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

by Michael J. Horswell

Overview

Early Andean historiography reveals a subaltern history of indigenous gender and sexuality that saw masculinity and femininity not as essential absolutes. Third-gender ritualists, Ipas, mediated between the masculine and feminine spheres of culture in important ceremonies and were recorded in fragments of myths and transcribed oral accounts. Ritual performance by cross-dressed men symbolically created a third space of mediation that invoked the mythic androgyne of the pre-Hispanic Andes. The missionaries and civil authorities colonizing the Andes deemed these performances transgressive and sodomitical.

In this book, Michael J. Horswell examines alternative gender and sexuality in the colonial Andean world, and uses the concept of the third gender to reconsider some fundamental paradigms of Andean culture. By deconstructing what literary tropes of sexuality reveal about Andean pre-Hispanic and colonial indigenous culture, he provides an alternative history and interpretation of the much-maligned aboriginal subjects the Spanish often referred to as "sodomites." Horswell traces the origin of the dominant tropes of masculinist sexuality from canonical medieval texts to early modern Spanish secular and moralist literature produced in the context of material persecution of effeminates and sodomites in Spain. These values traveled to the Andes and were used as powerful rhetorical weapons in the struggle to justify the conquest of the Incas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292712676
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	01/15/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	345
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.77(d)

About the Author

Michael J. Horswell is Professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature at Florida Atlantic University. He is also the university's Director of Caribbean and Latin American Studies.

Table of Contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Transculturating Tropes of Sexuality, Tinkuy, and Third Gender in the Andes
• 1. Barbudos, Afeminados, and Sodomitas: Performing Masculinity in Premodern Spain
• 2. Decolonizing Queer Tropes of Sexuality: Chronicles and Myths of Conquest
• 3. From Supay Huaca to Queer Mother: Revaluing the Andean Feminine and Androgyne
• 4. Church and State: Inventing Queer Penitents and Tyrannical Others
• 5. Subaltern Hybridity?: Inca Garcilaso and the Transculturation of Gender and Sexuality in the Comentarios Reales
• Epilogue: Dancing the Tinkuy, Mediating Difference
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index