Subject Honor and Object Shame: The Construction of Male Homosexuality and Stigma in Nicaragua

Abstract

In Nicaragua one encounters a folk category, the cochon. It can be given as either a male (el cochon) or female (la cochon, la cochona) noun; either case typically refers to a male. This term is loosely translated as queer or faggot by visiting English-speakers. Educated Nicaraguans, if they are fluent in international terminologies, are apt to freely translate the term in the same fashion, giving gay or homosexual as its English equivalents. It becomes clear on closer inspection, however, that the phenomenon in question is markedly different from its Anglo-American counterparts of whatever shade. In the first place, the term is less clearly derogatory, although it can be derogative and usually is. It can also be neutral and descriptive. I have even heard it employed in a particular sort of praising manner by ordinary Nicaraguans; viz., MWe must go to Carnaval this year and see the cochones. The cochones there are very, very beautiful. Second, and more important, the term marks and delimits a set of sexual practices that overlaps but is clearly not identical to our own notion of the homosexual. The term specifies only certain practices, in certain contexts, and in certain manners. Some acts that we would describe as homosexual bear neither stigma nor an accompanying identity of any special sort whatsoever; others clearly mark their practitioner as a cochon. If North American homosexuality is most characteristically an oral phenomenon, at least nowawdays, Nicaraguan homosexual practice is decidedly anal in preference. The lexicon of male insult clearly reflects this anal basic route of intercourse in Nicaragua, even as the North American lexicon reflects the oral route. But more is involved here than a mere shifting of the sites of erotic practice. With the exception of a few welldefined contexts (e.g., prisons), where the rule may be suspended, homosexual activity of any sort defines the North American homosexual. In Nicaragua, it is passive anal intercourse that alone defines the cochon. Oral or manual practices receive little social attention, and at any rate, nonanal practices appear far less significant in the repertoire of actually practiced homosexual activities.

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