Seminal Debates

This chapter contributes to conversations about the social meaning of masculinity and male bodies in the context of the colony of New Spain, where both Indigenous and European authors addressed themselves to male sexual functioning. For example, in his popular medical treatise ( Tratado breve de la medicina y de todas las enfermedades ), published in Mexico City in 1592, the Augustinian friar Augustín Farfán wrote that he was “moved and obligated by Christian charity” to provide remedies for impotent men. Taking its lead from Farfán, the chapter studies framings of impotence, ejaculation, conception, and male fertility in medical and religious works published in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century New Spain. The chapter traces both confluences and ruptures between European and Indigenous medical conceptions of male sexuality and potency, identifying notions of moderation and control in masculine sexuality; complementary and conflicting meanings and understanding of semen and its role in conception and male health; and condemnation of profligate male sexuality as harmful to fertility, all of which treat masculine sexuality and male sexual functioning as central to colonial anxieties about (and aspirations for) masculinity.