Martyred saints, Moors, Jews, viragoes, hermaphrodites, sodomites, kings, queens, and cross-dressers comprise the fascinating mosaic of historical and imaginative figures unearthed in Queer Iberia. The essays in this volume describe and analyze the sexual diversity that proliferated during the period between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries when political hegemony in the region passed from Muslim to Christian hands. To show how sexual otherness is most evident at points of cultural conflict, the contributors use a variety of methodologies and perspectives and consider source materials that originated in Castilian, Latin, Arabic, Catalan, and Galician-Portuguese. Covering topics from the martydom of Pelagius to the exploits of the transgendered Catalina de Erauso, this volume is the first to provide a comprehensive historical examination of the relations among race, gender, sexuality, nation-building, colonialism, and imperial expansion in medieval and early modern Iberia. Some essays consider archival evidence of sexual otherness or evaluate the use of “deviance” as a marker for cultural and racial difference, while others explore both male and female homoeroticism as literary-aesthetic discourse or attempt to open up canonical texts to alternative readings. Positing a queerness intrinsic to Iberia’s historical process and cultural identity, Queer Iberia will challenge the field of Iberian studies while appealing to scholars of medieval, cultural, Hispanic, gender, and gay and lesbian studies. Contributors. Josiah Blackmore, Linde M. Brocato, Catherine Brown, Israel Burshatin, Daniel Eisenberg, E. Michael Gerli, Roberto J. González-Casanovas, Gregory S. Hutcheson, Mark D. Jordan, Sara Lipton, Benjamin Liu, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Michael Solomon, Louise O. Vasvári, Barbara Weissberger
This book is an edited volume of eleven specially-commissioned essays by a range of established and emerging UK-based Hispanists, which assess recent developments in the disciplines falling under the umbrella of 'Iberian Studies'. These essays, which cover a wide range of time periods and geographical areas, but are united by the common question of what it means to 'Read Iberia', offer an invigorating critique of many of the critical assumptions shaping the study of Iberian languages and literatures. This volume offers a timely intervention into the debate about the current repositioning of language/literature disciplines within the UK university. Its intellectual starting point is the need for a committed and incisive re-evaluation of the role of literature and the way we teach and research it. The contributors address this issue from a diverse range of linguistic, cultural and theoretical backgrounds, drawing on both familiar and not-so-familiar texts and authors to question common reference points and critical assumptions. The volume offers not only a new and invigorating space for reimagining Iberian Studies from within, but also - through its commitment to interdisciplinary debate - an opportunity to raise the profile of Iberian Studies outside the community of academic Hispanists.
In Masculinity and Queer Desire in Spanish Enlightenment Literature, Mehl Allan Penrose examines three distinct male figures, each of which was represented as the Other in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spanish literature. The most common configuration of non-normative men was the petimetre, an effeminate, Francophile male who figured a failed masculinity, a dubious sexuality, and an invasive French cultural presence. Also inscribed within cultural discourse were the bujarrón or ’sodomite,’ who participates in sexual relations with men, and the Arcadian shepherd, who expresses his desire for other males and who takes on agency as the voice of homoerotica. Analyzing journalistic essays, poetry, and drama, Penrose shows that Spanish authors employed queer images of men to engage debates about how males should appear, speak, and behave and whom they should love in order to be considered ’real’ Spaniards. Penrose interrogates works by a wide range of writers, including Luis Cañuelo, Ramón de la Cruz, and Félix María de Samaniego, arguing that the tropes created by these authors solidified the gender and sexual binary and defined and described what a ’queer’ man was in the Spanish collective imaginary. Masculinity and Queer Desire engages with current cultural, historical, and theoretical scholarship to propose the notion that the idea of queerness in gender and sexuality based on identifiable criteria started in Spain long before the medical concept of the ’homosexual’ was created around 1870.
Viewing contemporary Latin American films through the lens of queer studies reveals that many filmmakers are exploring issues of gender identity and sexual difference, as well as the homophobia that attempts to defeat any challenge to the heterosexual norms of patriarchal culture. In this study of queer issues in Latin American cinema, David William Foster offers highly perceptive queer readings of fourteen key films to demonstrate how these cultural products promote the principles of an antiheterosexist stance while they simultaneously disclose how homophobia enforces the norms of heterosexuality. Foster examines each film in terms of the ideology of its narrative discourse, whether homoerotic desire or a critique of patriarchal heterosexism and its implications for Latin American social life and human rights. His analyses underscore the difficulties involved in constructing a coherent and convincing treatment of the complex issues involved in critiquing the patriarchy from perspectives associated with queer studies. The book will be essential reading for everyone working in queer studies and film studies. The films discussed in this book are: De eso no se habla (I Don't Want to Talk about It) El lugar sin límites (The Place without Limits) Aqueles dois (Those Two) Convivencia (Living Together) Conducta impropia (Improper Conduct) The Disappearance of García Lorca La Virgen de los Sicarios (Our Lady of the Assassins) Doña Herlinda y su hijo (Doña Herlinda and Her Son) No se lo digas a nadie (Don't Tell Anyone) En el paraíso no existe el dolor (There Is No Suffering in Paradise) A intrusa (The Interloper) Plata quemada (Burnt Money) Afrodita (Aphrodite) Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate)
Queer Italia gathers essays on Italian literature and film, medieval to modern. The volume's chronological organization reflects its intention to define a queer tradition in Italian culture. While fully cognizant of the theoretical risks inherent in trans-historicizing sexuality, the contributors to this volume share an interest in probing the multi-form dynamics of sexual desires in Italian texts through the centuries. The volume aims not to promote the mistaken notion of a single homosexuality through history. Rather, these essays together upset and undo the equally misguided assumption of an omnipresent heterosexuality through time by uncovering the various, complex workings of desire in texts from all periods. Somewhat paradoxically, a kind of queer canon results. These essays open a much-needed critical space in the Italian tradition wherein fixed definitions of sexual identity collapse. Queer Italia is the first and only work of its kind in Italian criticism. As such, it will be of interest to a wide audience of Italianists, medieval to modern, and queer cultural theorists.
This volume offers a dialogue with and through the medieval informed by cultural categories of performativity and simultaneity in on-line media, architecture, film, poetry, and social formations. The articles depart from Medievalism Studies and attempt to answer questions such as: How do medievalists, artists, writers, and entertainment industries communicate, replicate, and evoke medieval formations? How do national and transnational discursive fields relate to understandings of the medieval in its many unstable states? Where are the communal memory sites and what functions do they serve for those who are associated with them? Where are the medieval disjunctions and conjunctions of race, ethnicity and time in a settler society? And what do place, nature, and landscape have to do with it?
This anthology explores different genealogies of sexuality and questions some of the theoretical emphases and epistemic assumptions affecting current histories of sexuality.
This book offers the most up to the minute snapshot of scholarship on queer/gay historiographies in a number of geographical regions in western Europe, Asia and the US. It features the work of the most established scholars in the field of the history of same-sex desire and promises to take the study of same-sex relations in the early modern period in radical new directions.
Gema Pérez-Sánchez argues that the process of political and cultural transition from dictatorship to democracy in Spain can be read allegorically as a shift from a dictatorship that followed a self-loathing "homosexual" model to a democracy that identified as a pluralized "queer" body. Focusing on the urban cultural phenomenon of la movida, she offers a sustained analysis of high queer culture, as represented by novels, along with an examination of low queer culture, as represented by comic books and films. Pérez-Sánchez shows that urban queer culture played a defining role in the cultural and political processes that helped to move Spain from a premodern, fascist military dictatorship to a late-capitalist, parliamentary democracy. The book highlights the contributions of women writers Ana María Moix and Cristina Peri Rossi, as well as comic book artists Ana Juan, Victoria Martos, Ana Miralles, and Asun Balzola. Its attention to women's cultural production functions as a counterpoint to its analysis of the works of such male writers as Juan Goytisolo and Eduardo Mendicutti, comic book artists Nazario, Rubén, and Luis Pérez Ortiz, and filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar.