Brings together a broad community of scholars to explore the history of illicit and alternative sexualities in Latin America's colonial and early national periods. This title examines how "the unnatural" came to inscribe certain sexual acts and desires as criminal and sinful, and more.

Foreword, by Asunción Lavrin Acknowledgments Introduction: Unnatural Bodies, Desires, and Devotions Zeb Tortorici Part I. unnatural heresies 1. Archival Narratives of Clerical Sodomy and Suicide from Eighteenth-Century Cartagena Nicole von Germeten 2. Sacred Defiance and Sexual Desecration: María Getrudis Arévalo and the Holy Office in Eighteenth-Century Mexico Nora E. Jaff ary 3. The Devil or Nature Itself? Desire, Doubt, and Diabolical Sex among Colonial Mexican Women Jacqueline S. Holler 4. Female Homoeroticism, Heresy, and the Holy Office in Colonial Brazil Ronaldo Vainfas and Zeb Tortorici Part II: unnatural crimes 5. Experimenting with Nature: José Ignacio Eyzaguirre’s General Confession and the Knowledge of the Body (1799–1804) Martín Bowen Silva 6. Prosecuting Female-Female Sex in Bourbon Quito Chad Thomas Black 7. Sodomy, Gender, and Identity in the Viceroyalty of Peru Fernanda Molina 8. Incestuous Natures: Consensual and Forced Relations in Mexico, 1740–1854 Lee M. Penyak 9. Bestiality: The Nefarious Crime in Mexico, 1800–1856 Mílada Bazant Epilogue: Unnatural Sex? Pete Sigal Contributors Index  

"A tantalizing and fascinating collection of first-rate scholarship that interrogates the category of the natural in terms of sex and highlights new directions of historical investigation."—Martin Nesvig, author of Ideology and Inquisition: The World of the Censors in Early Mexico "These keen essays on sexuality, the natural, and the unnatural in colonial Latin America provide a much-needed broadening of vision for all readers and researchers of sexual history." —Jonathan Ned Katz, Co-Director, OutHistory.org "Building on strong foundations, Tortorici brings together an impressive cast of historians who explore the edges of normative sexuality in colonial Latin America, uncovering hidden corners of private lives and the desires and passions that animated men and women. This book will become required reading for anyone interested in the history of sexuality."—Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, author of Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750–1856

"This volume greatly expands the range of non-normative-although not necessarily rare-behaviors that shaped the sexual landscape of Spanish and Portuguese America. Bookended by contributions from Lavrin and Pete Sigal, this is a self-aware contribution to the historiography of sexuality. ... With its collection of sharp essays based on truly exceptional archival sources, this collection will be a must-read for scholars interested in the history of sexuality in the Iberian American colonies." H-Histsex (H-Net)