Profit and Passion Transactional Sex in Colonial Mexico [Hardcover]

Colonial documents and works of literature from early modern Spain are rife with references to public women, whores, and prostitutes. InProfit and Passion,Nicole von Germeten offers a new history of the women who carried and resisted these labels of ill repute. The elusive, ever-changing terminology for prosecuted women voiced by kings, jurists, magistrates, inquisitors, and bishops, as well as disgruntled husbands and neighbors, foreshadows the increasing regulation, criminalization, and polarizing politics of modern global transactional sex. The author’s analysis concentrates on the words women spoke in depositions and court appearances and on how their language changed over time, pointing to a broader transformation in the history of sexuality, gender, and the ways in which courts and law enforcement processes affected women.

Nicole von Germetenis Professor of History at Oregon State University.

"Profit and Passionprovides an innovative analysis of the lives of women classified as whores and procurers in colonial Mexico. Nicole von Germeten also gets us to think about the ways in which the women described here—whores, prostitutes, and procurers—have particular kinds of voices in the archive. This book should change the ways that we understand sexual commerce in colonial Latin America."—Pete Sigal, author ofThe Flower and the Scorpion: Sexuality and Ritual in Early Nahua Culture

"Profit and Passionis the first English-language publication to delve deeply into colonial Mexican archival narratives of women who sold sex and who engaged in other forms of sexual commerce and affective labor. As such, it makes a welcome addition to the historiography of gender and sexuality in colonial Latin America, and it does so by offering readers a critical, self-reflexive lens through which to view as historical subjects these women and adolescents and humanizlC3