Intervenciones – Primera Ronda

Comentario de Frida Gorbach Empezaría diciendo que, al tomar la propuesta del debate apuntada, me queda la incomodidad de la noción residual, de “resto”. Después de muchos años de incursionar en los archivos mexicanos, tuve que invertir la cuestión y en lugar de preguntarme por lo que queda del archivo, el camino más propio, lo hice por lo que falta en él. Puse el énfasis no en los archivos que alguna vez consulté, sino en aquellos que infructuosamente he buscado a lo largo de los años. Desd..

Exploring Sexuality, Religiousity, and Desire in Colonial Mexico

On January 23, 1621, a Spanish priest and commissary of the Holy Office of the Mexican Inquisition in Querétaro came forth to denounce the twentyyear- old Agustina Ruiz, a woman who had, according to him, never completed the confession that she had begun with him on the eve of Pascua de Reyes (Feast of the Three Kings) a few weeks earlier. He told the Inquisition that Ruiz had begun to confess her sins to him in the church of the Carmelite convent of Saint Theresa, asking for mercy and forgiveness, and then declared that since the age of eleven she had carnally sinned with herself nearly every day by repeatedly committing the act of pollution (polución)— masturbation. Most unsettling to the priest, however, was not the act of masturbation itself but rather the vivid, obscene, and sacrilegious descriptions that went alongside her masturbatory fantasies. According to the priest’s denunciation, Ruiz confessed that she had spoken “dishonest words” with Saint Nicolas of Tolentino, Saint Diego, and even Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary, and that they had carnally communicated with her in a variety of sexual positions: “They join themselves with her [Ruiz] in different ways, with her underneath them, and from the side, and her on top of them, and also with her lying facedown while they conjoin themselves with her through both of her dishonest parts,” meaning both vaginally and anally.1 Given that the primary aim of the Mexican Inquisition—established in 1569 by royal decree of Phillip II of Spain and founded in 1571—was to extirpate heresy, it is no surprise that the Mexican Inquisition would take a strong interest in Ruiz. She was eventually sentenced to spend three years in a convent in Mexico City

Entangled Archives and Latin Americanist Histories of Sexuality

Forum contributio

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

Panel 1 – Histories of Collecting and Collecting Stories

This panel will center on collecting, understood as the process of categorizing things as similar and then bringing them together into the same space, be it in physical or virtual forms. Each process of collecting has a history, and the collectibles themselves each also have stories to tell. The case studies explored here include tangible objects, such as documents or artifacts, as well as intangibles, such as literary narratives. By opening an interdisciplinary dialogue on narratives of collecting and collecting narratives in Latin America, we hope to highlight diverse ways of understanding processes behind the creation of archives.Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies; Latin America Initiative; Institute for Historical Studies; Not Even PastLatin American Studie

Queering archives: a roundtable discussion

“Queering Archives: A Roundtable Discussion” provides a reflection on histories of queer archives studies, while marking out some key directions for the field\u27s 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