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In this book, a dramatic and terrible history is traced. Richard Trexler, a European historian, surveys documentary evidence of the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of the Americas in the 16th century to argue that military domination is often secured through acts of sexualized punishment, with far-reaching social and psychic consequences. Military victory is celebrated, and in a sense ratified, through a regendering of defeated men by way of anal rape, castration, and sexual mutilation. Forcing effeminacy on defeated men through a sexualized enactment of colonization and imperialism symbolically recasts soldiers as women and puts out waves of shame and degradation to the extended kinship systems surrounding the dishonored soldiers.
Trexler intends an ambitious analysis of the interpenetration of Eros and conquest that should be of great interest to gender theorists and historians of cultural and social life across a number of disciplines, including psychoanalysis. Although he is not fully convincing and there are unresolved problems of theory, as well as controversies over the status of the historical material and artifacts Trexler employs, nonetheless this work provokes several important questions. While Trexler makes his argument in respect to European 16th-century colonization of the Americas, the range of historical and cross-cultural data he marshals suggests a more far-reaching, even at times universalistic, agenda. It remains an