NYU Scholar of Gender and Sexuality Speaks on 'Archiving the 'Obscene'' Oct. 3

New York University gender and sexuality scholar Zeb Tortorici will give a free public talk titled, "Archiving the 'Obscene,'" at 5:15 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 3 in Gearhart Hall, room 026.

"Archiving the 'Obscene,'" will offer an archival snapshot of Tortorici's recent book, Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (Duke University Press, 2018) in connection to his current research project on censorship and the archiving of erotica and pornography in Mexico, from the eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth.

Through an analysis of a handful of criminal and Inquisition cases, the book explores how colonial criminal and religious authorities deemed particular acts and desires — such as erotic religious visions — as being obsceno or "obscene," and how such naming practices reverberate across the centuries, in the language of archival classification and description.

This talk recasts Iberian Atlantic and modern Mexican history through the prism of the unnatural, demonstrating how archives hold the potential to destabilize the bodies, desires, and social categories on which the history of sexuality is based.

Tortorici received his Ph.D. in history from University of California Los Angeles, and is associate professor of Spanish and Portuguese languages and literatures at New York University.

His monograph, Sins against Nature: Sex and Archives in Colonial New Spain (2018) was co-awared the 2019 John Boswell Prize in LGBTQ History. He has recently edited or co-edited two special issues of Radical History Review on the topic of "Queering Archives" (2014/15); Sexuality and the Unnatural in Colonial Latin America (2016); Ethnopornography: Sexuality, Colonialism, and Archival Knowledge (2020); and Baptism through Incision: The Postmortem Cesarean Operation in the Spanish Empire (2020).

Tortorici is currently working on a book about the archiving of erotica and "obscenity" in Latin America, from the early 18th century to the mid-20th.