Butterflies Will Burn: Prosecuting Sodomites in Early Modern Spain and Mexico (review)

Abstract

GARZA CARVAJAL, FEDERICO. Butterflies Will Burn: Prosecuting Sodomites in Early Modern and Mexico. Austin: LJ of Texas P, 2003. 310 pages.Despite its promising title and study of a broad sample of legal cases against sodomites in and Mexico during early modern period, Butterflies Will Burn leaves reader with a feeling of disappointment. Tackling important issues such as legal code in Spain, strategies of self-preservation used by practitioners of anal sexual intercourse, complexities of homosocial and homosexual desire, its perceptions and misunderstandings, and extreme cases of torture experienced by many of accused sodomites requires theoretical and sustained analysis that author does not deliver. The book does have value, but such value is not related to theoretical claims it seeks to further.Butterflies Will Burn begins with a clear demarcation of book's scope. Garza Carvajal studies discourses of manliness written primarily by what he consistently calls moralistas, whose intentions were to foment the politics of empire in Spain-New Spain (2). However, term moralistas is applied indiscriminately to a good number of intellectuals, making it encompass entire Spanish intelligentsia at time (16). This reading irremediably arrives at conclusion that all writers were moralistas whose main function was to help construct ideal of man (Vir) in order to promote conquest and colonization. Such considerations contradict author's disclaimer that this almost exclusively male group should not be considered a monolith. Unfortunately, that is precisely way in which Garza Carvajal treats them. In fact, many of key texts that helped construct images of man during early modern period reflect diverse purposes that cannot be reduced to imperial function. Some of them, such as Castiglione's Book of Courtier (a crucial book in after its translation by Boscan), are complex works that do not make easy distinctions between, for example, a courtier and a soldier, or between what a woman is or should be. In this case, book's function is quite localized within small circles of court societies in Europe. Garza Carvajal could have profited from Norbert Elias' notion of a civilizing process as a way of constructing subjectivities that is not necessarily related to macro-political aims such as empire or conquest.In Prologue, Garza Carvajal claims that his study reflects latest tendencies developed by postmodern theories, along with new historical trends and, more significantly, postcolonial criticism. Butterflies Will Burn then becomes for Garza Carvajal an unabashedly subjective and quintessentially interpretation of sodomy prosecutions in early modern Spain-New Spain. The major intellectual shortcomings of this book are, paradoxically, generated by such statements. The tendency (and desire) to be political sometimes tends to narrow and cloud critical language and instruments of knowledge being used, giving impression that every textual construction of masculine, feminine, or homosexual identities necessarily responds to words such as Empire or Colonial expansion. Whatever these terms designate, their main force resides in subsummation of all data to imperial project that, in its trans-Atlantic thrust, determined and prescribed writings and representations of gender that dominated epoch, both discursively and in its activities in physical world. This is what I would call a totalizing cultural reading, one that pretends to provide reader with a full account of complexity of a cultural formation. Such renditions of extremely complex cultural processes naturalize data in ways that render a whole culture one-dimensional, incapable of expressing anything outside its imperialistic tendencies.But to do justice to project, we must give a proper account of whole book. …