Latin America and the Challenge of Globalizing the History of Sexuality

Abstract

Moche artisans on the coast of what is now northern Peru wrote perhaps the first Latin American history of sexuality sometime between 150 and 800 c.e. These crafts men declared their interest in subjects by producing a vast amount of pot tery that depicted anal intercourse, fellatio, and masturbation. Only rarely did they construct explicit images in which the penis penetrated the vagina. One anthropol ogist argues convincingly that the artisans intended these vessels as historical com mentaries. As they fixed meaning to sexual acts and developed particular ideologies regarding the past, they produced a historical critique, an analysis of time, rulers, ancestors, and gods. Yet, because we have such difficulty interpreting the messages portrayed, either we leave such imaginary universes entirely out of the history of sexuality, or we relegate them to uninterpretable oddities.1 Another puzzle emerges when we read an early colonial ethnography of a Nahua ceremony in which a priest donned the skin of a woman slain as an offering to a fertility goddess.2 In the ritual process, the Nahuas invoked a notion of creation: the