Queer Iberia : sexualities, cultures, and crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance / edited by Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Blackmore, Josiah, 1959-

Hutcheson, Gregory S.

Series:

Series Q

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Homosexuality--Spain.

Homosexuality.

Homosexuality--Portugal.

Homosexuality and literature.

Sex in literature.

Literature and society--Spain.

Literature and society.

Spain.

Literature and society--Portugal.

Portugal.

Physical Description:

viii, 478 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 1999.

Summary:

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 martyrdom 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 modem 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.

Contents:

I Queering Iberia

Saint Pelagius, Ephebe and Martyr / Mark D. Jordan 23

"Affined to love the Moor": Sexual Misalliance and Cultural Mixing in the Cantigas d'escarnho e de mal dizer / Benjamin Liu 48

Queer Representation in the Arcipreste de Talavera, or, The Maldezir de mugeres Is a Drag / Catherine Brown 73

II Iberian Masculinities

"Tanquam effeminatum": Pedro II of Aragon and the Gendering of Heresy in the Albigensian Crusade / Sara Lipton 107

The Semiotics of Phallic Aggression and Anal Penetration as Male Agonistic Ritual in the Libro de buen amor / Louise O. Vasvari 130

Male Bonding as Cultural Construction in Alfonso X, Ramon Llull, and Juan Manuel: Homosocial Friendship in Medieval Iberia / Roberto J. Gonzalez-Casanovas 157

III Sources of Sodom

The Poets of Sodom / Josiah Blackmore 195

Desperately Seeking Sodom: Queerness in the Chronicles of Alvaro de Luna / Gregory S. Hutcheson 222

Juan Ruiz's Heterosexual "Good Love" / Daniel Eisenberg 250

IV Normativity and Nationhood

Fictions of Infection: Diseasing the Sexual Other in Francesc Eiximenis's Lo llibre de les dones / Michael Solomon 277

"!A tierra, puto!": Alfonso de Palencia's Discourse of Effeminacy / Barbara Weissberger 291

"Tened por espejo su fin": Mapping Gender and Sex in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Spain / Linde M. Brocato 325

V The Body and the State

Dismembering the Body Politic: Vile Bodies and Sexual Underworlds in Celestina / E. Michael Gerli 369

From Convent to Battlefield: Cross-Dressing and Gendering the Self in the New World of Imperial Spain / Mary Elizabeth Perry 394

Written on the Body: Slave or Hermaphrodite in Sixteenth-Century Spain / Israel Burshatin 420.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0822323265

0822323494

OCLC:

40354530