Research Interests for Peter Sigal

The relationships between gender, sexuality, and colonialism have intrigued me since I began my first book on Maya sexuality. I recently completed a study on the interaction of writing and sexual representation in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Nahua societies--The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); I am currently co-editing with Neil Whitehead a volume on “ethnopornography,” the relationship between the colonial and ethnographic gaze and sexuality throughout the world; and engaging in research on the position of the hyper-masculinized Aztec warrior in early modern literature from Europe and the Americas. I have moved from studying sexual desires in indigenous communities to examining the early modern cultural processes that created global concepts of modern sexuality, gender, masculinity, and femininity.

Keywords:

Anthropology, Cross-Cultural Comparison, Gender, Historiography, History, 16th Century, History, 17th Century, History, 18th Century, History, 19th Century, History, 20th Century, Internationality, Language, Latin America, Men's Health, queer theory, Queer Theory, Religion, Sexual Behavior, Sexuality, Social Change, Women's Health

Areas of Interest:

Colonial Latin America
Indigenous Peoples of Latin America
The History of Sexuality

Representative Publications

1. Sigal, P, The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture, Latin America Otherwise (2011), pp. 1-361, Duke University Press, ISBN 9780822351511 [ViewProduct.php] [abs]
2. Sigal, P, Imagining Cihuacoatl: Mexica Masculinity and Spanish Colonization, Gender & History, vol. 22 no. 3 (November, 2010), pp. 538-563, WILEY (Republished in Historicising Gender and Sexuality. Kevin P. Murphy and Jennifer M. Spear, eds. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.) [doi] [abs]
3. Sigal, P, Latin America and the challenge of globalizing the history of sexuality., The American historical review, vol. 114 no. 5 (December, 2009), pp. 1340-1353, Oxford University Press (OUP), ISSN 0002-8762 [20425925], [doi]
4. Sigal, P, Queer Nahuatl: Sahagún's faggots and sodomites, lesbians and hermaphrodites, Ethnohistory, vol. 54 no. 1 (December, 2007), pp. 9-34, Duke University Press, ISSN 0014-1801 (Republished in Indigenous Religions. Steven Hunt, ed. London: Ashgate, 2010.) [Gateway.cgi], [doi] [abs]
5. Sigal, P, Sexual Encounters/Sexual Collisions: Alternative Sexualities in Colonial Mesoamerica, edited by Sigal, P; Chuchiak, J, Ethnohistory, vol. 54 no. 1 (January, 2007)
6. Sigal, P, The Cuiloni, the Patlache, and the Abominable Sin: Homosexualities in Early Colonial Nahua Society, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 85 no. 4 (November, 2005), pp. 555-593, Duke University Press, ISSN 0018-2168 [Gateway.cgi], [doi]
7. Sigal, P, Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America (2003), University of Chicago Press [html]
8. Sigal, P, To Cross the Sexual Borderlands: The History of Sexuality in the Americas, Radical History Review, vol. 82 (2002), pp. 171-185 [repository]
9. Sigal, P, Gender, male homosexuality, and power in colonial Yucatán, Latin American Perspectives, vol. 29 no. 2 (January, 2002), pp. 24-40, SAGE Publications, ISSN 0094-582X [Gateway.cgi], [doi] [abs]
10. Sigal, P, From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire (2000), University of Texas Press [sigfro]