollution and Pleasure 197 Conclusion. Accessing Absence, Surveying Seduction 233 Appendix 255 List of Archives 261 Notes 263 Bibliography 297 Index 309ReviewsBased on an astonishing amount of research that scholars will mine for decades (one wonders if Zeb Tortorici has gone to every single archive and library in all of Mexico), Sins against Nature is a rigorously argued work that takes the field to the next theoretical and methodological level. -- Pete Sigal, author of * The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture * Sins Against Nature offers a strikingly original contribution to the understanding of histories of sexuality in colonial New Spain. Zeb Tortorici's supple readings of records of sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation reveal radically divergent orientations to knowledge, affect, and reason at the very heart of the colonial archive. This is a work of compelling historical scholarship-interdisciplinary, imaginative, meticulous, and critically self-reflexive. -- Anjali Arondekar, author of * For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India * Based on an astonishing amount of research that scholars will mine for decades (one wonders if Zeb Tortorici has gone to every single archive and library in all of Mexico), Sins against Nature is a rigorously argued work that takes the field to the next theoretical and methodological level. --Pete Sigal, author of The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture Sins Against Nature offers a strikingly original contribution to the understanding of histories of sexuality in colonial New Spain. Zeb Tortorici's supple readings of records of sodomy, bestiality, and masturbation reveal radically divergent orientations to knowledge, affect, and reason at the very heart of the colonial archive. This is a work of compelling historical scholarship--interdisciplinary, imaginative, meticulous, and critically self-reflexive. --Anjali Arondekar, author of For the Record: On Sexuality and the Colonial Archive in India Author InformationZeb Tortorici is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University, coeditor of Centering Animals in Latin American History, also published by Duke University Press, and editor of Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America. Tab Content 6Author Website:Countries AvailableAll regions |