The chieftains and settlers [from Carabaya] bring a chuqui chinchay, an animal painted in all the colors. They say that it was the apo [deity] of the jaguars, under whose protection were the hermaphrodites, or Indians of two genders. [Los curacas y mitmais (de Carabaya) trae a chuqui chinchay, animal muy pintado de todos colores. Dizen que era apo de los otorongos, en cuya guarda da a los ermofraditas yndios de dos naturas.]

—Santacruz Pachacuti, Relación de antigüedades deste reyno del Perú

***

These ruinous people are all sodomites . . . there is not a chief among them who does not carry with him four or five gallant pages. He keeps these as concubines. [Es gente muy bellaca son todos someticos no ay principal que no trayga quatro o cinco pajes muy galanes. Estos tiene por mancebos.]

—Juan Ruiz de Arce, Relación de servicios en Indias

In the late fifteenth century there was a crisis in the succession of Inca rulers in Tawantinsuyu—a pachacuti (cataclysmic change) that became a liminal moment in the cultural reproduction of the Andean social body and in the transition of Inca imperial bodies from one generation to another. As recounted in the first epigraph above, to mediate the tension created during this time of change, the Inca summoned to Cuzco a queer figure, the chuqui chinchay, or the apo de los otorongos, a mountain deity of the jaguars who was the patron of dual-gendered indigenous peoples. While we do not know precisely why the chuqui chinchay was called to Cuzco that day, we can now appreciate that this apo was a revered figure in Andean culture, and its human huacsas, or ritual attendants—third-gendered subjects—were vital actors in Andean ceremonies. These quariwarmi (men-women) shamans mediated between the symmetrically dualistic spheres of Andean cosmology and daily life by performing rituals that at times required same-sex erotic practices. Their transvested attire served as a visible sign of a third space that negotiated between the masculine and the feminine, the present and the past, the living and the dead. Their shamanic presence invoked the androgynous creative force often represented in Andean mythology.

The third gender's body was a sign in a semiotic system that privileged representation and communication on a corporeal plane rather than on the written page. The Andeans' collective memory depended on oral transmission and interpretation aided by mnemonic devices such as quipus (multicolored knotted cords used to record historical and other data in the Andes), textiles, natural topography, rituals, monumental architecture, ceramics, and sculpture. Above all, this memory depended on the people who performed their culture's ritualized history rather than on print technology and standardized alphabets, a significant cultural difference that would have far-reaching effects when the Spanish invasion, another pachacuti, was unleashed in the Andes. The impermanence of the human body and its vestments reflected the relative fragility of Andean cultural memory. When sacred figures like the chuqui chinchay and its third-gender ritualists are inscribed as diabolical and deviant subjects in Spanish colonial writings, scholars are presented with a challenge.

The Spanish "Conquest" and colonization of the Andes was recorded for posterity in the legendary "books of the brave," narratives that created the infamous "lettered cities" (ciudades letradas) in the shadows of the "darker side" of Renaissance humanism. These familiar metaphors for Spanish literary hegemony in the Americas have in common an assumed masculinity of the writing subject, a masculinity often naturalized in the original colonial texts, later historiographies, and literary criticism. The relationship between colonial literature and the dominant masculine subject personified by the Renaissance's ideal man—one of arms and letters—finds its roots in Iberian medieval culture and literature. This subjectivity was central to shaping the colonial narratives that tried to make sense of the invasion, colonization, and indigenous resistance in the first century after Francisco Pizarro penetrated the west coast of South America. Yet, the "brave," "lettered" men of the time, some more or less touched by the nascent humanist philosophies, expressed an implicit instability of Spanish male sexuality in their writings, an instability revealed in performative discursive iterations of the ideal masculine subject once again under siege by a cultural Other, this time by the indigenous Americans rather than the Christians' Moorish rivals in Iberia.

From the beginning of the "Encounter" and Conquest of the Americas, indigenous gender and sexual difference, like that embodied in the third-gender ritual specialists, challenged Spanish concepts of masculinity and femininity. The chroniclers, missionaries, civil servants, and historians of the period reacted to these differences by inscribing them in the colonial discourse through what I consider tropes of sexuality and through distorted interpretative testimonies. Such tropes are important markers for the places of enunciation shaped by the Spanish writing subjects who employed them. I argue, however, that these tropes also left traces of pre-Columbian cultural values and subjectivities that can be recovered through careful readings and reconstructions from the fragments of colonial discourse.

This book has a double objective: to interrogate the performative nature of these tropes of sexuality found in early colonial texts; and to recover the subaltern knowledge of the colonized third-gender subjects misrepresented by the rhetorical figures. I contend that Andean cultural memory of what became subaltern knowledge was recorded through ritual performances deemed anathema to the cultural values that informed Spanish colonial discourse. The public use of the body, outside the context of the vestiges of medieval Christian religiosity, was viewed by the Spanish as a debased, effeminate activity and therefore idolatrous or sinful. The Andean body, a site of cultural memory, became subjugated to a masculinized, lettered discourse or incorporated into Spanish-sanctioned Christian religious performances, such as Corpus Christi celebrations. From the Spanish perspective, ritual cultural reproduction through the body was a dangerous indigenous resistance, and the traces of this sacred rituality were viewed as a heretical counterdiscourse that sometimes pitted the feminine and androgynous against the masculine.

In Spanish culture, the feminine and the androgyne were contemptible, whereas in Andean culture the feminine was understood as complementary and reciprocal to the male. The tensions between the feminine and the masculine were ritually negotiated in order to reenact the originary, utopian, androgynous whole represented in Andean mythology. The symmetrical balance between the masculine and the feminine was at times arbitrated through the corporal performances of third-gender ritualists, most often represented as debased, lascivious sodomites by Spanish tropes of sexuality. Transvested Andeans introduced a crisis into the Spanish patriarchal paradigm because the third gender's symbolic rupture of the gender binary served the purpose of creating harmony and complementarity between the sexes and invoked the power and privilege of the androgynous creative force.

This challenge to Spanish gender and sexual norms invited a counteroffensive in various arenas of colonial culture: historiography, civil law, ecclesiastical literature, and religious art and performance. These strands of colonial discourse conspired in the near erasure and eventual transculturation of third-gender ritual subjectivity.

The Spanish effort to eliminate the ritual attendant, represented in this study by the third-gendered ipa or orua, who interpreted and transmitted cultural knowledge, was an attempt to destroy part of the people's memory and understanding of the cosmos. In the first Spanish chronicles of the conquest of Tawantinsuyu we find references to the cultural misunderstanding and misinterpretation of enigmatic third-gender figures, commonly referred to by the Spanish as sodomites, and the call for their extermination. Juan Ruiz de Arce's comment in his version of Francisco Pizarro's first foray on the coast of South America, which serves as the second epigraph to this introduction, sets the stage for the next hundred years of acculturation of indigenous gender and sexuality. His equation of same-sex sexuality and lasciviousness reflects medieval patriarchal values and an abjection of the feminine that informed the subjectivities of the conquistadores in the Americas. His mention of "ruinous" peoples whose leaders were so corrupt as to keep male concubines begins the discourse of abjection that obfuscated the complexities of the indigenous gender culture. Julia Kristeva has defined the abject as that which "disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules" (Powers of Horror, 11). I argue that, just as in the Iberian Peninsula the feminine was figured as a disturbance of the masculine "order" and a threat to the "borders" that the male Spanish subject patrolled in his performance of gender identity, in the Andes same-sex sexuality and the third-gender subject threatened these "rules" and put into question the patriarchal "system" constructed on the basis of dual gender categories.

It is important to locate this analysis in the transatlantic context of the early-modern period; to understand this first wave of globalization in the Americas and its effects on indigenous gender culture requires a constant crisscrossing of the oceans to comprehend what values and tropes traveled to the periphery of the Spanish empire in the Americas and, in turn, what perceptions and revaluations returned to the metropolis. I trace the roots of the abjection of the feminine to the Iberian Peninsula by reading tropes of sexuality in canonical literary texts and by pursuing how the subjugation of the feminine manifested in the persecution of same-sex sexuality. Without an appreciation of the history of the deep-rooted instability of Spanish masculinity, one cannot understand the anxiety expressed in the chronicles and histories of the Andes related to sacred and profane same-sex sexuality and ritual performances of the feminine and androgynous sphere of Andean culture. As the transculturation of the Andes unfolds, this anxiety is absorbed by the first-generation ladino and mestizo writers, further obscuring our understanding of pre-Hispanic indigenous gender and sexuality. Transculturated tropes of sexuality cross back to the peninsula in a venerable transatlantic text, one produced in Renaissance Spain by an Andean mestizo who would become one of the cultural mediators between his mother's Inca heritage and his father's Spanish ancestry. The celebrated Inca Garcilaso de la Vega brings us full circle from the originary Iberian gender anxiety of the cultural Other I analyze in El poema del mio Cid to the mestizo's unique form of self-censure and sacrifice of his "queer" Inca ancestors, as expressed in his seminal Comentarios reales.

To reconstruct the nearly shattered subjectivity of third gender in the colonial discourse of the Andes is to elicit a reflection of the subject based on the distorted image of the abject Other both in and of that discourse. How do we make the image whole when the language that reflects its fragments is the very same that broke the illusion of wholeness in the first place? How do we read for subjectivities in the profane, frozen word-images of an outsider's mirror when those same subjects were inscribed in their culture's collective memory through ritual, sacred performances in an oral tradition? To make sense of the fragmented colonial accounts of the cross-dressed "temple sodomites" encountered in colonial readings is to embark on a multidisciplinary cultural study of gender and sexuality in the pre-Hispanic and colonial Andes. To comprehend the representation of colonized subjectivities marked by processes of marginalization in hegemonic discourses requires an inquiry into the gender and sexual culture of both the invader and the invaded.

I begin by relocating third-gender subjectivities from the margins of colonial scholarship to the center and suggest that, from this new vantage point, all readers, regardless of their subject positions, might hear a questioning of the gender and sexual binaries that have historically marginalized what might be understood as a "queer" identity. This is not to situate this project only or even primarily in the recent academic trend of queer studies, but it is to bring aspects of queer theory to colonial Andean studies in order to enact a claim to space in the historical and theoretical record. It is in this spirit that I place the Andean third gender at the center of this research, as a subjectivity that once served a vital ceremonial role in third-gender culture and that put into question the colonizing gender binaries that marginalized his/her once-sacred subjectivity. It is to restore the maligned subject to his/her historically vital third space, a space that mediated between absolute binaries. Restoring him/her to this third space requires a new reading strategy for colonial Andean texts. As I explain more fully below, this approach leads me to reconceptualize transculturation as a process that produces alterity, as a dynamic "third space" in the continuous stream of cultural reproduction in which queer subjects are produced. This "queering" of the term "transculturation" is formulated from Andean philosophy and narrative practice; I wish to think from an Andean paradigm of cultural reproduction in order to reinvigorate a theoretical construct born in the Caribbean and used throughout the continent to its near exhaustion.

Transculturation: A Queer, Third Space

The concept of transculturation has undergone an intense theoretical revision in the last few years. The term speaks to a multifaceted process in which hegemonic cultures influence subjugated ones, in which subjugated cultures give up old and acquire new values and meanings, and in which completely new cultural forms are created. Fernando Ortiz is credited with coining the term transculturation in his 1940 study Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar. His neologism was intended to replace the popular sociological word acculturation, which for Ortiz, signified "the process of transition from one culture to another, and its manifold social repercussions" (98). Ortiz believed that the social and cultural processes that formed twentieth-century Cuban culture were much more complex, and as his thorough analysis of Cuban historical development suggests, "the real history of Cuba is the history of its intermeshed transculturations"( ibid.), which included the mixing of many races and ethnicities, from the originary Taínos to the Spanish, African, Asian, and Anglo immigrants. Defending his neologism, Ortiz explains:

I am of the opinion that the word transculturation better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture, which is what the English word acculturation really implies, but the process also necessarily involves the loss or uprooting of a previous culture, which could be described as a deculturation. In addition it carries the idea of the consequent creation of new cultural phenomena, which could be called neoculturation. In the end, as the school of Malinowski's followers maintains, the result of every union of cultures is similar to that of the reproductive process between individuals: the offspring always has something of both parents but is always different from each of them.(Ibid., 102-103)

This process, however, is not an equal exchange of cultural values, as Ortiz's somewhat idealized description of mestizaje might lead us to believe. Due to the violent and persistent nature of colonial practices, the early and intermediate stages of transculturation can be characterized as "acculturation" and "deculturation," as Ortiz understands the terms, while in simultaneous and later stages the strategies of resistance and accommodation of the marginalized culture begin to affect the dominant, invasive culture, which leads to new cultural forms in the contact zone, or neoculturations.

Ortiz's foundational metaphor equates the cultural reproductive process with human procreation. Sylvia Spitta, in her reconsideration of the term, observes how Ortiz "tends to overlook imbalances of power"(Between Two Waters, 6). She points out that in "his appeal to the family and to relations between the sexes as a model for transculturation, women and men, mothers and fathers, although physiologically different, are assumed to be equal. Women and men, however, are never equal when it comes to power—particularly in a colonial context based on the violence of one race over another and one gender over another"(ibid.). As Walter Mignolo has observed, Ortiz's conceptualization was deeply connected to questions of nationality and did not address coloniality (Local Histories/Global Designs, 16). Ortiz's priority was to characterize the unique cultural history of his nation through a concept of miscegenation that privileged biological and reproductive metaphors.

To this critique I would add that Ortiz's heterosexist paradigm must be challenged, for a model of cultural reproduction should not implicitly exclude those subjects that do not conform to hegemonic forms of sexuality. Normative metaphors do not convey the complexity and heterogeneity of cultural reproduction. As we will see in this study, for example, same-sex practices and transgendering were ritually important in the Andean region's cultural reproduction. Furthermore, as the third-gender subjects became marginalized and resemanticized in the process of colonization, they began to signify sites of transculturation in the form of what I characterize as queer tropes of sexuality. To ignore the gender and sexual bias inherent in Ortiz's metaphor is to disseminate a theoretical term that replicates the same ideology of exclusion that critics seek to challenge in the colonial and postcolonial culture of the Americas. The task at hand is to understand how and why the representation of gender and sexuality changed, and what ideological affinities made its representation such a conflictive issue; therefore, it is necessary to analyze issues of transculturation from a perspective that holds no identity markers as essential or naturalized.

I argue that the process of transculturation produces and is produced by queer subjectivities. The word queer as I use it throughout this study purposefully evokes the most common meanings of the term, both its traditional denotation as something "odd, singular, strange, doubtful, suspicious, eccentric" and its currently more fashionable, activist, and academic meaning as that which is transgressively marginal to normative gender and sexual culture. The production of "culturally queer," that is, eccentric, singular, subjectivities is central to the process. The various subjects produced and reproduced are consistently marginal to both the hegemonic and the subjugated cultures. The subjects of transculturation often find themselves in third spaces, neither of the originary nor of the new, invading culture. Homi Bhabha has observed that colonial discourse not only represses native voices through its myriad strands of colonial authority, but also creates hybrid subjects who are of neither the native nor the dominant culture, but are in liminal positions between the two (Location of Culture, 36-39). Thus, they embody and articulate difference in contested "third spaces," particularly in colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial "contact zones." This difference is often considered unorthodox, and the vanguard of these new third spaces is anything but "natural" sons and daughters of cultural procreation, as Ortiz's metaphor might imply. A more radical conception of the queerness of transculturated subjects opens our readings and understanding of cultural reproduction to include those social actors whose queer gender and sexuality both distinguished them in their originary culture and increasingly marginalized them in their transculturated one. To recognize the queer aspects of cultural reproduction is to affirm the Otherness subjects must assume or disavow in the metamorphoses they undergo and create.

Gloria Anzaldúa began writing about the material and psychic borderlands of this third space in her influential Borderlands/La Frontera, in which she goes back to the colonial writings of Mexico to recuperate terms from Nahuatl and the Mesoamerican cultures of her ancestors. The terms nepantla and nepantlismo, first defined by Anzaldúa as "torn between ways"(ibid., 100), is taken from an indigenous scribe's self-description during the sixteenth century. While nepantla is also theorized as the liminal geographic space of the U.S. Southwest, in between the two spaces of Mesoamerica and the United States, Anzaldúa increasingly understands the concept to be a psychic space of transformation in which new subjects are agents in the creation of their new realities. Nepantleras create new forms of language, new cultural relations, and new values that express in-between states of being, in the intersections of gender, ethnicity, class, race, sexuality, and geographic displacement. Anzaldúa first employed the term in her development of the notion of a mestiza consciousness whose place is that intense, ambiguous third space of liminality and creativity: "In attempting to work out a synthesis, the self has added a third element which is greater than the sum of its several parts. The third element is a new consciousness—a mestiza consciousness—and though it is a source of intense pain, its energy comes from continual creative motion that keeps breaking down the unitary aspect of each new paradigm" (ibid., 101-102). The third space of nepantlismo yields alternative histories that give voice to subaltern subjects' conocimiento, or knowledge. Anzaldúa defines conocimiento as "an epistemology that tries to encompass all the dimensions of life, both inner—mental, emotional, instinctive, imaginal, spiritual, bodily realms—and outer—social, political, lived experiences" (Entrevistas, 177). Her work adds to our understanding of transculturation because she unflinchingly goes to the heart, the interior workings, of the metamorphoses of cultural change and the hybrid identities that emerge from the painful processes, mediated by power, that produce conocimiento.

I will argue that, in the Andes, this process was often performed by subjects who embodied this third space at ritually significant moments and represented conocimiento crucial to transitional periods in their societies. This is the knowledge that was nearly erased by the Spanish Conquest and colonization, but that remains embedded in both the writings and the cultural practices of some Andean, mestizo, and Spanish writers and performers. My recovery of what had become subaltern knowledge and practice in the case of the third-gender ritual roles in Andean culture can be understood as a conocimiento that informs alternative, queer ways of cultural reproduction.

The power relations that inform this obscuring of subaltern knowledge determine which cultural values and activities—queer and otherwise—continue to be reproduced and which are "sacrificed." Walter Mignolo has contributed to the theorization of subaltern knowledge and the relationship between difference—what I am characterizing as queer subjects—and colonial power. He recognizes that

colonial difference is the space where coloniality of power is enacted. It is also the space where the restitution of subaltern knowledge is taking place and where border thinking is emerging. The colonial difference is the space where local histories inventing and implementing global designs meet local histories, the space in which global designs have to be adapted, adopted, rejected, integrated, or ignored. The colonial difference is, finally, the physical as well as the imaginary location where the coloniality of power is at work in the confrontation of two kinds of local histories displayed in different spaces and times across the planet. (Local Histories/ Global Designs, ix)

While Mignolo is addressing how the "coloniality of power" has permeated the myriad spaces of the global culture, both the classic center and the periphery, in the late twentieth century, his conceptualization of subaltern knowledge, border thinking, and the relationship between local and global discourses is rooted in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings of colonial Mexico and the Andes. Like Anzaldúa, Mignolo is intrigued by the notion of "nepantla"; he glosses "estamos nepantla" from the Nahuatl as "to be or feel in between" (ibid., x) and understands the unique voice that emerges in the context of colonial difference as one that expresses a "border gnosis," or conocimiento. Mignolo helps us appreciate the dialogic nature of the "fractured enunciations" that emerge from the subaltern spaces of coloniality. His emphasis on the semiotics of coloniality guides us to focus on issues of representation, and not on racial, genetic miscegenation, in our analysis of colonial discourse (or semiosis, as he prefers). "Transculturation" as a critical term is useful insofar as it serves as "a principle to produce descriptions that changes the principle in which similar descriptions have been made up to the point of its introduction in cultures of scholarship's vocabulary" (ibid., 16).

This stress on "descriptions" might risk locating projects like mine in a Eurocentric logocentrism if it were not for Mignolo's concomitant insistence that our analysis be grounded in a "pluritopic hermeneutics." This understanding of colonial semiosis frames my approach to the subaltern knowledge found in the representations of the body, particularly the queer corporeal signs that signify important conocimiento, or "border gnosis," in the colonial Andes. Furthermore, my attention to the specificity of culturally performed bodies and their myriad representations in the fractured enunciations of subaltern coloniality reminds us to pay closer attention to the agency of those participating in the processes of transculturation.

In other words, the "transculturators," as Ángel Rama named the vanguards of neoculturations in Latin America, are agents in the course of cultural change. These subjects cannot be blindly celebrated, as much criticism related to hybridity and mestizaje has tended to do. Instead, a more nuanced reading of the effects of transculturation on all social actors is needed, especially as this relates to the sexually queer aspects of the culture. Some culturally queer transculturators I consider, like Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, for example, contributed to the marginalization of the newly colonized, sexually queer, despite their traditional role in cultural reproduction of their originary culture. I will focus on this phenomenon in order to further interrogate cultural hybridity and its relationship to the sexual heterogeneity of Andean culture and to the larger theme of what Rama calls the "selection" process undertaken by the transculturators.

Alberto Moreiras problematizes this selection process by reminding us that transculturation works like a "war machine, which feeds on cultural difference, whose primary function is the reduction of the possibilities of radical heterogeneity" ("José María Arguedas," 218; all translations are mine unless otherwise noted). This reductive "war machine" can be "understood as a systematic part of the Western productionist ideology or metaphysics, which still retains a strong colonizing power in relation to alternative symbolic fields in culture" (ibid., 218-219). Moreiras's insight into the colonizing erasure of all that does not enter into a certain productive model of transculturation provides a framework within which to examine how colonial discourse reduced indigenous sexual heterogeneity to forms and practices acceptable to the orthodox Catholicism and humanism of the early-modern period. This war machine may have reached its finale in the work of José María Arguedas, as Moreiras concludes, but I will argue that it began in the Andes with Inca Garcilaso's colonial hybrid, the Comentarios reales, an early constituent of the lettered city.

However powerful the social dynamic of transculturation is, we cannot lose sight of Rama's original observations, which privileged the agency of the transculturators (Transculturación narrativa, 38-39). It was through a process of "cultural plasticity" that "donors" and "receptors" of culture selected and invented cultural components from which the neoculturations would be fashioned. I will explore how the indigenous and mestizo writers contributed to the silencing of third gender as either a resistant, contestatory strategy of survival, on the one hand, and how, on the other hand, they encoded the third-gender conocimiento in order to preserve it, as in the case of culturally queer, indigenous ladino writer Santacruz Pachacuti Yamqui. To recover the cultural value of this pre-Hispanic diversity is a challenge that requires a "pluritopic hermeneutic" that underscores the traces of orality and, by extension, subaltern discourse in colonial texts. My intention is to highlight the sexual heterogeneity of pre-Hispanic and early colonial Andean culture, often lost in lettered accounts but found between the lines of the transcribed and transculturated oral accounts that are both historical sources and transculturating agents in that process. Understanding how the sexual Other is treated in the colonial texts offers us insight into the workings of colonial subjectivization and subaltern hybridity as well as a better appreciation of the performative nature of alterity represented by tropes of sexuality.

Transculturating Tropes of Sexuality

Spanish colonial discourse is marked by a series of what I will name "transculturating tropes of sexuality." If "troping is the soul of discourse," as White has asserted (Tropics of Discourse, 3), then it is crucial to understand how certain gender and sexual tropes play a part in the transformation of subjectivities to whom the figures of speech refer. It is through analysis of this "troping" that we can come to understand how Spanish and, later, mestizo and indigenous writers used the power of their imaginations and the weight of traditional tropes in the interpretation of Andean culture. Since the 1980's, the primary fields of knowledge making up colonial studies have undergone a fundamental transformation related to the epistemological shift known broadly as poststructuralism. History, anthropology, and literary criticism have converged in their increasing distrust of language as representing "reality" and making "truth claims." What before was a tacit acceptance of the transparency of language has entered into question; the polysemous nature of signs, the ideology that informs writing, and the complexity of the contexts involved underscore the inherent opacity of language. The challenge for my project and any analysis of colonial historiography is identified by Hayden White in his discussion of the problems with narrative translation of knowing into telling: "If we view narration and narrativity as the instruments with which the conflicting claims of the imaginary and the real are mediated, arbitrated, or resolved in a discourse, we begin to comprehend both the appeal of narrative and the grounds for refusing it"(Content of the Form, 4).

In the case of the chronicles, relaciones, and histories that constitute the primary sources of this study, I examine how the Spanish and mestizo writers narrativize the gender and sexuality of indigenous Andeans. I problematize how the resulting narratives infuse events and observations in the contact zone with significance intelligible to the Spanish but alien to the indigenous culture. We will come to understand that the truth claims imbedded in the texts are related to colonial authority that legitimizes their writing in the first place and respond to what White calls the latent desire to moralize the observed reality (Content of the Form, 14). Each chronicler or historian I analyze must be understood in the context of his place of enunciation; his relationship with authority and tradition must be foregrounded. The writer's subjectivity is crucial to an understanding of his narrative, since, in White's words, "the more historically self-conscious the writer of any form of historiography, the more the question of the social system and the law that sustains it, the authority of this law and its justification, and threats to the law occupy his attention"(ibid., 13).

To understand this desire to moralize, it is necessary to examine the tradition from which the chroniclers and historians emerge; therefore, my study begins with a reading of peninsular Spanish literature, which will provide a background to the primary research. Subsequently, each writer's relationship with the colonial apparatus will be closely examined to detect its influence in the representation of Andean gender culture. Much of the corpus of colonial discourse has characteristics of protoethnography insofar as the writers attempt to represent the Other in the newly encountered Andean cultures. But, as James Clifford reminds us in his critique of twentieth-century ethnographies, those representations are often more analogous to inventions of cultures than transparent representations (Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, 2).

Integral to the "invention" of the Andes is reproduction of tropes of sexuality in colonial discourse. Ultimately, this troping operates to stereotype the cultural Other, who, in Bhabha's terms, becomes "fixed" through the repetition of a stereotypical representation, which especially concerns us in this study because of the way the discourses of power inscribe the Other's difference on the body. Bhabha reminds us that "the construction of colonial subjects in discourse, and the exercise of colonial power through discourse, demands an articulation of forms of difference—racial and sexual" (Location of Culture, 67). While much attention has been paid to the racial stereotypes of colonial discourse, it is also important to examine the sexual differentiation of the Other and its rhetorical relationship with colonial power. In addition, the problematic relationship between this rhetorical Othering in the dominant colonial discourse and the emerging contestatory voices of mestizo and indigenous writers suggests that sexual tropes played a significant role in colonial processes of subjectivization and transculturation.

Jonathan Goldberg was one of the first to identify sodomy as a colonial discursive trope and to call for further scholarship on its employment in colonial texts:

This history needs to be retold in as unpresuming and discriminating a fashion as possible in order to uncover the density of the concept of sodomy and to understand the work it is put to do; but also to recognize that sodomy, "that utterly confused category," as Foucault memorably put it, identifies neither persons nor acts with any coherence or specificity. This is one reason why the term can be mobilized—precisely because it is incapable of precise definition; but this is also how the bankruptcy of the term, and what has been done in its name, can be uncovered. ("Sodomy in the New World," 46)

This "sodomy trope" is characterized by the various "mobilizations" of the ambiguous terms and idioms that signify "sodomy." As Goldberg recognizes in the sodomy trope and Bhabha has theorized for colonial stereotypes in general, it is the "ambiguity" of the signifying tropes that invests them with power: "For it is the force of ambivalence that gives the colonial stereotype its currency: ensures its repeatability in changing historical and discursive conjunctures; informs its strategies of individualization and marginalization; produces that effect of probabilistic truth and predictability which, for the stereotype, must always be in excess of what can be empirically proved or logically construed" (Bhabha, Location of Culture, 66).This ambivalence will be underscored in my "genealogy" of the term sodomite and its many derivatives.

Asunción Lavrin, concentrating primarily on colonial Mexico's heterosexual relations and marriage, offers a definition, derived from "moral theologians" of the times, of the so-called sins against nature, though she does not specify these sources: "Sodomy or sin contra naturam was the copulation of two persons of the same sex. It also applied, however, to any form of sex between man and woman, married or not, contravening the physical position accepted by the church as 'natural'" (Sexuality and Marriage, 51). Regina Harrison's definition of sodomy in the Andean colonial context is more precise and relevant to this project, since it is taken from a sixteenth-century Peruvian catechism ("'True' Confessions," 20). This definition also suggests that the term was employed to represent several "unnatural" acts, including "bestiality, homosexuality, or unnatural heterosexual acts"(ibid.).

I will be analyzing passages that speak to sex acts between males and third-gender subjects, or what colonial writers speculated to be same-sex activity among unspecified "sodomitas," while emphasizing how the sodomy trope transculturates performative notions of Andean gender culture. I am reading "sodomy" as a discursive marker for sites of cultural difference that elicited the wrath of moralizing Spanish colonizers and as transculturated phantasms reiterated in the discourse. The meaning of these tropes was ideologically charged to justify conquest, massacre, and colonization, as Goldberg suggests. Those subjects that did not conform to hegemonic discourses of cultural foundation, especially those that betrayed a binary gender system, were demonized through a rhetoric of Christian morality. The Andean public performance of a third-gender subjectivity disrupted the Spanish semiotics of masculinity. The transvested so-called sodomites were unintelligible subjects who mis-signified, perverting the orthodox signification of sexuality, given that the Spanish marginalized the sexual Other deemed effeminate or sodomitical.

The resemanticization of third-gender subjects into sodomites, which became tropes of colonial discourse, resulted from a process of transculturation that involved the representation of their roles in the writing of both the invading and the invaded. I will trace how these tropes found their way into both the civil legal discourse, which controlled the native populations, and the texts of ecclesiastical literature and religious performance, which were the tools of evangelization.

Implicit in this understanding of historical discourse is the privileged role writing technologies played in the colonization of the Americas. The Spanish imposed what Michel de Certeau has called a "scriptural economy" in which the Americas became the colonists' "blank page" to be filled with an ordering of the disparate linguistic fragments that formed the indigenous culture, the object of the colonial subject's writing (Practice of Everyday Life, 134). Hegemonic authority and law are inscribed on the body of the indigenous; Spanish morality "engraves itself on parchments made from the skin of its subjects"(ibid., 140), whose bodies are "defined, delimited, and articulated by what writes [them]"(ibid., 139). The native bodies discussed in this study are the sites of this scriptural violence as the colonial discourse moves toward the formation of a social body in which codes purge undesirable elements. I argue that the sodomy trope not only stereotypes the Other but also functions as a "speech act" in its active denunciation of sacred and profane aspects of indigenous sexuality, which leads to its near disappearance from culture. This speech act has the unique characteristic of being one that "dare[s] not speak its name"; that is, at times it is a silent speech act because of the medieval Christian legacy that prohibited the mere speaking of the word sodomy. My analysis of the Doctrina christiana, the first book published and printed in Peru, will demonstrate how code words and phrases were substituted in sermons, confession manuals, and catechisms to represent the moral censure of the silent speech act.

What de Certeau calls the "machinery of representation" operates in two ways: "The first seeks primarily to remove something excessive, diseased, or unaesthetic from the body, or else to add to the body what it lacks" (Practice of Everyday Life, 147, original emphasis). Spaniards saw third-gender subjects as dangerously "excessive" within a scriptural economy in which a dimorphic gender system was privileged. To remove these excesses, their bodies were inscribed as morally diseased and degenerative to the colonial social body. The second operation, according to de Certeau, is "making the body tell the code"(ibid., 148); in our case, the indigenous come to believe and practice the colonial law inscribed on their bodies. Through my study of civil codes, questionnaires, and disciplinary practices, I will explore the ways colonial discourse inscribed Spanish laws of masculinity and heterosexuality on colonized Andean bodies. This revelation requires us to reconsider Michel Foucault's assertion that sex is a product of nineteenth-century European discourse and rethink the colonial contact zone in the Americas as one of the earlier spaces in which bodies were regulated and sexuality was registered as a possible threat to proto-state apparatuses.

In the course of a century, Andean gender culture was reinscribed not only by the colonizers, but also by the mestizos and indigenous peoples who had become incorporated into the scriptural economy, an important element of Andean transculturation that is marked by indigenous resistance and adaptation. As de Certeau clarifies, "normative discourse 'operates' only if it has already become a story, a text articulated on something real and speaking in its name, i.e. a law made into a story and historicized, recounted by bodies"(ibid., 149, original emphasis). We will explore the ways in which normative discourse on gender and sexuality, beginning with the peninsular tradition, transformed, and was transformed by, indigenous Andean bodies. It is time to read the normative story in a new way, to decode how the sexually queer bodies of the Andes performed vital roles in the cultural reproduction of their society while undergoing the scriptural violence of the Spanish tropes of sexuality.

Mediating the Tinkuy: Third Gender in the Andes

The new reading I propose is grounded in an Andean epistemology of gender and sexuality that is revealed in part by taking into consideration several Andean notions of narrativization and cultural reproduction as well as Andean philosophical principles. I will explore the relationship between the Quechua concepts of tinkuy and yanantin and the role that third-gender subjects play in community rituals. Tinkuy is essentially the joining together of complementary opposites through a process of ritual mediation; similarly, yanantin is an expression of dualistic symmetry of inclusion.

My interest in tinkuy is twofold. First, I will argue that we incorporate the aesthetic and structural importance of the concept into our reading practices when approaching indigenous Andean texts. Anthropologists have interpreted many contemporary ritual performances through the lenses of tinkuy. Can we benefit from this paradigm when approaching historical texts transcribed from the Andean oral tradition? I use a tinkuy reading strategy in order to better understand the Quechua language mythology found in the Huarochirí Manuscript. I uncover two threads of narrative, which I bring together and understand reciprocally and complementarily in order to explicate pre-Hispanic gender culture. This approach, in turn, helps me explain how the presence of third gender, which invoked the androgynous primordial whole, was ritually vital in order to bring gendered opposites into harmony and symmetry in different ceremonial contexts. I am using tinkuy as a metaphor, one with deep resonances in a culture of highly abstract thought and symmetrical aesthetic and social organization.

Verónica Cereceda has shown how this symmetry and mediation are expressed in the quintessential Andean text: the woven textile. Her insightful analysis of talegas, woven bags from a traditional Chilean Aymara community, reveals in weaving what I discuss in terms of other aspects of Andean culture: mediation of difference is achieved through negotiations of symmetrical binaries. Cereceda describes the talega: "The design of the talegas is formed mostly through longish bands, their colors those of the natural hues of alpaca and llama fleeces. At a closer view, one notices that the colors of the bands are repeated, two by two, in such a way that each has its pair on the opposite half of the bag, but since the number of bands is always odd, one of them remains without a pair, and sometimes it acts as a central axis" ("Semiology of Andean Textiles," 152). This singular band, without a mate, is conspicuous in a world of complementary pairs. A question will arise throughout this book: What does a third space signify in Andean culture? Discussing the center of the textile composition, the middle axis dividing the two sides of the talega, Cereceda remarks: "This odd band, found at the center of the talegas, is called a chhima, which means 'heart' in the Aymara spoken in Isluga. This heart is both the meeting place and the separating line of the two sides. It plays the ambivalent role of separator, creating two halves, and simultaneously it is the nexus, the common 'territory'"(ibid.). The center is thus defined as a point of articulation within the woven space—an axis, always sharp, that divides the bag lengthwise in the direction of the warp threads. This in-between space in the talega, known as the "heart" of the composition, is suggestive of how a third space can be a "point of articulation."

Andean ladino writers, I argue, symbolically embodied this "heart" space, the chhima or chaupi between cultures. I will use the term chaupi throughout this study to invoke this notion of in-between positioning, both as a way of characterizing colonial indigenous, ladino writers and as a way of explaining the symbolic positioning of third-gender ritualists. In Quechua, the one among paired things, but without a pair, is the chhullu, an idea I return to in later discussions. Symbolically, the third-gender ritual attendants, chhullus embodied, formed the chaupi that separated the two complements brought together in a metaphorical or, at times, an actual tinkuy. Did they at times represent the heart of ritual mediation? I argue that, through this "queer" union, one in which the odd, unpaired ritualist facilitates the joining of opposites, culture was reproduced.

Through this understanding of the chaupi position embodied by third-gender ritualists in tinkuy, I bring to the foreground the performative role third gender played (and continues to enact) in what has previously been described and studied as a binary gender system. Irene Silverblatt's Moon, Sun, and Witches provides us with one of the most complete histories of the gender systems and their evolutions in the Andes. Her analysis of colonial historiography and archival records reveals deeply ingrained daily practices as well as frequent sacred rituals that indicate that women in the pre-Columbian Andes had access to material resources and supernatural power.

While Silverblatt's scholarship, as well as subsequent studies, suggests that gender complementarity is the fundamental basis for human interaction and cultural reproduction in the Andes, research on this structure has not fully considered third-gender subjects, which populated the Andes alongside the acllas ("chosen women"), Incas, and other Andean peoples. While Silverblatt posits the female's divine relationship with earth/female deities and discusses the material positions of women in the conquest politics of the pre-Hispanic and colonial Andes, I strive to account for female expression of agency in the pre-Inca conquest politics of gendered prestige hierarchies, a theme that I take up in my discussion of the Huarochirí myths. This recuperation of feminine agency informs my theoretical construction of tinkuy as both a reading strategy and a mode of cultural reproduction. Without an appreciation of the symbolic, performative role of the feminine and the androgyne, we cannot fully understand the complexities of Andean gender culture and the negotiation of complementarity in ritual and quotidian contexts.

While the feminist movement in the fields of anthropology and literary studies has moved decidedly toward theorizing a break from the traditional categorizing of gender in direct relation to biological sex, other research has sharpened the focus on those subjects of ethnographies that do not seem to fit neatly in either a male or a female gender designation. Traditionally, ethnographies discussed these variations in terms of homosexuality and cross-dressing. Evelyn Blackwood edited the first volume of anthropology to study homosexuality, The Many Faces of Homosexuality, and changed the focus from treating homosexual acts as deviant individual behavior to emphasizing institutional and cultural patterns of that behavior. The contributing researchers avoided imposing Western prejudices in sexology and psychoanalysis on the non-Western cultures under study.

It became readily evident, however, that consideration of these non-Western cultures required a revision of assumptions concerning a binary gender system in addition to a better understanding of sexuality. Thomas Laqueur's Making Sex took a step toward breaking the traditional understanding of a dimorphic sex model by proposing that from the Greeks to the eighteenth century the West actually had a single-sex model and that the female body was culturally constructed as incomplete and inferior relative to a male point of reference. That the West at one point posited the existence of only one sex opens us to the notion that both sex and gender are contingent constructs. Scholars have now begun to reexamine passages in ethnographies that suggest a more diverse population of sexes and genders throughout the world. From this scholarship has emerged the term "third gender."

As Gilbert Herdt argues in his introduction to Third Sex/Third Gender, to speak of third genders is not to say there are three genders instead of two, but it is to break with the sex and gender bipolarity that has, until recently, dominated Western popular and scientific thought. Herdt follows sociologist George Simmel in viewing the presence of just two categories as creating an intrinsic relationship of potential oppositional conflict. Herdt claims "third" as "emblematic of other possible combinations that transcend dimorphism" (Third Sex/Third Gender, 20). The essays in Herdt's volume strive to unravel the multiple discourses that construct gender identities around human propensities to "categorize things into twos, threes, or other structures of the mind"(ibid.). Theorizing beyond sexual dimorphism is a gesture toward thinking about infinite rather than finite numbers of gender categories. "Third gender," then, becomes a metonymic signifier for those gendered subjectivities that fall outside the classic dimorphic gender categories but whose intelligibility depends on cultural specificity. Therefore, each third-gender subject can be meaningfully discussed only within the context of his or her gender culture. While third-gender presence seems to be widespread in many forms in a variety of geographic locals, research related to the Americas is the most relevant as an introduction to how I will theorize third gender in the Andes.

Will Roscoe's articles—"How to Become a Berdache" and "Gender Diversity in Native North America"—and book—Changing Ones—work toward establishing that what the traditional ethnographic literature long identified as "berdache" is in many cases the manifestation of a third-gender designation within specific native cultures. His work also gives an extensive review of berdache studies. As Roscoe explains, berdache is the term anthropology adopted from colonial discourse in the Americas to refer to men who dress like and adopt the roles of women in native societies. Male berdache have been documented in nearly 150 North American societies, while female berdache (females who take on the lifeways of males) appear in half as many groups (Changing Ones, 330). Because the Western colonial chroniclers, nineteenth-century ethnographers, and, later, anthropologists did not have linguistic or cultural categories that corresponded to the berdache subjectivity, naming it became a problem and usually resulted in misnomers such as the term berdache itself, which was originally a Persian and Arabic name for the younger male partner in a same-sex erotic relationship (ibid., 331).

In the different discourses alluded to above, these subjectivities have been variously named "hermaphrodite," "sodomite," "effeminate," and, more recently, "homosexual" and "transsexual." Each of these terms misrepresents the berdache in its own way, some expressing bodily confusions, others inscribing the native subject in Christian or psychosexual discourses, and all ignoring the often-sacred roles these subjects performed. In this book, I have opted to use the term third gender except when the specific indigenous word for the subjectivity in question is known. I employ the term berdache only when discussing other researchers' use of the term and do not adopt the term Two-Spirit, whose cultural specificity relates directly to the contemporary North American Native American community and issues of self-identification. I make this distinction because, as we will see, third gender in the Andes does not always approximate the subjectivity of berdache as it has been articulated in other cultures. Moreover, my study is as much about a symbolic, spatial concept as it is about actual subjects who represent the idea of chaupi mediation.

Walter Williams's The Spirit and the Flesh was the first book-length study devoted to revising Western knowledge of the berdache in native North America. Combining archival research with field investigations, Williams reconstructed a more integral understanding of berdache roles in native societies, calling particular attention to their often-sacred status in many ethnic groups. While Williams tended to romanticize the berdache in utopian terms, his study did open the way to further, more culturally specific, study of the topic.

Roscoe followed Williams's Pan-American survey with a detailed ethnohistory of the Zuni berdache, The Zuni Man-Woman. Since the publication of this study, Roscoe has used the burgeoning literature on the subject to research, as noted above, the commonalities between the berdache in different North American native societies. This consensus does not necessarily predict that we will find the same gender constructs in the Andes; indeed, I restrain from making explicit comparisons in my analysis of the Andean context in order to respect the cultural specificity of Andean gender culture. It is instructive, however, to have a sense of third gender in other American cultures so that the reader will have at least one other point of reference, albeit contested, in addition to the European tradition.

First, male berdache are known to have had productive specialization in the areas of crafts and domestic work, including the care of children, and they are often marked as overachievers in their occupations ("How to Become a Berdache," 334). Second, berdache often enjoy supernatural sanction and fulfill religious functions in their communities. Due to their reputations in both these aspects, berdache are integrated members of society (ibid., 335). Gender variation in relation to the culture's norms for male and female genders varies; berdache often cross-dress or dress completely differently from either males or females (ibid., 334). Their sexuality also varies, from exclusively same-sex (male biological sex) relationships to bisexual and heterosexual partnerings. Their sexual activity ranges from casual encounters to long-term relationships (ibid., 335). Roscoe notes that, increasingly, scholars are abandoning "deterministic hypotheses concerning the "cause" of berdache behavior"(ibid., 336). The trend is to recover the berdache's agency in taking on social roles, rather than accepting biased discourses' "practices [that] predetermine and overdetermine berdaches as objects of action, never the subjects" (ibid., 336). (I will return to this point below.) Finally, some berdache are increasingly categorized as third genders. Rather than conceptualize them as crossing genders or in terms of sexual object choice (homosexual), third-gender theory posits them as "a separate gender within a multiple gender, gender system"(ibid., 38).

The fundamental strength of Roscoe's methodology is its combination of fieldwork in current Native American communities with archival research, extensive collaboration with a host of researchers, and an engagement of the traditional historiography and ethnography with a critical skepticism. I have used the few anthropological or ethnographic accounts available to help reconstruct the historical figure, and I hope this study will encourage future research on contemporary Andean gender culture to include a consideration of gender and sexual diversity. Fritz Villasante Sullca is one of the few Peruvian anthropologists to address this topic in his fieldwork, though several contemporary ethnographers mention aspects of third-gender performance in passing, but not in the terms of my study (Allen, Bolin, Franquemont, Isbell). Villasante's research on the role of sexuality and humor in Paucarambo's festival in honor of the Mamacha del Carmen is helpful in understanding how gender liminality continues to be performed today. I discuss the transculturation of third gender in Andean colonial ecclesiastical literature and reflect on Villasante's research as further evidence of the mutability of performative ritual identities in the Andes.

Third gender is a controversial term. In a critique of its use, "Romancing the Transgender Native," Towle and Morgan discuss the abuse of the term in its transference from anthropological literature to "popular American writing by and about transgendered people"(469). The title of their article speaks to one of the principal pitfalls of its use. Whereas I believe it is nearly impossible to reliably recover the "lived experience" of the subjects who performed third gender in the pre-Hispanic and colonial Andes, one should no more "celebrate" their roles in ritual contexts than celebrate human sacrifice victims, for example. My book attempts to recover their roles and, moreover, the symbolic signification they represent, in order to understand Andean notions of gender and sexuality and their eventual transculturation in colonial discourse. Without romanticizing the roles of third genders, I hope to open a dialogue on the place of gender liminality in our understanding of broader cultural patterns in the Andes. As Towle and Morgan advise, studies of third gender "should center on the meanings, ideologies, disputes, and practices that situate gender dynamics in specific historical and cultural contexts"(ibid., 471). I use the term in its metonymic capacity because, as we shall see, there are multiple manifestations of gender liminality that mediate between the gendered spheres of Andean culture. Again, Towle and Morgan insightfully remind us of the potential "reductionism and exclusionism" of the term, which can erase the very difference some anthropologists wish to highlight (ibid., 484-485).

My use of third gender works in the opposite direction—toward expansion and inclusion—in the sense that gender liminality in the Andes is not about "breaking binaries" conceived as naturalized notions of masculinity and femininity, but about negotiating gender difference to create a complementary pairing, an invocation of an androgynous whole. To get there, Andeans conceive of themselves on a gender continuum in temporal performances of gender that are not fixed in time and space. To understand these complexities, third-gender subjects must be studied with cultural specificity.

Richard Trexler's Sex and Conquest is the most sustained analysis of the Latin American berdache. Trexler reconstructs a Pan-American identity and argues that the berdache was a product of a pre-Hispanic gender ideology that sexually objectified defeated or otherwise subjugated males in ways that magnified the masculine power of the conqueror. These cultural patterns, he contends, remarkably approximated the early-modern, European treatment of same-sex behavior and effeminized dependency. While this characterization may hold true for other parts of the Americas that Trexler analyzes, I assert that the Andean versions of this historical subjectivity had culturally distinct meanings that transcended European notions of effeminacy as dependency and degeneracy, especially in ritual contexts. Trexler's notion of the berdache as a "dependent," and therefore demeaned, subject does not concur with a more nuanced reading of the native gender culture of the Andes.

My demonstration of how third-gender peoples fit into the native societies and performed sacred ritual duties and specialized productive roles reconstructs third-gender subjectivity from an Andean paradigm of gender culture and stresses the differences between this epistemology and early-modern European notions of degradation of the feminine. My approach does not efface issues of power that Trexler stresses in his reconstruction of berdache; indeed, the performance of any subject position is conditioned by structures of power. Whereas Trexler privileges masculine power as the determining agent in berdache subjectivity by linking fragmentary evidence across myriad cultures of the Americas, I emphasize the culturally specific role the feminine and the androgyne played in the performance of subjectivity in the Andes. My approach does not ignore masculinity, an equally and, at times, more dominant force in the Andes. Rather, I seek to understand how gender liminality mediated between the masculine and the feminine by invoking the mythic, androgynous whole. Rather than work with essentialist notions of masculinity and femininity, I posit the performativity of these categories in a symbolic system in which the androgyne, not the phallus, may be the "universal signifier."

A Performative Approach to Transculturated Third Gender

My approach to third gender in the pre-Columbian and colonial Andes underscores the performativity of the third-gender subjectivity within a context of transculturation. In tracing the textual representation of gender and sexuality in premodern Iberian culture, and later in Andean colonial culture, I problematize notions of a "natural," inherent, or essential gender and sexuality in the peninsula and Andean region by interrogating their discursive constructedness. As Diana Fuss has pointed out, however, there is no need for us to be caught between false theoretical binaries; even for those who maintain that there is no prediscursive gender or sexuality, that all manifestations of identity are constructs of a given discourse, a reading begins at some point in time, which implies starting from an essence (Essentially Speaking, 3-4). While a constructionist reading strategy often resorts to a historicism that is itself an essentialized version of the social process, and while there are essentialist aspects of psychological and deconstruction theories as well, as Fuss indicates, the critic must accept, in terms dating to Locke, "nominal essence," that is, that identities are "merely a linguistic convenience, a classificatory fiction we need to categorize and label" (ibid., 4). Similar to Spivak's "strategic essentialism," this conception of identity enables an identity politics based on unstable identity categories, for example, man or woman. Strategic essentialism is also helpful in the theorization of subjectivity.

Judith Butler's conception of gender performativity suggests that discursive subjectivities are agents of their gendered selves (Gender Trouble, 147), agents that reiterate culturally constructed imitations of an imagined original gender. Any substance to a gendered identity, that is, its essence, is actually a phantasm, a mere appearance of substance that has acquired the illusion of essence through its repetition in discourse. Individuals imitate the phantasms in "performances" that pass as gendered identities. Butler has clarified her position in Bodies That Matter by emphasizing the discursive nature of the human body, which is as much a cultural construct as gender itself. Therefore, the body is "sexed" through cultural norms; in the West, for example, sexual dimorphism cannot be taken as a naturalized condition for, as recent scholarship reveals, the body has at times been considered as a single-sexed entity (Laqueur), a position that reiterates progress in the field of anthropology toward understanding the instability of bodies and genders.

Also important for my understanding of the representation of third-gender subjectivities in colonial discourse is Butler's assertion that "the subject is constituted through the force of exclusion and abjection, one which produces a constitutive outside to the subject, an abjected outside, which is, after all, 'inside' the subject as its own founding repudiation" (Bodies That Matter, 3). As we will see, notions of the feminine and third-gender subjectivities are figured as "abjected" outsiders to performative masculine, idealized subjects of Spanish and, later, colonial discourse. These abjected outsiders, therefore, are left in the discourse as marginalized to dominant subjectivities, transformed from earlier performative identifications with different values and meanings.

In the Andes, the body of third-gender subjects signifies culturally meaningful relationships that are brought into discourse through ritual repetitions. What we know of third-gender subjects comes from the colonial record of their "performances" of ritual expressions of gender and sexuality. This brings us back to my earlier discussion of transculturation, for I am positing that we read third genders as performed subjectivities who have passed through processes of subjectivization in the highly contested contact zone. Third gender was acculturated and deculturated; the subjectivity acquires European notions of degeneracy associated with the sodomy trope while it loses part of its sacred, integrated identity associated with feminine and androgynous rituality. Out of this process emerge the neoculturations, performative iterations of the once-sacred subjectivity that continue to enact the tinkuy mediation in public ceremonies throughout the Andes.

Decolonizing Queer Tropes through Tinkuy Readings

The structure of this book reflects the spirit of the Andean concept of tinkuy in that the five chapters are arranged in complementary pairs mediated by an intervening chapter. I begin the study with an exploration of the performance of masculinity and its abject Other, femininity, in Spanish premodern culture, with the primary reading focused on El poema del mio Cid and the tropes of masculinity the text unleashes into early-modern Spanish literature and historiography. This chapter introduces the acculturating discourse that traveled to the Andes in the sixteenth century by tracing a "genealogy" of the relationship between the abjection of the feminine and the persecution of same-sex sexuality in the Iberian Peninsula.

Chapter 2 brings these Iberian tropes of masculinity into a tinkuy with the Andean sexual Other, represented in the writings produced in the third space of transculturation. Pedro de Cieza de León, one of the first chroniclers to write what I consider to be a protoethnography of the Andes, provides some of the earliest descriptions of Andean gender and sexuality, accounts that blend the Iberian tropes of sexuality with indigenous informants' and his own observations to produce queer texts that became enduring references in Andean historiography. This chapter reflects on colonial discourse and transculturation in the context of Conquest politics while adding to my characterization of third gender through critical readings of several other early colonial sources. The fragments, or neoculturations, that remained in colonial discourse as phantasms of previous, pre-Columbian performances of the ritual identity will be key sources for understanding third-gender subjectivity.

Chapter 3 constitutes the chaupi chapter of this study, as it reconstructs Andean notions of gender liminality from ladino scribes writing from the chaupi between the two cultures of the colonial contact zone. From their writings, I recover the importance of the feminine and the androgyne in Andean culture. My analysis of The Huarochirí Manuscript reveals a narrative strategy based on Andean notions of yanantin and tinkuy, which leads me to reconsider how pre-Hispanic mythology and colonial protoethnography express cultural values associated with bodily performances of the sacred androgyne. I will also introduce into the discussion late twentieth-century ethnographies that include reports of third-gender ritual activity in contemporary indigenous societies to aid us in understanding the continuity and change of Andean gender values through time.

Chapter 4 begins the second metaphoric tinkuy of the book by focusing on the transculturating discourse of Francisco de Toledo's viceroyalty and highlighting the role of indigenous informants in the Spanish collection of knowledge on third-gender subjects. To help us understand Andeans' agency in the process of transculturation, this chapter stresses how native Andeans contributed to the narrativization of their culture as informants and eventually as writers of their own histories. By analyzing colonial ordinances and other investigative questionnaires, I reconsider Michel Foucault's assertion that sex is a product of European, nineteenth-century discourse and rethink the colonial contact zone as one of the earliest spaces in which bodies were regulated and sexuality was registered as a potential threat to an imperial hegemony. This chapter, by studying the pedagogical ecclesiastical literature and exposing the gendered nature of the extirpation-of-idolatry campaigns, also explores the ways a transculturated version of Andean gender culture was turned back on native converts and penitents. The missionaries begin to occupy the chaupi of Andean culture, displacing the amautas, or knowledge keepers, of the pre-Hispanic Andes. This chapter continues the transatlantic reading I began in Chapter 1 by emphasizing the role of the Reconquest and evangelization of the Moors in Spain in the spiritual conquest of the Andes. I examine how Catholic notions of luxuria (lasciviousness) traveled to the Americas as tropes in the catechisms, confession manuals, and sermons and were deployed in the attack on indigenous religiosity, leading to the suppression, but not the erasure, of third-gender performance. I close this chapter with a reading of how the civil and religious discourses of the Toledo viceroyalty conflate in the queering of an Inca mother by examining Sarmiento de Gamboa's hyperbolic representation of the transgressive Mama Huaco, a pre-Hispanic, ambiguously gendered archetype.

Finally, I conclude this study with an example of how one Andean of mixed heritage, the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, used the phantasms of colonial discourse in his representation of gender and sexuality. As Mary Louise Pratt highlights in her definition of transculturation, "subjugated peoples cannot readily control what emanates from the dominant culture, they do determine to varying extents what they absorb into their own, and what they use it for"(Imperial Eyes, 6). In this final discussion of the effects of transculturation, we will explore how a transculturated "writing subject" sacrifices those queer subjectivities of his maternal culture that threatened his apology of the Incas. Inca Garcilaso steps into the "third space" of colonial hybridity armed with Westernized tropes of sexuality and displaces those who once mediated as the symbolic chaupi in his maternal gender culture. His foundational text is a tinkuy-like response to the Toledan discourse explored in the previous chapter and provides an opportunity for us to revise our understanding of subalternity and hybridity in the current scholarship on the colonial Andes by appreciating how processes of cultural hybridization, like those of Inca Garcilaso, obscured indigenous values of mediation. By ending this study with my analysis of Inca Garcilaso's Los comentarios reales, the most widely read colonial account of Andean culture and history, we cross back to Iberia to engage the mestizo writer's mediation between the conquered, colonized Andeans and the Renaissance Spaniards. The instability of the masculine Spanish subject, first encountered in Spanish medieval epic poetry, rears its head again, this time absorbed into a subaltern subject's portrayal of the Other that is partly himself. Inca Garcilaso's abjection of that part of himself that was the founding repudiation of the feminine in the Spanish literary tradition finds itself constituting the new mestizo subject as well.

In the Epilogue I reflect on implications and future avenues of this research by briefly considering how queer tropes of sexuality continue to be performed in the Andes, in both literature and ritual ceremonies. The endurance of difference in both hegemonic and subaltern cultural forms speaks to the dynamics of Andean tinkuy performances. Alterity is continually mediated and brought into complementary, sustainable relationships . . . despite the occasional pachacuti.