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

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- I Queering Iberia -- Saint Pe1agius, Ephebe and Martyr -- "Affined to love the Moor": Sexual Misalliance and Cultural Mixing in the Cantigas d'escarnho e de mal dizer -- Queer Representation in the Arcipreste de Talavera, or The Maldezir de mugeres Is a Drag -- II Iberian Masculinities -- "Tanquam effeminatum": Pedro II of Aragon and the Gendering of Heresy in the Albigensian Crusade -- The Semiotics of Phallic Aggression and Anal Penetration as Male Agonistic Ritual in the Libro de buen amor -- Male Bonding as Cultural Construction in Alfonso X, Ramon Llull, and Juan Manuel Homosocial Friendship in Medieval Iberia -- III Sources of Sodom -- The Poets of Sodom -- Desperately Seeking Sodom: Queerness in the Chronicles of Alvaro de Luna -- Juan Ruiz's Heterosexual "Good Love" -- IV Normativity and Nationhood -- Fictions of Infection: Diseasing the Sexual Other in Francese Eiximenis's Lo llibre de les dones -- "iA tierra, puto!": Alfonso de Palencia's Discourse of Effeminacy -- "Tened por espejo su fin" Mapping Gender and Sex in Fifteenthand Sixteenth-Century Spain -- V The Body and the State -- Dismembering the Body Politic: Vile Bodies and Sexual Underworlds in Celestina -- From Convent to Battlefield: Cross-Dressing and Gendering the Self in the New World of Imperial Spain -- Written on the Body: Slave or Hermaphrodite in Sixteenth-Century Spain -- Index -- Notes on the Contributors

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