Desiring Nuns, Saints, and Virgins: Culling Sexuality, Eroticism, and Religiosity in Colonial Mexico
Zeb J. Tortorici
Department of History
UCLA Department of History
This paper entitled "Desiring Nuns, Saints, and Virgins: Culling Sexuality, Eroticism, and Religiosity in Colonial Mexico" will use seventeenth-century Inquisition cases to explore the oft-forgotten intersections between sexuality and religiosity in early colonial Mexico. Many historians of sexuality have posited the existence of a clear divide between the proscriptions of Church dogma and the wayward behaviors of the population at large. In a variety of Inquisition cases however sexuality and religiosity are not so antagonistic and they often reinforce one another as religious imagery and iconography, the partaking of the sacraments, prayer, and spiritual devotion were at times eroticized and sexualized by both women and men.
In one unique 1621 Inquisition case from Querétaro, the issues of female sexuality and religiosity clearly merge through the trial of Agustina Ruiz who was charged with a variety of heretical sins relating to her body, her visions, and her actions. Early in 1621 the comissario of the Inquisition made a formal charge against Agustina Ruiz who was then a twenty-year-old unmarried woman living with her son, seven years of age, in the house of Alonso de Garibaldi and his wife. Among the charges were that she had come to the priest in the confessional, asking for mercy and forgiveness, and declared that, since the age of eleven, she had carnally sinned with herself whereby she repeatedly committed the act of polución—masturbation. She also supposedly told the priest that she had communicated carnally and spoken dishonest words with San Nicolas de Tolentino, San Diego, Jesus Christ, and the Virgen Maria. In her third formal declaration to the Inquisition, Agustina de Ruiz asserted among other things that the saints, Jesus Christ, and the Virgin appeared to her with their "partes deshonestas" physically excited, began to hug and kiss her, and enticed her with "obras y palabras deshonestas."
According to the logic of the Inquisitors, it was the devil that, in the physical forms of Jesus, Mary, and the saints, had tricked Agustina into believing what she did. For, as Jacqueline Holler tells us, "Demonically inspired sexual activity by women, however serious and suggestive of a pact with the devil, would not have surprised a sixteenth-century inquisitor." The most interesting part of the case however is that from her testimonies, we see that Agustina Ruiz did not interpret her sexualized visions of Jesus, the Virgin, and the Saints as demonic but rather as expressions of her devotion to them and of their love for her. In this essay, which I hope to present at the 1st Chimalpahin Conference on Colonial and Post-colonial Remembering and Forgetfulness, I will use the case of Agustina Ruiz alongside a few other Inquisition cases to show how at times sexuality and religiosity functioned symbiotically. I feel that my paper will fit extremely well with the themes of interest for the conference, and I sincerely hope to participate.
About Zeb J. Tortorici
I am an advanced graduate student in the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Department of History and am currently working on my Ph.D. dissertation entitled "The Appearance of Colonial Order: Sin, Crime, Tolerance, and the Regulation of 'Unnatural' Sexuality in Colonial Mexico." I have conducted research in a variety of historical archives including Mexico's AGN, the Archivo Histórico del Estado de Tlaxcala, the Archivo Histórico Municipal de Morelia, the Archivo Nacional de Costa Rica, the UC Berkeley Bancroft Library, and the Huntington Library in Los Angeles. In 2007 I have an article entitled "Eran Todos Putos: Sodomitical Subcultures and 'Disordered Desire' in Early Colonial Mexico" being published by Duke University Press in The Journal of Ethnohistory. I have another article entitled "Animals, Indians, and the Category of the 'Unnatural' in Colonial Mexico" that will be published in the forthcoming book Ethnopornography to be edited by Pete Sigal and Neil Whitehead. I have participated in a variety of academic conferences on history and gender/sexuality studies. In terms of queer studies, also in 2007 I have an article entitled "Queering Pornography: Youth, Race, Intimacy, and Fantasy in Gay Porn" being published by SUNY Press in the edited collection Queer Youth Cultures.