Journal of Latin American cultural studies, Oct 2, 2023
Among a large lote of dozens of early to mid-twentieth-century erotic and pornographic postcards,... more Among a large lote of dozens of early to mid-twentieth-century erotic and pornographic postcards, illustrated novelettes, amateur photographs, and pamphlets purchased at a flea market in the San Telmo neighbourhood of Buenos Aires in 2021 was one Spanish-language novel, El mundo del placer: o las memorias de Susana [The World of Pleasure: Or, the Memories of Susana]. The materials in this set-most of them in Spanish-nicely illustrate the partly-and generatively-fragmented, disjointed, occluded, copied, and reprinted nature of early twentieth-century pornography. El mundo del placer is undated-it looks to have been printed during the 1940s or 1950s-and although it was supposedly printed by the "Editorial Gato Negro" in Madrid, this typographical information may also be the result of a printer's sleight of hand. Given the illegality of printing and disseminating such publications, it is probable that the book itself was not printed in Madrid, and perhaps not even in Spain, as it was common for such risk-tolerant printers to cover their tracks, at least partly, through several means. This particular book's presence in an Argentine flea market, so many decades after its printing, gestures towards the multiple trajectories-occluded traversals those are both geographic (across borders and languages) and individual (among hands, sellers, collectors)-that such an object may have taken. As historian Lisa Z. Sigel makes clear, starting in the 1890s with the beginnings of the postcard craze, referred to as "cartomania" or "cartophilia", new forms of visual pornography began to outstrip older ones. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Sigel writes, "[v]isual pornography continued to focus on women as the objects of desire; ephemera deepened, rather than inaugurated, the imperial gaze; scatological humor, social commentary, and an undifferentiated sexuality returned to pornography after a brief hiatus with the end of radical pornographers" in nineteenth-century England (2002, 119). In the wider context of Spain and its ties to Latin America, Maite Zubiaurre notes that Spanish-language serialised pornography "was often published as periodical fiction, which served as a smooth prolongation of the nineteenth-century novel" (2012, 16). Indeed, El mundo del placer: o las memorias de Susana might be seen as playing some role in the world of publishers of erotic contents. Yet, erotic fiction came to be increasingly connected to popular sexology, advertisements for sexual hygiene, and erotic and ethno-pornographic postcards. Obscenity takes multiple shapes and forms; the adaptability of producers and This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Special issue editors Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortorici interview Maya Mikdashi and Carlos Motta about... more Special issue editors Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortorici interview Maya Mikdashi and Carlos Motta about their collaborative film, Deseos / ﺭ ﻏ ﺒ ﺎ ﺕ (Desires, 2015), which places queer and gender-variant historical characters within a fluid chronological framework. In this interview, Mikdashi and Motta discuss issues such as imperial and colonial temporality, queer networks of community, and a desire for happy endings in history. Keywords decoloniality, queer temporality, film and video art, Ottoman Empire, Spanish Empire, transgender studies, imagination, historical narration T his interview with Maya Mikdashi, an anthropologist and assistant professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, and Carlos Motta, a multidisciplinary artist based in New York, emerges from an event on "Trans*historicities" held at the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University in November of 2017. For that event, the editors of this special issue invited several artists, activists, and scholars to discuss how their work engages with history and notions of time. Among them, Maya Mikdashi and Carlos Motta discussed their thirty-three-minute film, Deseos / ﺭ ﻏ ﺒ ﺎ ﺕ (Desires, 2015), which exposes the ways in which medicine, law, religion, and cultural tradition shaped dominant discourses of the gendered and sexed body through the narration of two parallel stories: that of Martina, who lived in Colombia during the late colonial period of the early nineteenth century and that of Nour, who lived in Beirut during the late Ottoman Empire. Part documentary and part fiction, the film presents an imaginary correspondence between these individuals. The criminal court of colonial New Granada prosecuted Martina in 1803 for being a "hermaphrodite" after being accused by her female lover of having a body that was "against nature." Martina was tried in a court of law and ultimately set free after medical doctors appointed by the court were unable to find evidence of her lover's accusation. This story is
This article looks at the symbiotic relationship between archivists, researchers, historians, boo... more This article looks at the symbiotic relationship between archivists, researchers, historians, booksellers, flea market vendors toward the archival preservation of historical "erotica" and "pornography."
This special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly brings together artists, curators, and s... more This special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly brings together artists, curators, and scholars to imagine a history of transgender before the advent of terms that scholars generally look to for the formation of modern conceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality. Contributors include Kadji Amin, M.W. Bychowski, Julian B. Carter, Jules Gill-Peterson, J. Halberstam, Asato Ikeda, Maya Mikdashi, Carlos Motta, Kai Pyle, C. Riley Snorton, Jennifer Wilson, and others. Here, we consider what we find if we look for trans* before trans*.
“Sexual Violence, Predatory Masculinity, and Medical Testimony in New Spain” in Scientific Mascul... more “Sexual Violence, Predatory Masculinity, and Medical Testimony in New Spain” in Scientific Masculinities, special issue of Osiris 30:1, ed. Robert Nye and Erika Milam (University of Chicago Press, 2015): 272-294.
This essay examines the medical and legal construction of predatory masculinity in New Spain by contrasting criminal cases of rape [estupro] with those of violent or coercive sodomy [sodomía]. In the context of male-female rape, the rulings of most criminal and ecclesiastical courts imply that predatory masculinity was a “natural” manifestation of male sexual desire, whereas in cases of sodomy and nonconsensual sexual acts between men, courts viewed such desire as “against nature.” The processes by which the colonial state prosecuted certain sexual crimes simultaneously criminalized and validated predatory masculinity. By analyzing the roles of the medics, surgeons, and midwives who examined the bodies of the male and female victims in these cases, this essay argues for a commonality in the authoritative judgments based on medical evidence, whether conclusive or inconclusive.
Centering Animals in Latin American History, ed. Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici (Duke University Press, 2013): 93-119, 2013
Exploring the historical links between nonhuman animals and sacramental desecration in a Catholic... more Exploring the historical links between nonhuman animals and sacramental desecration in a Catholic theological tradition, this paper looks critically at a number of eighteenth-century Mexican Inquisition cases in which priests and laypersons were suspected of heresy for having (drunkenly) administered the sacraments of marriage and baptism to dogs. In all cases, witnesses asserted that the canine weddings and baptisms took place amidst drinking and dancing, merely as a form of entertainment. This, however, did little to assuage inquisitors who were concerned with eradicating sacrilege and maintaining the boundaries between humans and animals. These cases are juxtaposed with the anonymously penned eighteenth-century satire, "Honras funebres a la perra Pamela” (“Funeral honors for a dog named Pamela”), which, in a manner highly critical of bourgeois funerary pomp and splendor, recounts the extraordinary life and tragic death of Pamela. Arguing that the inhabitants of Bourbon Mexico experienced an important shift in sensibilities regarding household pets and affective ties between certain “privileged species” like dogs, this chapter, as an exercise in "perrología" ("dogology") delves deeply into the social meanings of petkeeping, heresy, and souls in late colonial Mexico.
Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain, 2018
This is the introduction to my recent book, Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New... more This is the introduction to my recent book, Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (Duke University Press, 2018), 1-24.
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.
This issue offers a theoretical and methodological imagining of what constitutes trans* before th... more This issue offers a theoretical and methodological imagining of what constitutes trans* before the advent of the terms that scholars generally look to for the formation of modern conceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality. What might we find if we look for trans* before trans*? While some historians have rejected the category of transgender to speak of experiences before the mid-twentieth century, others have laid claim to those living gender-non-conforming lives before our contemporary era. By using the concept of trans*historicity, this volume draws together trans* studies, historical inquiry, and queer temporality while also emphasizing the historical specificity and variability of gendered systems of embodiment in different time periods. Essay topics include a queer analysis of medieval European saints, discussions of a nineteenth-century Russian religious sect, an exploration of a third gender in early modern Japanese art, a reclamation of Ojibwe and Plains Cree Two-Spirit language, and biopolitical genealogies and filmic representations of transsexuality. The issue also features a roundtable discussion on trans*historicities and an interview with the creators of the 2015 film Deseos. Critiquing both progressive teleologies and the idea of sex or gender as a timeless tradition, this issue articulates our own desires for trans history, trans*historicities, and queerly temporal forms of historical narration.
Contributors: Kadji Amin, M. W. Bychowski, Julian B. Carter, Fernanda Carvajal, Howard Chiang, Leah DeVun, Ramzi Fawaz, Julian Gill-Peterson, Jack Halberstam, Asato Ikeda, Anson Koch-Rein, Jacob Lau, Kathleen P. Long, Robert Mills, Marcia Ochoa, David Primo, Kai Pyle, C. Riley Snorton, Susan Stryker, Zeb Tortorici, Jennifer Wilson.
This essay explores the concept of "archival seduction" through an examination of the traces of s... more This essay explores the concept of "archival seduction" through an examination of the traces of sodomy and homosexuality in the national archive of Mexico (the Archivo General de la Nación): http://www.archivejournal.net/issue/5/archives-remixed/archival-seduction/
This is the introduction to the first of two issues of Radical History Review (#120) on "Queering... more This is the introduction to the first of two issues of Radical History Review (#120) on "Queering Archives"
This essay focuses on how viscerality -understood as the experience of intense and highly mediate... more This essay focuses on how viscerality -understood as the experience of intense and highly mediated bodily feelings or affective responses that manifest themselves through conflicting corporeal and emotive reactions -refracts as an issue for archival studies of early modern sexuality (and beyond). I use the concept of viscerality as a theoretical framework to construct an understanding of how criminal and Inquisition cases became archived in New Spain in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth. Viscerality has significant implications for those who create and use archives, and it is intimately linked to the metaphorics of consumption that undergird the archive (in both a textual and a corporeal sense). After a theoretical discussion of "consuming archives," which is centered on the idiom of consumption that has filtered through archival theory and scholarship, I analyze three case studies from the historical archives of colonial New Spain, focusing on how bodies and desires come to be archived through a chain of visceral reactions on the part of historical actors, colonial authorities, notaries and scribes, archivists, and modern-day historians. These visceral archives of the body go so far as to implicate me, the author of this essay, and the readers of this essay as well. Drawing such connections between the producers and consumers of documents across the centuries highlights a particularly queer archival, methodological, and temporal approach to the writing of history -one in which the historical/temporal/ raced/sexed other is encountered (and partly rendered knowable and consumed) through visceral and other affective archival encounters.
Since the early 1980s, historians have increasingly turned their attention toward the topics of s... more Since the early 1980s, historians have increasingly turned their attention toward the topics of sodomy and '
Journal of Latin American cultural studies, Oct 2, 2023
Among a large lote of dozens of early to mid-twentieth-century erotic and pornographic postcards,... more Among a large lote of dozens of early to mid-twentieth-century erotic and pornographic postcards, illustrated novelettes, amateur photographs, and pamphlets purchased at a flea market in the San Telmo neighbourhood of Buenos Aires in 2021 was one Spanish-language novel, El mundo del placer: o las memorias de Susana [The World of Pleasure: Or, the Memories of Susana]. The materials in this set-most of them in Spanish-nicely illustrate the partly-and generatively-fragmented, disjointed, occluded, copied, and reprinted nature of early twentieth-century pornography. El mundo del placer is undated-it looks to have been printed during the 1940s or 1950s-and although it was supposedly printed by the "Editorial Gato Negro" in Madrid, this typographical information may also be the result of a printer's sleight of hand. Given the illegality of printing and disseminating such publications, it is probable that the book itself was not printed in Madrid, and perhaps not even in Spain, as it was common for such risk-tolerant printers to cover their tracks, at least partly, through several means. This particular book's presence in an Argentine flea market, so many decades after its printing, gestures towards the multiple trajectories-occluded traversals those are both geographic (across borders and languages) and individual (among hands, sellers, collectors)-that such an object may have taken. As historian Lisa Z. Sigel makes clear, starting in the 1890s with the beginnings of the postcard craze, referred to as "cartomania" or "cartophilia", new forms of visual pornography began to outstrip older ones. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Sigel writes, "[v]isual pornography continued to focus on women as the objects of desire; ephemera deepened, rather than inaugurated, the imperial gaze; scatological humor, social commentary, and an undifferentiated sexuality returned to pornography after a brief hiatus with the end of radical pornographers" in nineteenth-century England (2002, 119). In the wider context of Spain and its ties to Latin America, Maite Zubiaurre notes that Spanish-language serialised pornography "was often published as periodical fiction, which served as a smooth prolongation of the nineteenth-century novel" (2012, 16). Indeed, El mundo del placer: o las memorias de Susana might be seen as playing some role in the world of publishers of erotic contents. Yet, erotic fiction came to be increasingly connected to popular sexology, advertisements for sexual hygiene, and erotic and ethno-pornographic postcards. Obscenity takes multiple shapes and forms; the adaptability of producers and This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Special issue editors Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortorici interview Maya Mikdashi and Carlos Motta about... more Special issue editors Leah DeVun and Zeb Tortorici interview Maya Mikdashi and Carlos Motta about their collaborative film, Deseos / ﺭ ﻏ ﺒ ﺎ ﺕ (Desires, 2015), which places queer and gender-variant historical characters within a fluid chronological framework. In this interview, Mikdashi and Motta discuss issues such as imperial and colonial temporality, queer networks of community, and a desire for happy endings in history. Keywords decoloniality, queer temporality, film and video art, Ottoman Empire, Spanish Empire, transgender studies, imagination, historical narration T his interview with Maya Mikdashi, an anthropologist and assistant professor in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, and Carlos Motta, a multidisciplinary artist based in New York, emerges from an event on "Trans*historicities" held at the Fales Library and Special Collections at New York University in November of 2017. For that event, the editors of this special issue invited several artists, activists, and scholars to discuss how their work engages with history and notions of time. Among them, Maya Mikdashi and Carlos Motta discussed their thirty-three-minute film, Deseos / ﺭ ﻏ ﺒ ﺎ ﺕ (Desires, 2015), which exposes the ways in which medicine, law, religion, and cultural tradition shaped dominant discourses of the gendered and sexed body through the narration of two parallel stories: that of Martina, who lived in Colombia during the late colonial period of the early nineteenth century and that of Nour, who lived in Beirut during the late Ottoman Empire. Part documentary and part fiction, the film presents an imaginary correspondence between these individuals. The criminal court of colonial New Granada prosecuted Martina in 1803 for being a "hermaphrodite" after being accused by her female lover of having a body that was "against nature." Martina was tried in a court of law and ultimately set free after medical doctors appointed by the court were unable to find evidence of her lover's accusation. This story is
This article looks at the symbiotic relationship between archivists, researchers, historians, boo... more This article looks at the symbiotic relationship between archivists, researchers, historians, booksellers, flea market vendors toward the archival preservation of historical "erotica" and "pornography."
This special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly brings together artists, curators, and s... more This special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly brings together artists, curators, and scholars to imagine a history of transgender before the advent of terms that scholars generally look to for the formation of modern conceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality. Contributors include Kadji Amin, M.W. Bychowski, Julian B. Carter, Jules Gill-Peterson, J. Halberstam, Asato Ikeda, Maya Mikdashi, Carlos Motta, Kai Pyle, C. Riley Snorton, Jennifer Wilson, and others. Here, we consider what we find if we look for trans* before trans*.
“Sexual Violence, Predatory Masculinity, and Medical Testimony in New Spain” in Scientific Mascul... more “Sexual Violence, Predatory Masculinity, and Medical Testimony in New Spain” in Scientific Masculinities, special issue of Osiris 30:1, ed. Robert Nye and Erika Milam (University of Chicago Press, 2015): 272-294.
This essay examines the medical and legal construction of predatory masculinity in New Spain by contrasting criminal cases of rape [estupro] with those of violent or coercive sodomy [sodomía]. In the context of male-female rape, the rulings of most criminal and ecclesiastical courts imply that predatory masculinity was a “natural” manifestation of male sexual desire, whereas in cases of sodomy and nonconsensual sexual acts between men, courts viewed such desire as “against nature.” The processes by which the colonial state prosecuted certain sexual crimes simultaneously criminalized and validated predatory masculinity. By analyzing the roles of the medics, surgeons, and midwives who examined the bodies of the male and female victims in these cases, this essay argues for a commonality in the authoritative judgments based on medical evidence, whether conclusive or inconclusive.
Centering Animals in Latin American History, ed. Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici (Duke University Press, 2013): 93-119, 2013
Exploring the historical links between nonhuman animals and sacramental desecration in a Catholic... more Exploring the historical links between nonhuman animals and sacramental desecration in a Catholic theological tradition, this paper looks critically at a number of eighteenth-century Mexican Inquisition cases in which priests and laypersons were suspected of heresy for having (drunkenly) administered the sacraments of marriage and baptism to dogs. In all cases, witnesses asserted that the canine weddings and baptisms took place amidst drinking and dancing, merely as a form of entertainment. This, however, did little to assuage inquisitors who were concerned with eradicating sacrilege and maintaining the boundaries between humans and animals. These cases are juxtaposed with the anonymously penned eighteenth-century satire, "Honras funebres a la perra Pamela” (“Funeral honors for a dog named Pamela”), which, in a manner highly critical of bourgeois funerary pomp and splendor, recounts the extraordinary life and tragic death of Pamela. Arguing that the inhabitants of Bourbon Mexico experienced an important shift in sensibilities regarding household pets and affective ties between certain “privileged species” like dogs, this chapter, as an exercise in "perrología" ("dogology") delves deeply into the social meanings of petkeeping, heresy, and souls in late colonial Mexico.
Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain, 2018
This is the introduction to my recent book, Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New... more This is the introduction to my recent book, Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (Duke University Press, 2018), 1-24.
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.
This issue offers a theoretical and methodological imagining of what constitutes trans* before th... more This issue offers a theoretical and methodological imagining of what constitutes trans* before the advent of the terms that scholars generally look to for the formation of modern conceptions of gender, sex, and sexuality. What might we find if we look for trans* before trans*? While some historians have rejected the category of transgender to speak of experiences before the mid-twentieth century, others have laid claim to those living gender-non-conforming lives before our contemporary era. By using the concept of trans*historicity, this volume draws together trans* studies, historical inquiry, and queer temporality while also emphasizing the historical specificity and variability of gendered systems of embodiment in different time periods. Essay topics include a queer analysis of medieval European saints, discussions of a nineteenth-century Russian religious sect, an exploration of a third gender in early modern Japanese art, a reclamation of Ojibwe and Plains Cree Two-Spirit language, and biopolitical genealogies and filmic representations of transsexuality. The issue also features a roundtable discussion on trans*historicities and an interview with the creators of the 2015 film Deseos. Critiquing both progressive teleologies and the idea of sex or gender as a timeless tradition, this issue articulates our own desires for trans history, trans*historicities, and queerly temporal forms of historical narration.
Contributors: Kadji Amin, M. W. Bychowski, Julian B. Carter, Fernanda Carvajal, Howard Chiang, Leah DeVun, Ramzi Fawaz, Julian Gill-Peterson, Jack Halberstam, Asato Ikeda, Anson Koch-Rein, Jacob Lau, Kathleen P. Long, Robert Mills, Marcia Ochoa, David Primo, Kai Pyle, C. Riley Snorton, Susan Stryker, Zeb Tortorici, Jennifer Wilson.
This essay explores the concept of "archival seduction" through an examination of the traces of s... more This essay explores the concept of "archival seduction" through an examination of the traces of sodomy and homosexuality in the national archive of Mexico (the Archivo General de la Nación): http://www.archivejournal.net/issue/5/archives-remixed/archival-seduction/
This is the introduction to the first of two issues of Radical History Review (#120) on "Queering... more This is the introduction to the first of two issues of Radical History Review (#120) on "Queering Archives"
This essay focuses on how viscerality -understood as the experience of intense and highly mediate... more This essay focuses on how viscerality -understood as the experience of intense and highly mediated bodily feelings or affective responses that manifest themselves through conflicting corporeal and emotive reactions -refracts as an issue for archival studies of early modern sexuality (and beyond). I use the concept of viscerality as a theoretical framework to construct an understanding of how criminal and Inquisition cases became archived in New Spain in the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth. Viscerality has significant implications for those who create and use archives, and it is intimately linked to the metaphorics of consumption that undergird the archive (in both a textual and a corporeal sense). After a theoretical discussion of "consuming archives," which is centered on the idiom of consumption that has filtered through archival theory and scholarship, I analyze three case studies from the historical archives of colonial New Spain, focusing on how bodies and desires come to be archived through a chain of visceral reactions on the part of historical actors, colonial authorities, notaries and scribes, archivists, and modern-day historians. These visceral archives of the body go so far as to implicate me, the author of this essay, and the readers of this essay as well. Drawing such connections between the producers and consumers of documents across the centuries highlights a particularly queer archival, methodological, and temporal approach to the writing of history -one in which the historical/temporal/ raced/sexed other is encountered (and partly rendered knowable and consumed) through visceral and other affective archival encounters.
Since the early 1980s, historians have increasingly turned their attention toward the topics of s... more Since the early 1980s, historians have increasingly turned their attention toward the topics of sodomy and '
This is the introduction, co-authored with Javier Fernández-Galeano, to a special issue of JLACS ... more This is the introduction, co-authored with Javier Fernández-Galeano, to a special issue of JLACS on "The Politics of Obscenity in Latin America" (2023):
Introduction Introduction. The Politics of Obscenity in Latin America Zeb Tortorici & Javier Fernández-Galeano Pages: 539-547 Published online: 14 Mar 2024
Article Beyond Sex: Pornographic Journalism, Violence, and Politics in Argentina’s Transition to Democracy Natalia Milanesio Pages: 549-566 Published online: 31 Jan 2024
Article French Kissing the Icon: Erotic Iconoclash and Political Subversion in Deborah Castillo’s The Emancipatory Kiss (2013) Irina R. Troconis Pages: 567-585 Published online: 28 Dec 2023
Article “Bésame otra vez”: The Use of Obscenity to Denounce Violence in Pedro Lemebel’s Incontables (1986) María Célleri Pages: 587-603 Published online: 12 Dec 2023
Article Bodies to Reveal and Conceal: Baroque Dynamics of Obscenity (Heresy) and Modesty (Saintliness) in Feminine Bodies in the Peruvian Viceroyalty Pilar Espitia Pages: 605-627 Published online: 24 Jan 2024
Article Race And Politics In Peruvian And Argentine Porn Under The Transition To Democracy, 1975–1985 Santiago Joaquín Insausti & Pablo Ben Pages: 629-655 Published online: 22 Jan 2024
Article National Santos and Mariachi Machos: Liberatory Ethics and Aesthetics of Pleasure in Mecos Films’ La putiza and La verganza Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou Pages: 657-679 Published online: 22 Jan 2024
Article Gore Aesthetics: Chilean Necroliberalism And Travesti Resistance Cole Rizki Pages: 681-703 Published online: 22 Jan 2024
“Trans*historicities: A Roundtable Discussion” offers reflections on how thinking about time and ... more “Trans*historicities: A Roundtable Discussion” offers reflections on how thinking about time and chronology has impacted scholarship in trans studies in recent years. Contributing scholars come from numerous disciplines that touch on history, and have expertise in far-ranging geographic and temporal fields. As a broad conversation about some of the potential possibilities and difficulties in seeking out—and finding—trans in historical contexts, this discussion focuses on the complex interrelations between trans, time, and history.
Contributors: M. W. Bychowski, Howard Chiang, Jack Halberstam, Jacob Lau, Kathleen P. Long, Marcia Ochoa, C. Riley Snorton, Leah DeVun, Zeb Tortorici
CALL FOR PAPERS: Global Iberian Pornographies (1492-1898), to be coedited by Nicholas R. Jones (U... more CALL FOR PAPERS: Global Iberian Pornographies (1492-1898), to be coedited by Nicholas R. Jones (UC Davis), Chad Leahy (University of Denver) and Zeb Tortorici (NYU)
Uploads
Papers by Zeb Tortorici
This essay examines the medical and legal construction of predatory masculinity in New Spain by contrasting criminal cases of rape [estupro] with those of violent or coercive sodomy [sodomía]. In the context of male-female rape, the rulings of most criminal and ecclesiastical courts imply that predatory masculinity was a “natural” manifestation of male sexual desire, whereas in cases of sodomy and nonconsensual sexual acts between men, courts viewed such desire as “against nature.” The processes by which the colonial state prosecuted certain sexual crimes simultaneously criminalized and validated predatory masculinity. By analyzing the roles of the medics, surgeons, and midwives who examined the bodies of the male and female victims in these cases, this essay argues for a commonality in the authoritative judgments based on medical evidence, whether conclusive or inconclusive.
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.
Contributors: Kadji Amin, M. W. Bychowski, Julian B. Carter, Fernanda Carvajal, Howard Chiang, Leah DeVun, Ramzi Fawaz, Julian Gill-Peterson, Jack Halberstam, Asato Ikeda, Anson Koch-Rein, Jacob Lau, Kathleen P. Long, Robert Mills, Marcia Ochoa, David Primo, Kai Pyle, C. Riley Snorton, Susan Stryker, Zeb Tortorici, Jennifer Wilson.
This essay examines the medical and legal construction of predatory masculinity in New Spain by contrasting criminal cases of rape [estupro] with those of violent or coercive sodomy [sodomía]. In the context of male-female rape, the rulings of most criminal and ecclesiastical courts imply that predatory masculinity was a “natural” manifestation of male sexual desire, whereas in cases of sodomy and nonconsensual sexual acts between men, courts viewed such desire as “against nature.” The processes by which the colonial state prosecuted certain sexual crimes simultaneously criminalized and validated predatory masculinity. By analyzing the roles of the medics, surgeons, and midwives who examined the bodies of the male and female victims in these cases, this essay argues for a commonality in the authoritative judgments based on medical evidence, whether conclusive or inconclusive.
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.
Contributors: Kadji Amin, M. W. Bychowski, Julian B. Carter, Fernanda Carvajal, Howard Chiang, Leah DeVun, Ramzi Fawaz, Julian Gill-Peterson, Jack Halberstam, Asato Ikeda, Anson Koch-Rein, Jacob Lau, Kathleen P. Long, Robert Mills, Marcia Ochoa, David Primo, Kai Pyle, C. Riley Snorton, Susan Stryker, Zeb Tortorici, Jennifer Wilson.
Introduction
Introduction. The Politics of Obscenity in Latin America
Zeb Tortorici & Javier Fernández-Galeano
Pages: 539-547
Published online: 14 Mar 2024
Article
Beyond Sex: Pornographic Journalism, Violence, and Politics in Argentina’s Transition to Democracy
Natalia Milanesio
Pages: 549-566
Published online: 31 Jan 2024
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French Kissing the Icon: Erotic Iconoclash and Political Subversion in Deborah Castillo’s The Emancipatory Kiss (2013)
Irina R. Troconis
Pages: 567-585
Published online: 28 Dec 2023
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“Bésame otra vez”: The Use of Obscenity to Denounce Violence in Pedro Lemebel’s Incontables (1986)
María Célleri
Pages: 587-603
Published online: 12 Dec 2023
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Bodies to Reveal and Conceal: Baroque Dynamics of Obscenity (Heresy) and Modesty (Saintliness) in Feminine Bodies in the Peruvian Viceroyalty
Pilar Espitia
Pages: 605-627
Published online: 24 Jan 2024
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Race And Politics In Peruvian And Argentine Porn Under The Transition To Democracy, 1975–1985
Santiago Joaquín Insausti & Pablo Ben
Pages: 629-655
Published online: 22 Jan 2024
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National Santos and Mariachi Machos: Liberatory Ethics and Aesthetics of Pleasure in Mecos Films’ La putiza and La verganza
Iván Eusebio Aguirre Darancou
Pages: 657-679
Published online: 22 Jan 2024
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Gore Aesthetics: Chilean Necroliberalism And Travesti Resistance
Cole Rizki
Pages: 681-703
Published online: 22 Jan 2024
Contributors: M. W. Bychowski, Howard Chiang, Jack Halberstam, Jacob Lau, Kathleen P. Long, Marcia Ochoa, C. Riley Snorton, Leah DeVun, Zeb Tortorici