Masculinity and Queer Desire in Spanish Enlightenment Literature

by Mehl Allan Penrose, Anne J Cruz

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781472422286
Publisher:	Ashgate Publishing Ltd
Publication date:	05/28/2014
Series:	New Hispanisms: Cultural and Literary Studies
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Mehl Allan Penrose is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Maryland, USA. He has published several articles concerning Spanish and Mexican cultural discourse in peer-reviewed journals. His research interests include the problematic of gender and sexuality in modern Spanish cultural discourse, specifically non-normative representations of men, and also include queer studies, reception theory, camp theory, and the intersections of literature, science, law, and medicine.

Table of Contents

Contents: Introduction: inventing the queer in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spain. Part I The Reinvention of Masculinity and the Problematic Petimetre: The invocations of hermaphrodism in the periodicals El Censor, El Duende Especulativo, and El Pensador; Proto-camp: humor as critical instrument in Ramón de la Cruz’s El petimetre and La oposición a cortejo. Part II The Invention of Sexuality and the Homoerotic Male: ‘I don’t burn candles of that sort’: male homoerotica as sexual violence in Enlightenment poetry; Male friendship, love, and longing in the poetry of Manuel María del Mármol; Conclusion: a newly emerging consciousness. Works cited; Index.

Editorial Reviews

'In his excellent study of queer issues in eighteenth-century Spanish literature, Mehl Allan Penrose applies a wide array of thinking about the nature of erotic acts and the sociohistorical considerations relative to them. Focusing on male writers, Penrose convincingly analyzes representations of the homoerotic in the writing of major figures in Spanish literature.' David William Foster, Arizona State University, USA

From the Publisher