Then if someone out of his torment cursed him as a cuiloni, he no longer had his pride when he said to him, "Titlacauan, great cuiloni, wretched cuiloni! You have had your pleasure with me! You have mocked me!"-Florentine Codex When you were drunk, did you fall into the frightening sin? That called cuiloyotl; that which is with your fellow man?-Confessionario Mayor, y Menor en Lengva Mexicana The cuiloni: the sodomite, the penetrated man, the homosexual, the passive, the third sex, the faggot, the queer. Cuiloyotl (or cuilonyotl): sodomy, homosexuality, the act without which the cuiloni could not exist. The term cuiloni reveals much about sexuality, sexual identity, and the many homosexualities present in early colonial discourse on the Nahuas, the indigenous peoples who at the time of the Spanish Conquest made up the bulk of the population of central Mexico. 1 In recent years, scholars have begun to study the daily lives of the indigenous peoples of early Mexico, inquiring into the most intimate details of Nahua I thank Moshe Sluhovsky, Micol Seigel, Richard T. Rodriguez, Christopher Endy, Kimberly Gauderman, and Juliette Levy for reading and commenting on the entire manuscript. I also thank James N. Green, James Lockhart, David Sartorius, Lisa Sousa, and Caterina Pizzigoni for their comments and suggestions. 1. I follow the standard usage of this term, referring to the Nahuatl-speaking peoples of central Mexico. I use Mexica to refer specifi cally to the people of Tenochtitlán. 2. Probably the most interesting recent collection in this regard, covering both Hispanic and indigenous peoples of early Mexico, is Seminario de Historia de las
This article provides a method for interpreting the place of sexuality in texts that defy analysis. The author uses one source, the Florentine Codex, a large and complex bilingual Nahuatl and Spanish document, to decipher some elements about cross-dressing individuals, homosexualities, and gender inversions in Nahua society at the time of the Spanish conquest. The methodology used combines close narrative analysis with intellectual genealogy. The author argues that decoding the texts in this way allows us to uncover a cross-dressing male who engaged in “passive” homosexual acts and had a degraded but institutionalized role to play.
Angeles, and a coordinating editor of Latin American Perspectives.
We began this intellectual journey over a de cade ago with a deceptively simple question proposed by Neil: are ethnography and pornography really dif er ent forms of knowledge production? When he brought this question to the table, Pete thought the answer obvious: yes, they are differ ent. While some similarities exist in method (both seek to understand embodied "truths" and delve into desire), diferences abound in goals: one seeks to inform while the other seeks to titillate, one seeks knowledge, while the other seeks a good per for mance. But could prurient interests be at the core of ethnography-responsible ethnography-the type used by professional anthropologists?Neil quickly convinced Pete and, later, Zeb (and most of the other participants in the "Ethnopornography" conference at Duke University in 2006 and at the "Sexuality, Vio lence, & Cultural Imagination" conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2007) of the productivity of relating pornography to ethnography as a particularly pointed critique of the formation of objective knowledge in the "modern West. " 1 Further, perhaps
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