Richard C. Trexler

"In addition to offering insights into the political, social, and psychological meanings of religious spectacle, Trexler illuminates the strong cultural forces that have helped provide a voice for some of Mexican society's most powerless members."--BOOK JACKET.

"This volume brings together twenty-two papers by Richard Trexler and reflects the trajectory of the author's career and various interests. Two of the papers are original works, and eight others appear here in English for the first time. Over time, a sharp turn from political to cultural and social history is evident, even though a dominant concern with the relationship between dependency, religion, and power has persisted. This compilation should be of great interest to scholars of Italian, general European, and conquest American history."--BOOK JACKET.

Matthew's Gospel reveals little about the three wealthy visitors said to have presented gifts to the infant Jesus. Yet hundreds of generations of Christians have embellished that image of the Three Kings or Magi for a myriad of social and political as well as spiritual purposes. Here Richard Trexler closely examines how this story has been interpreted and used throughout the centuries. Biblically, the Journey of the Magi presents a positive image of worldly power, depicting the faithful in progress toward their God and conveying the importance of the gift-giving laity as legitimators of their deity. With this in mind, Trexler explains in particular how Western societies have molded the story to describe and augment their own power - before the infant God and among themselves.

This dazzling book delineates the relation between force and sex in social and political institutions. Its subject is male sexual culture in Europe and America at the time of the conquest; its basis is the primary sources of the period. What does it mean, Richard C. Trexler asks, that the Spanish and Portuguese repeatedly justified their conquest of America's Indians with the claim that the Americans had to be saved from themselves because they practiced sodomy, transforming into "women" (berdaches) the young men whom they penetrated. To answer his question, Trexler interrogates the sexual culture of both conqueror and conquered. Turning to the native American world, the author finds a remarkably similar pattern of gendered dominance and submission. He reconstructs the lived experience of the berdaches - biological males who lived as women - analyzing the familial and political pressures that produced them and concentrating on the social, religious, and sexual roles they were expected to fulfill. Trexler concludes that making berdaches was a form of state building, and that state building through berdaches involved child abuse. Finally, assessing both Iberian and American attitudes toward the transvestism and homosexual behavior he describes, Trexler maintains that civil institutions in both the Old and New World were modeled on the military: the weak, however defined, were gendered as feminine to guarantee the power of the (macho) elite. In an impassioned conclusion, he argues that the sexual violence so deeply encoded in social and political institutions must be confronted before "we [can] freely revel in the distinctive genius of each human culture."