Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Series Q) - Tapa dura

"In this provocative volume, an impressive collection of scholars, undaunted by a tradition of more solemn readings, train the powerful double lens of cultural and sexual difference on the medieval and early modern Iberian world, which turns out to be much more akin to our own than we might have suspected."-Mary Gaylord, Harvard University "An outstanding collection. The pieces are sharp, bold, well argued, and witty; the whole project is-above all-crucial to the much-needed expansion of the fields of Hispanic, postcolonial, and lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender studies."-Carolyn Dinshaw, author of Chaucer's Sexual Poetics and Getting Medieval

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. Gonzalez-Casanovas, Gregory S. Hutcheson, Mark D. Jordan, Sara Lipton, Benjamin Liu, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Michael Solomon, Louise O. Vasvari, Barbara Weissberger