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REVIEWS
| Butterflies Will Burn: Prosecuting Sodomites in Early Modern Spain and Mexico. By Federico Garza Carvajal (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. xx plus 310 pp. $27.50).
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| This book represents a significant reworking of a University of Texas dissertation. It interprets the early modern Spanish prosecution of sodomites, in the peninsula and in New Spain, as the result of the danger Spaniards thought sodomy posed to their concept of the New Spanish Man (vir) which, the author alleges but fails to document, empire brought with it. The prosecutions in question are some 175 cases brought by secular authorities in Andalusia (the High Courts in Seville and Granada and the Casa de Contratación) and a score brought by secular tribunals in Mexico City in 1657 and 1658. |
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In his prologue, the author begins with a proclamation: "First, I position my study of early modern Spanish manliness squarely within the field of postmodern theorizing and theorists...." (p. 3). But as far as this reader can determine, this positioning boils down in practice to nothing more than the author's conviction that these prosecutions expressed male political power in imperial Spain. To be sure, Garza presents no evidence that the prosecutors themselves made such associations, nor did they. Yet to my knowledge no modern historian has ever doubted the presence of such power. Inevitably the differences between male prosecutors and male victims would be expressed in gendered terms, the victims becoming girlies, Nancies, Mollies and the like, so that it is curious at best for Garza while emphasizing power to dismiss both a gendered and apparently a generational approach to these anti-sodomy prosecutions, when in fact gender and generational rhetorics are often the cultural-political languages of such persecutions. |
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Alas, once all the historiographical posturing and associated name-dropping is stripped away, this book will be judged not for any imagined theoretical contribution but for the usefulness of the source materials and their analysis. Seen from this angle, there is much of value in the work. Characterized by wide reading and the use of fresh primary materials excavated through admirable archival searching, the author brings forward his findings in two distinct chapters that follow on early chapters dedicated to thematic historiography and a setting of stages, the author turning in chapters three and four to what is new and previously inedited. |
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Chapter three, entitled "Mariner, Would You Scratch My Legs," represents the author's gleanings from the aforementioned 175 peninsular cases the author found mainly in the Sevillian Archive of the Indies. The majority concern cases of sodomy practiced at sea. His procedure is to consecutively narrate the highlights of perhaps a score of these cases with a minimum of interpretation, the chapter then concluding with one page of interpretive summation. The author is careful to regularly spell out the ages of the parties to the alleged sodomy as a part of his narratives, but nowhere in his work does he provide any tabular or serial overview of this or any other social fact, so that only the dedicated reader like this reviewer can gain any idea of their substance. In short, we must be satisfied with Garza's brief summations which, on examination, often do not concur with the narratives. Just one example: the author claims in the summation of this chapter (130) that "in all cases, the boys and the young men involved engaged in some sort of reciprocal sodomy. That is, they anally penetrated others as well as allowing others to anally penetrate them." But my reading of the narratives found not a single case where each partner penetrated the other. Instead, in all Garza's cases described in this chapter, the younger party of a twosome always assumed the passive sexual role with that opposite, active, number. |
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