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Visceral Archives of the Body: Consuming the Dead, Digesting the Divine

This essay focuses on how viscerality refracts as an issue for archival studies of early modern sexuality (and beyond). Through a microhistorical examination of textual representations of necrophilia, fellatio, masturbation, and erotic religious visions from colonial Mexican historical archives, this essay traces what I term the visceral archives of the body to show how particular acts and desires come into archival being (and thus into historicity) by eliciting visceral responses—“gut feelings”—on the part of suspects, witnesses, colonial authorities, scribes, archivists, and historians. I further argue that a metaphorics of consumption undergirds historical archives and archival documents, as they are produced, ordered, read, and interpreted. By working through such complex affective archival engagements, we gain a more nuanced understanding of the erotic chains that structure and confuse the taxonomizing impulses of the archive itself.