Research Interests for Peter H 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.

Areas of Interest:

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

Representative Publications

1. The Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture, Latin America Otherwise (2011), Duke University Press [ViewProduct.php]
2. Imagining Cihuacoatl: Mexica Masculinity and Spanish Colonization, Gender & History, vol. 22 no. 3 (November, 2010), pp. 538-563 (Republished in Historicising Gender and Sexuality. Kevin P. Murphy and Jennifer M. Spear, eds. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.)
3. Latin America and the Challenge of Globalizing the History of Sexuality, American Historical Review, vol. 114 no. 5 (December, 2009)
4. Queer Nahuatl: Sahagún's Faggots and Sodomites, Lesbians and Hermaphrodites, Ethnohistory, vol. 54 no. 1 (January, 2007), pp. 9-34 (Republished in Indigenous Religions. Steven Hunt, ed. London: Ashgate, 2010.)
5. Sexual Encounters/Sexual Collisions: Alternative Sexualities in Colonial Mesoamerica, edited by Pete Sigal and John Chuchiak, Ethnohistory, vol. 54 no. 1 (January, 2007)
6. The Cuiloni, the Patlache, and the Abominable Sin: Homosexualities in Early Colonial Nahua Society, Hispanic American Historical Review, vol. 85 no. 4 (2005), pp. 555-593 [555]
7. To Cross the Sexual Borderlands: The History of Sexuality in the Americas, Radical History Review, vol. 82 (2002), pp. 171-185
8. Gender, Male Homosexuality, and Power in Colonial Yucatan, Latin American Perspectives, vol. 29 no. 2 (2002), pp. 24-40
9. Infamous Desire: Male Homosexuality in Colonial Latin America (2003), University of Chicago Press [ctl]
10. From Moon Goddesses to Virgins: The Colonization of Yucatecan Maya Sexual Desire (2000), University of Texas Press [html]