A01=Zeb Tortorici
AHA Committee on Lesbian
Alan Bray Memorial Book Prize
Author_Zeb Tortorici
Bisexual and Transgender History book awards
Category=JBFW
Category=JBSJ
Category=JKV
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Category=NHTQ
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Gay
John Boswell Prize winner
Marysa Navarro Best Book Prize
MLA Book Award Winners
NECLAS Book Award Winners
Product details
- ISBN 9780822371540
- Weight: 476g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 01 Jun 2018
- Publisher: Duke University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In 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.
Zeb 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.
