week 12: love and hate

This week, we are focusing on family, sexuality, and social order. The customs and laws of Iberia and the Indies were deeply influential in the ordering (and disordering) of colonial society. The Conquest, and its aftermath, included exploitative and coercive relationships, and even regular marriages had their fair share of conflict between spouses. This week, we consider these things by looking at unnatural sexuality and witchcraft, as a way of also understanding what colonial society understood to be natural.

November 5 (Tuesday) – Sex in the Archive

• Zeb Tortorici, “Impulses in the Archive: Misinscription and Voyeurism,” Chapter 2 in Sins Against Nature (Duke University Press, 2018).

November 7 (Thursday) – Bewitched

• Ruth Behar, “Sexual Witchcraft, Colonialism, and Women’s Powers,” in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America. Lavrin, ed. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1992.

• Richard Boyer, “Catarina María Complains that Juan Teoia Forcibly Deflowered Her (Mexico, 1693)” in Colonial Lives: 155-165.