El hábito. Cubrimiento, desnudez y trans-vestismo en las crónicas de Indias
The Habit. Covering, nudity, and trans-vestism in chronicles of the Indies

Summary/Abstract: This article proposes a reading, in some texts of the 16th century, of the way in which colonial subjects apprehend the existence and corporality of others, as well as their own, through the figure of the garments, of their absence (nudity), and of their displacements ("trans-vestism"). The habit - what covers and identifies, the custom - is here the complementary face of the figure of "discovery". The vestment served as one of the first parameters for the classification of the other. As protection, dissimulation, or ritual, clothing invests bodies with new potentialities, with the body being understood here as an active and complex process of appropriation according to which certain historical and cultural possibilities are embodied. Performativity is the repetition that the law needs to update itself. The European narrative, especially, was focused from the beginning on the nudity of others, but some conquerors also experienced, for different reasons, a change of habit. Trans-vestism, on the other hand, can represent survival strategies, or gestures of identity adjustment, whether of gender or social status. The new reality of mestizaje in the colony came to problematise the social categories established in the Occident. In the act of searching for and redefining this new reality, these people question the very notion of identity, traditionally understood as something stable, and allow us to destabilise the idea that the colonial binary is immutable.

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