Zeb Tortorici

Editors' Introduction Queering Archives: Intimate Tracings

In the longer introduction of Radical History Review’s two thematic issues “Queering Archives,” we frame the archive as an evasive and dynamic space animated by the tensions of knowledge production, absence, and presence. As Jeffrey Weeks argued in RHR in 1979, “The evolution of sexual meanings and identities that we have traced over the past hundred years or so are by no means complete.”1 Fragments of information float unfixed — historically unraveled — and we form archives when we pull the fragments into the orbit of efforts to know. Yet the business of knowing is unsteady, as scholars of sexuality and gender have amply demonstrated. Between the fraught and necessary practices of historicization, anachronism, interpretation, bias, and partial readings that propel historical scholarship, archival fragments fall in and out of the frame of an easily perceptible knowledge. Queer historical knowledge thus is evasive — like a coin dropped in the ocean and for which one grasps, reaching it only for it to slip away again, rolling deeper into the beyond. To say that the knowledge work of animating queer historical fragments is marked by such slipperiness is to underline how the archive negotiates the decomposition and recomposition of knowledge’s materials. We pull and push at the fading paper, the fraying fabric, the photographs bleaching into their backgrounds, and manipulate technologies on their way to obsolescence, all as part of some suturing effort of one kind or another.

Visceral Archives of the Body: Consuming the Dead, Digesting the Divine

This essay focuses on how viscerality refracts as an issue for archival studies of early modern sexuality (and beyond). Through a microhistorical examination of textual representations of necrophilia, fellatio, masturbation, and erotic religious visions from colonial Mexican historical archives, this essay traces what I term the visceral archives of the body to show how particular acts and desires come into archival being (and thus into historicity) by eliciting visceral responses—“gut feelings”—on the part of suspects, witnesses, colonial authorities, scribes, archivists, and historians. I further argue that a metaphorics of consumption undergirds historical archives and archival documents, as they are produced, ordered, read, and interpreted. By working through such complex affective archival engagements, we gain a more nuanced understanding of the erotic chains that structure and confuse the taxonomizing impulses of the archive itself.

Queering Archives A Roundtable Discussion

© 2015 by MARHO: The Radical Historians’ Organization, Inc. “Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion” provides a reflection on histories of queer archives studies, while marking out some key directions for the fields future development. As a broad conversation about the career of the queer archival, as both intellectual project and political practice, this discussion focuses on developments and limits within North American queer studies of the archive, which emerges as a central object of analysis and is itself somewhat archived within the terms of the discussion. The roundtable discussion provides a sustained critical engagement with the profile of the queer archive as a site for radical struggles over historical knowledge, offering a renewed sense of the queer archive as a pertinent site for scholarship and politics across an array of orientations and tendencies.

Sexual Violence, Predatory Masculinity, and Medical Testimony in New Spain.

This essay examines the medical and legal construction of predatory masculinity in New Spain by contrasting criminal cases of rape [estupro] with those of violent or coercive sodomy [sodomía]. In the context of male-female rape, the rulings of most criminal and ecclesiastical courts imply that predatory masculinity was a “natural” manifestation of male sexual desire, whereas in cases of sodomy and nonconsensual sexual acts between men, courts viewed such desire as “against nature.” The processes by which the colonial state prosecuted certain sexual crimes simultaneously criminalized and validated predatory masculinity. By analyzing the roles of the medics, surgeons, and midwives who examined the bodies of the male and female victims in these cases, this essay argues for a commonality in the authoritative judgments based on medical evidence, whether conclusive or inconclusive.