Queer Iberia : Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance

A collection of essays exploring ideologies and discourses that center on sexual otherness in medieval Iberian cultures. 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 Saint Pelagius, Ephebe and martyr / Mark D. Jordan -- "Affined to love the Moor": sexual misalliance and cultural mixing in The Cantigas d'escarnho e de mal dizer / Benjamin Liu -- Queer representation in the Arçipreste de Talavera, or The maldezir de mugeres is a drag / Catherine Brown -- "Tanquam effeminatum": Pedro II of Aragon and the gendering of heresy in the Albigensian crusade / Sara Lipton -- The semiotics of phallic aggression and anal penetration as male agonistic ritual in the Libro de buen amor / Louise O. Vasvári -- Male bonding as cultural construction in Alfonso X, Ramon Llull, and Juan Manuel: homosocial friendship in Medieval Iberia / Roberto J. González-Casanovas -- The poets of Sodom / Josiah Blackmore -- Desperately seeking Sodom: queerness in The chronicles of Alvaro de Luna / Gregory S. Hutcheson -- Juan Ruiz's heterosexual "good love" / Daniel Eisenberg -- Fictions of infection: diseasing the sexual other in Francesc Eiximenis's Lo llibre de les dones / Michael Solomon -- "A tierro, puto!": Alfonso de Palencia's discourse of effeminacy / Barbara Wissberger -- "Tened por espejo su fin": mapping gender and sex in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain / Linde M. Brocato -- Dismembering the body politic: vile bodies and sexual underworld in Celestina / E. Michael Gerli -- From convent to battlefield: cross-dressing and gendering the self in the new world of Imperial Spain / Mary Elizabeth Perry -- Written on the body: slave or hermaphrodite in sixteenth-century Spain / Israel Burshatin Summary: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 Iberia passed from Muslim to Christian hands