Brokeback University

Philadelphia, PA—Because universities spend so much time on niche studies, basic knowledge goes wanting. Far too few college students can name the ships Columbus took to the New World, and with the type of coursework faculty mentors encourage prospective professors to undertake, fewer still are likely to.

Nowhere is this trend toward what might be called the pedagogy of the marginal more readily on display than at the Modern Language Association’s annual confab. And since the MLA meeting is something of a trade show for most English Departments, the Ph.D. thesis of today can easily become the elective, or even the requirement of tomorrow.
As it happens, the capstone of the MLA panel on “Scholarship of the New Generations(s)” was a statistical survey of sodomy cases in colonial Mexico.

“The influence of the Catholic Church changed native morals,” Jorge Guillermo De Los Reyes-Heredia said, “by its classification of illicit acts” including “sodomy, bigamy, bestiality and rape.” De Los Reyes-Heredia is a Ph.D. Candidate from the University of Houston.

He has unearthed 100 such cases among the Archua Indians from archives and diaries. “What can the punishment of sexual acts tell us about norms and mores?” he asked, answering, “There was a different level of punishment for colonial subjects.” Class warfare is a favorite subject of the thousands of English professors who belong to the MLA.

De Los Reyes-Heredia looked at “male sexuality and gender performativity,” specifically “male-to-male sexuality.” This is another topic cherished by the MLA, and this panel was not even sponsored by the group’s Gay Caucus.

“I’ve looked at documents on priests committing sodomy, for which the usual punishment is burning at the stake,” De Los Reyes-Heredia reports. “Priests were merely reassigned to other parishes because they were supposed to be men of reason.”

“One priest wanted to go before the inquisition and only got mass every day and daily rosaries,” he said.
“I don’t deal with female-to-female sexuality because, for one thing, there is not enough evidence,” he explained. “Bestiality is more of a rural phenomenon,” he said. “Sodomy is more of an urban phenomenon.”

Bright and personable, De Los Reyes-Heredia has expended much time and energy on his project. Still, although such topics dominate the MLA “to do” list, when they are relevant at all, they are more historical in nature than literary.

By definition, the latter realm would seem to be of greater concern to the Modern Language Association than would the former. Nonetheless, the research that De Los Reyes-Heredia did does appear to have some relevance to the current controversy over pedophile priests.

Ironically, this aspect had not really occurred to the quick-witted young man as I discovered when I asked him whether the slap-on-the-wrist treatment colonial clerics received did not eliminate a deterrent to such behavior. His focus, after all, was on “Catholic Church persecution” from 1542 to the 1700s.

Also, the MLA is loath to rush to judgment about sodomites, whether they wear a collar or not.

De Los Reyes-Heredia was one of hordes of Ph.D. candidates trying out their theses at the MLA. Others had, maybe, less gravitas than his offering.

On the same panel with De Los Reyes-Heredia, the equally erudite and articulate Anna H. More of UCLA presented her findings on the Creole patriarchy in Spanish colonies in the 17th Century. “The patriarchy” of any century is another favorite subject of MLA regulars.

That same evening, one session later, Robert Chodat of Boston University tried to explain his thesis in the MLA panel on “The Fate of the Person in Literary Studies.” “I wanted to see where you were going with this,” the moderator of that panel, Berkeley’s Charles Francis Alteiri told him when Chodat finished his talk on “Missing Persons.”

Following Chodat’s effort, which took us from Descartes to Lenny Bruce, Williams College Ph.D. candidate Bernard Rhie gave a preview of his project on “The Philosophy of the Face.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.