The X32 Subliminal Aphrodisiac (eros)

This volume deals with the world of women in Mesoamerica, discussing particularly the religious and ritual aspects of gender. As its sources, it uses colonial documents of the contact period with European cultures, testimonies of the subjugated indigenous during the colonial period, as well as contemporary ethnographic studies.

This provocative work provides a radical reassessment of the emergence and nature of Christian sexual morality, the dominant moral paradigm in Western society since late antiquity. While many scholars, including Michel Foucault, have found the basis of early Christian sexual restrictions in Greek ethics and political philosophy, Kathy L. Gaca demonstrates on compelling new grounds that it is misguided to regard Greek ethics and political theory–with their proposed reforms of eroticism, the family, and civic order–as the foundation of Christian sexual austerity. Rather, in this thoroughly informed and wide-ranging study, Gaca shows that early Christian goals to eradicate fornication were derived from the sexual rules and poetic norms of the Septuagint, or Greek Bible, and that early Christian writers adapted these rules and norms in ways that reveal fascinating insights into the distinctive and largely non-philosophical character of Christian sexual morality.