Sex and Conquest A Redundant Copula?

Abstract

In a widely quoted passage in his "Historia general y natural de las Indias," the Spanish royal historian Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo expressed his inability to describe in words a tree that he had come across on Hispaniola; a painting was required to convey what could not be translated directly into a European language (Fernandez de Oviedo 1959/11: 7). He was also one of the first to document cases of alleged homosexual practices in the New World, and here the same problem arises: were these practices similar to forms of homosexual behaviour in Europe, and could they be translated in ways that were familiar to a European audience; or were they refractory to the interpretive grid applied to them by Fernandez de Oviedo and other European observers? In other words, is it possible to gain a glimpse of native American sexuality behind and despite the inevitably Eurocentric parameters of our Iberian sources? This is the challenge set himself by Richard Trexler in his "Sex and Conquest" (1995).1 As