queer masculinities

Martin Austin Nesvig 177
Mayan histories of their life in this time period to show how homosexual
intercourse took on political, social, and ritual significance.
Accordingly, Sigal is interested in how homosexually-charged dialogue
in ritual persisted despite Spanish prohibitions to the contrary.
Homosexual desire among the colonial Yucatecan Maya was politicized
to the extent that older men employed intercourse with younger men
as a way of demonstrating their status and prestige. This was seen as
more or less acceptable, as long as it was understood that it held ritual
and age-specific meaning. In due course older men penetrated younger
men, assuming a teacher role and imparting a patron–client relationship
between an older, active-partner man and a younger, passivepartner
adolescent boy. This type of ‘pederasty’ also rested on the
assumption that it was unacceptable for an older man to be penetrated.
Sigal uses indigenous language sources to examine the question of pederasty
(homosexuality) in Mexico, potentially opening an entirely new
area of study that has been ignored by previous historians. 46
A recent study has added further material to the historiography of
Spanish America. Vir: Conceptions of Manliness in Andalucía and México,
1561–1699 by Federico Garza-Carvajal is an important contribution to
the growing field on Latin American homosexuality, adding to this
increasingly sophisticated body of historiography in ambitious ways.
Based largely on civil court cases against men for male–male sexual
activity, this book traces both a social and legal history. Significantly,
this is one of the first full-length monographs on homosexuality in
colonial Latin America. 47
The chapters are arranged thematically and each is organized around
a vignette or theoretical sounding-point. First and foremost the book
examines the prosecution and religious condemnation of homosexuality
in the early modern Hispanic context. In the two introductory
chapters the authors explains that understanding the Hispanic ‘construction’
of homosexuality requires more than a social or intellectual
history but must encompass the overall goals of Spanish imperialism.
Therefore, understanding homosexuality in early modern Spain and
Mexico can only be done if one understands the overall context – of
resurgent scholastic theology, Spanish imperialism, and anti-Semitism.
The introductory chapters outline the author’s thesis that negative attitudes
toward homosexuality were a mixture of xenophobia and religious
mentality. In short, sodomy was seen as a kind of cancer that
infected the body politic. 48
Chapter one of Vir provides a résumé of the problem of writing the
history of homosexuality, rejecting a transhistorical ‘gay identity’