Producing Patriarchy: Male Sodomy and Gender in Early Modern Spain

Abstract

Producing Patriarchy: Male Sodomy and Gender in Early Modern Spain Cristian Berco (bio) The recent shift in the history of homosexuality from an essentialist-constructionist debate that sought to find the historical origins of a gay identity into a field dominated by queer studies—an amalgam of theoretical positions that tend to stress the importance of difference as a tool for understanding and even challenging heteronormativity—means that the relationship between this sexual minority position and wider society and power structures has become more central and relevant. Indeed, the history of homosexuality has become in many ways the history of nonnormative sexuality more generally, a scholarly project that is intended ultimately to reveal and to challenge the oppressive forces of what has been called heteronormativity and patriarchy. Generally speaking, historical studies of homosexuality—regardless of their theoretical underpinning—tend to place a positive value on this minority itself while castigating the forces of oppression embedded in the state, religion, and/or the heterosexual family.1 I take no issue with the notion that patriarchy and heteronormativity have produced unbearable pain and suffering to women and sexual minorities throughout history and have been instrumental in guaranteeing or at [End Page 351] least stabilizing the social hierarchy, thereby reproducing or attempting to reproduce gender, social, sexual, economic, and racial inequality generation after generation. Rather, this article explores and questions the unwritten assumption that sexual minority status necessarily challenges the patriarchal order. Men who engage in homosexual activity are at once partakers of patriarchal privilege as men and also victims of the system of patriarchal oppression as members of a “deviant” sexual group. For this reason, is male homosexual behavior inevitably queer? That is, does it produce necessarily the difference that, according to recent theorists, challenges the norms upon which various forms of oppression rest? In other words, is same-sex erotic behavior a site of difference that is always ultimately problematic to the gender structures of the social order? If not, what is the relationship between historical patterns of male homosexual behavior and the longstanding traditions of patriarchy? By focusing on this interaction between sexuality and social order, these questions point to the wider theoretical concerns about how we understand and do the history of sexuality. Based on an examination of male sodomy in an early modern Spanish context, it seems clear that, rather than being oppositional forces, patriarchal culture and sodomy were inextricably linked, producing each other in a system of individual and collective reinforcement.2 The Spanish Context A case study from Spanish sources, while not definitive, can provide fresh insights into the ways in which same-sex eroticism has interplayed and connected with social structures at large. Early modern Spain, which included the jointly ruled but still separate kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, fits the bill nicely for such a case study.3 It was a patriarchal society with strong [End Page 352] gender expectations that served as the basis for socioeconomic and corporate hierarchies in the context of a heterogeneous population, a Mediterranean system of sexuality that witnessed widespread homosexual activity between males.4 There is, finally, an abundance of sodomy cases that survive from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain to examine. A thoughtful scholarly reassessment of early modern Spanish patriarchy has been under way for a few years now, thus refining our understanding of its place in Iberian culture and society. We are now much more aware, for example, of the possibilities women enjoyed—economically, socially, even politically—even within the patriarchal order, especially those women hailing from the upper classes. Moreover, Spanish women, thanks to equally partible inheritance and their legal ability to enter into contracts or bring cases to court, seem to have enjoyed a wider margin of action and greater relative freedoms than previously believed.5 Nonetheless, patriarchal structures were still crucial to the organization of the Spanish family and society as a whole, and they affected not only women but men, too. The importance of meeting gendered expectations of behavior probably increased as the [End Page 353] voluptuous optimism of the sixteenth century changed into the guarded nostalgia of the Spanish Golden Age. This was a time not only when the post-Tridentine...

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