Customer Reviews

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

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trexler's study of preconquest sexuality is thorough and thought-provoking. he investigates countless indigenous and spanish sources to come up with a compelling argument that berdaches--indigenous males who cross-dressed and perfomed female sex and social roles--were part of the majority of indigenous cultures. he also demonstrates how those individuals were viewed by their peers and by the spanish, and how the spanish/european fear of homosexuality, specifically "passive" homosexuality, is responsible for the disappearance of the berdache. this book was highly readable for the more novice reader, but incredibly well documented (one hundred pages of notes) for the more academic reader. this book will likely go down as the definitive study on pre-conquest indigenous (homo)sexuality.

This is a book for you if, only if, you have a fundamental belief in sex as power and very little else. For me it's a dark interpretation of human culture and unwarranted. His theory - incidence of homosexuality has to do with power (and subjection, humiliation) or is primarily to be studied in those terms - is way too blanket across cultures for my trust; he seems to me to treat vastly different cultures as almost equivalent. The evidence he hangs on is often loose, and the fact naively given away in his sentence structure: that is, you can easily read through to: 'although there's not a lot of data on this point, my theory holds'.

Sorry, my skin crawled; I have less negative beliefs. For your guidance, he follows Foucault, he scorns Walter Williams' The Spirit and the Flesh (too happy, too gay. I love this book). He discounts the spirituality, or spiritual significance of the berdache.

I'll have to admit, I couldn't finish it. He starts from a basic assumption that anything outside of heteronormativity is shameful, that all homosexual actions are rape, and goes downhill from there. I was looking for new information about third genders in ancient societies. This isn't it.