History 465- Week 11 Post (Sexuality/Society)

This week we delved into an examination of sexuality and society, particularly the societal control on sexuality that was present in early Latin America.  This week for me pieced together several of the topics we’ve been looking at lately (marriage, the Church, family) and gave some good insight into what “sin” was defined as in this era. It was interesting to see how the Church exerted and enforced its views on marriage and sex, and by doing so shaped the framework of society (because society is built around what the family is defined as). Using the confessional as surveillance was perfect for maintaining a grasp on society, as clergy could utilize the threat of eternal damnation to draw out any necessary information about private sexual practices. It’s interesting to consider what marriage was supposed to be: consensual, procreative, and unadventurous. After understanding that it’s much easier to understand how sexual sin came to include so many things.

On Thursday we examined a few court cases, which were enlightening both for giving insight into how the courts came to a decision and for providing secondary or peripheral information. For example, most groups looked at the Catarina Maria “deflowering” case, which showed not only the aspects of sexuality in Latin American culture, but also gave peripheral information–women had legal rights, honor was highly important, and loss of virginity had legal implications.  Another case emphasized the extreme importance of will in marriage. The annulment suit between Diego Andres and Ysabel Suyo provided an example of something that was discussed a week or two ago in this class–the fact that a marriage could be annulled if it was proven that both parties had not consented using free will to it. In this case the judge ruled that Ysabel did not have free will, and thus the marriage was annulled. Once again this shows that women had legal rights at this time, and that marriage could not be forced. I see a lot of similarities between the legal processes of this time and ours. The two parties involved were allowed to present witnesses and testimonies, and had a chance to provide evidence for their innocence or the other person’s guilt. The decision is made by one person, of course, but other than that the way this culture went about resolving legal issues is not too distant from processes seen in many countries today. The subject matter is somewhat different because societal norms and values are different, but through these cases its possible to get a good glimpse of what was valued in this society.

It is always interesting observing how a society changes as its attitude towards the religion changes. Right now we are studying a society where the Church exerts a great amount of control. As the Patricia Seed we read for last week demonstrated, though, a change in the role of the Church correlates with changing values of society. When there is separation of church and state, as in America today, there seems to be a wide variety of value systems, but when religion plays a huge role in defining what is legal or illegal, there is much less variance of value systems.