On Floating Phalluses and Universal Berdaches

Richard C. Trexler. Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas. Cambridge, UK : Polity Press, 1995.

Pete Sigal. From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.

I began this pair of readings with some trepidation. Sex(uality) and gender are popular, buzz-worthy terms, which means that they are often thrown into scholarship as necessary elements, with the obligatory nods to Foucault or Butler and the like. A few buzzwords- gender, body, performance, blah blah- and the author moves on to the topics she actually cares about and knows. These books, while possessing their own problems, are not perfunctory examinations of gender and sexual practice, but rather make these categories central, even totalizing, to their analysis. That said, the two books differ pretty dramatically in their basic approaches and their usefulness and historical accuracy. I will begin with Trexler’s book, the more seriously problematic of the two it seemed to me (and I apologize if I sound particularly critical- probably I should include more positive analysis but sometimes criticism is easier and cathartic…).

Trexler takes the wide view, constructing a bold world of reified and essentialist ‘Americans,’ ‘Europeans,’ even ‘Asians’ and ‘Africans,’ as well as- of course!- ‘Muslims,’ the sufferers par exemplar of  ‘harem [sic] culture’. Having already discovered, via his reading of Foucault and Freud, what he is looking for, he proceeds to find it beginning with the ancient Persians (via Herodotus[!]) and ending with nineteenth century American anthropologists. In between cultures, religions, polities, and the like collapse before his all-consuming vision of things. Buggery=(more or less) state formation. This of course is an expression of power (someone read his Foucault!), which is pretty much the same everywhere. This totalizing discourse is supported by a highly impressionistic use of sources, both when setting the ‘European’ and Iberian/Islamic background- the two areas with which I am most familiar. His construction of Islamic sexuality and gender understanding was especially painful; I was reminded that Said’s critiques in Orientalism, while sometimes over the top and flawed, can also be all too pertinent. Amazingly, Trexler quite confidently fixes ‘Islamic’ (read: Arabo-Islamic/Perso-Islamic) understandings and practices of gender and sexuality via a handful of studies from Morocco, and one from Medina. That, and a dubious source on Jewish sexuality, is the greater part of his sweeping discourse of Islamic mores, which in turn back up his contentions for Iberian culture.

Arriving in the Americas, my knowledge of the sources is of course much less, but even a cursory examination reveals the far-flung impressionistic approach Trexler takes. This in itself would not necessarily be a problem. One cannot fault a scholar for the paucity of his sources if they are simply unavailable. One can however fault him for building castles in the air and declaring them to be the absolute case; one can fault him for an inability or unwillingness to acknowledge what is surely a more complex situation than a universal mode of being a berdache that Trexler seems to uncover. Further, even within the problems of his use of sources, the reduction of sexuality and human activity that Trexler proposes is seriously problematic on its own, to say the least. That said, it seems likely that much of his discourse is accurate enough- certainly sexuality and gender were and are powerful means of communicating, conveying, and imposing power relationships. However, that is not the sum of it, and the ways in which gender and sexuality are expressed, the extent to which they are used, and so on, varies from society to society, a fact that ought to be kept in constant mind, especially in the presence of apparent external homogeneity.

Where Trexler jumped from Persia to Cuzco with apparent ease, Sigal has the immense (in light of Trexler at least) virtue of largely confining his examination to post-conquest, colonial Mayan society. He further confines- largely- himself to a select grouping of texts, which he presents as simultaneously representative of pre-conquest/colonial Mayan culture as well as colonial ‘hybridity’ (Sigal’s favorite, constantly recurring concept). Sometimes it is very unclear where on this spectrum a given text or interpretation falls- perhaps a deliberate strategy on Sigal’s part. While he does in fact take into account ‘external’ history (despite his prerequisite disavowal of ‘positivism’ and his deliberate adherence to the world of the texts), much of his interpretation does stay within the confines of his texts, which leads to both positive- a grounded, particular path that avoids the pitfalls of sweeping generalities and floating cultural signifiers and interpretations- and the less positive. Sometimes the way in which Sigal is extracting a given meaning from a text is very unclear; in a few chapters I found myself completely lost while trying to follow Sigal’s often torturous logic and prose style. The blame cannot all be upon Sigal, I ought to note- no source is ‘transparent,’ and Sigal’s certainly are not. This makes appraising his interpretations and claims to extract gender and sexual practice all the more difficult.

It would take more time and space than I wish to spend to examine each of Sigal’s arguments and constructions of Mayan identity and response to colonialism. Some sections I found quite convincing and useful; others were much more dubious, or far too hedged upon expansive treatments of Lacan or Freud and too little Mayan or Spanish material, the evidentiary material receding into the background, floating in the air like the floating phallus Sigal spends a great deal of time elucidating. Most troubling, I sometimes thought that Sigal believes that he has ‘decoded’ Mayan society in its whole via his elucidation of gender and sex; that everything can be collapsed into this one ‘thing,’ hinged upon sexual practice. Hence, by ‘desire’ only sexual (in an apparently very specific though never actually specified sense) desire is meant- but surely we can allow for the existence of other permutations and means of desire without collapsing them all into (presumably physically, actively) sexual desire? Likewise with other issues, whether reactions to colonial situations or understandings of the ‘sexuality’ of the gods. Certainly, sexuality and gender are central issues in any culture, and certainly sex and gender become ‘tools’ of the sorts of construction and moves of power that Trexler and Sigal have in mind; but I would suggest that things- especially things outside of the modern European context- are in fact rather more complex than that. But that’s a whole other post/book/career…