University of New Mexico Press
Violent Delights, Violent Ends: Sex, Race, & Honor in Colonial Cartagena de Indias
Key Metrics
- Nicole Von Germeten
- University of New Mexico Press
- Paperback
- 9780826353955
- 8.9 X 6 X 1 inches
- 1.05 pounds
- History > Latin America - General
- English
Secure TransactionBook Description
This study of sexuality in seventeenth-century Latin America takes the reader beneath the surface of daily life in a colonial city. Cartagena was an important Spanish port and the site of an Inquisition high court, a slave market, a leper colony, a military base, and a prison colony--colonial institutions that imposed order by enforcing Catholicism, cultural and religious boundaries, and prevailing race and gender hierarchies. The city was also simmering with illegal activity, from contraband trade to prostitution to heretical religious practices. Nicole von Germeten's research uncovers scandalous stories drawn from archival research in Inquisition cases, criminal records, wills, and other legal documents. The stories focus largely on sexual agency and honor: an insult directed at a married woman causes a deadly street battle; a young do�a uses sex to manipulate a lustful, corrupt inquisitor. Scandals like these illustrate the central thesis of this book: women in colonial Cartagena de Indias took control of their own sex lives and used sex and rhetoric connected to sexuality to plead their cases when they had to negotiate with colonial bureaucrats.
Author Bio
Nicole von Germeten, a professor of Latin American History at Oregon State University, has worked as the Director of the School of History, Philosophy, and Religious studies since 2017.
She received her PhD from the University of California Berkeley in 2003 with research funded by the Fulbright Garcia Robles Scholarship and the Muriel McKevitt Sonne Endowment. She was a Fellow at the Princeton Center for the Study of Religion in 2004 and was affiliated with the Stanford University Center for Latin American Studies in 2008 and 2009.
She has contributed essays, reviews, and articles to over thirty edited volumes and academic journals. She has published three single-authored books and one edited book-length translation since 2006, most recently Profit and Passion: Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico (California, 2018). Her fifth book, coming out in 2022 with the University of Nebraska Press, The Enlightened Patrolman: The Early History of Law Enforcement in Mexico City, examines how the Spanish viceroys attempted to modernize policing to suppress popular revolt and to curb what they viewed as an out-of-control drinking culture.
This book focuses on the perspective of the men walking the beat. Her previous publications range in topics from sexuality, religion, legal history, and gender in Spain and the Iberian empires, to Afro-descended populations in Spanish America, Catholic brotherhoods and Jesuit proselytization. Her scholarship has also explored transactional sex, honor, violence, witchcraft, sodomy, and suicide.
She is currently writing a manuscript on a mass murder incident from 1789 and a translation from Spanish to English of an 1869 novel which focuses on the same case. Her next project will delve into the human sacrifice/cannibalism series of crimes in late 1980s Mexico, especially their framing as a candomblé-influenced ritual.
Source: Oregon State University
Videos
No Videos
Community reviews
Write a ReviewNo Community reviews