Sylvia Sellers-García

“Flawed Bodies” is a work of archival history that tells the story of Juana Aguilar, an intersex person arrested in San Salvador in 1792 for cohabiting with a woman. “Flawed Bodies” also tells the story of the institutions that attempted to define Aguilar: the religious institutions that labeled same-sex relationships a heinous sin, the medical establishment that construed sex as binary, and the legal institutions that punished crime in gendered and racialized ways. Drawing on archival sources and scholarly works in the history of sexuality, history of religion, history of medicine, legal history, and social history, this project contributes to understandings of how modern society, through the “flawed bodies” of Enlightenment-era institutions, imposed enduring identity categories.