Trexler Summary

Richard Trexler

Richard Trexler lived from 1933 until 2007.  Trexler received his BA from Baylor University, and earned his PhD in 1964 from the University of Frankfurt.   Trexler worked at the University of Texas and the University of Illinois, but in 1978 he moved to SUNY Binghamton, where he worked until his death.

Trexler was principally a scholar of Renaissance Florence, but worked on many areas of Early Modern and Renaissance Europe.  In addition to Sex and Conquest, Trexler is best known for his three-volume study Power and Dependence in Renaissance Florence.  All told, Trexler wrote or edited nearly twenty books and authored over sixty scholarly articles.

Sex and Conquest: Gendered Violence, Political Order, and the European Conquest of the Americas

Trexler’s work is principally a study of the berdache, a poorly understood figure nearly ubiquitous in indigenous American cultures.  Trexler’s goal is to “describe and analyze American homosexual practices and the male transvestism often associated with them, as the Iberians heard of these practices” (2).  In the end, Trexler finds that the berdache is an important component of a political and social order based on gendered violence.  In this order, male sexual domination of women, other males, and children was an instrument of social and political authority.  Such domination manifested itself in both the threat and the execution of sexual violence.

Assigning a fundamental social and political role to sexual violence is a bold and contentious analysis.  To support his claim, Trexler draws on the ancient and medieval pasts in the European and Mediterranean worlds.  Trexler devotes several chapters to demonstrating that gendered violence was common in the ancient world, even if its prominence is often obscured in the evidence.  Trexler maintains that homosexual acts of violence were prominent in ancient martial experiences and a normal component of conquest.  Soldiers brought such behaviors home with them, and over time they became an accepted component of domestic life.  Trexler points to the Islamic world as the inheritor of these practices, but he also strives to find examples in medieval Europe, and even presents evidence of homosexual violence in modern wars.

Ultimately, Trexler’s Sex and Conquest provides a useful discussion of the construction of human sexuality and the role of sexuality in creating social and political order.  While many of Trexler’s assertions are provocative and even confrontational, this study demonstrates that sexuality, violence, and social order need to be examined as parts of a whole, not as isolated components of the human experience.