Sex and conquest : gendered violence, political order, and the European conquest of the Americas

Richard C. Trexler

This book delineates the relation between force and sex in social and political institutions. Its subject is male sexual culture in Europe and America at the time of the conquest; its basis is the primary sources of the period. What does it mean, Richard C. Trexler asks, that the Spanish and Portuguese repeatedly justified their conquest of America's Indians with the claim that the Americans had to be saved from themselves because they practiced sodomy, transforming into "women" (berdaches) the young men whom they penetrated. To answer his question, Trexler interrogates the sexual culture of both conqueror and conquered.