Home
Toronto Iberic
Bodies Beyond Labels

Bodies Beyond Labels

Finding Joy in the Shadows of Imperial Spain

Edited by Daniel Holcombe and Frederick A. de Armas

Published by: University of Toronto Press

Series: Toronto Iberic

Imprint: University of Toronto Press

346 Pages, 157.00 × 249.00 × 30.00 mm, 25 b&w illustrations

Hardcover
9781487556891
Published: May 2024

£59.00

Buy

Description
Contents
Authors

Bodies beyond Labels explores moments of joy and joyful expressions of self-identity, intimacy, sexuality, affect, friendship, social relationships, and religiosity in imperial Spanish cultures, a period when embodiments of such joy were shadowed by comparatively more constrictive social conventions.

Viewed in this manner, joy frames historic references to gender, sexuality, and present-day concepts of queerness through homoeroticism, non-labelled bodies, gender fluidity, and performativity. This collection reveals diverse glimmers of joy through a variety of genres, including plays, poems, novels, autobiographies, biblical narratives, and civil law texts, among others. The book is divided into five categories: theatrical works that use mythology to enjoy themes of homoeroticism; narrative prose and visual arts that reveal public and private homoerotic expressions; scopophilia within garden and museum spaces that make possible joyous observations of non-labelled and non-corporeal bodies; biblical narratives and epistolary works that signal religious transgressions of gender and friendship; and sexual geographies explored in historic and legal documents.

As new generations develop more nuanced senses of gender and sexual identities, Bodies beyond Labels strives to provide new academic optics, as framed by non-labelled bodies, queer theorizations, joy in unexpected places, and the light that has historically (re)emerged from the shadows.

List of Illustrations

Introduction

Part I. Expressions of Joy in Light and Shadow: Pagan Myth and Christian Gazes

1. Forging Ganymede in Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity and Lope de Vega’s El castigo sin venganza
Frederick A. de Armas

2. Ganymede, Narcissus, and the Joys of Teasing the Pagan in Tirso de Molina’s Religious La mejor espigadera (1614)
Felipe E. Rojas

Part II. Homoeroticism as Joyous Loving

3. Secret Intimacies: Eternal Homoeroticism in Cervantes’s El curioso impertinente
Daniel Holcombe

4. Queer Raptures Past and Present: Saint Sebastian and the Homoerotics of Martyrdom in Early Modern Spain and Italy
José R. Cartagena-Calderón

5. El casamiento entre dos damas by Pedro de Navarro: Finding the Joys of Non-Heteronormativity in the Shadows of an Early Modern Spanish Romance
Pablo Restrepo Gautier

Part III. Celebrating Joyful Non-Labelled Bodies: Defying Fixed Identities

6. Joyful Visual Reinterpretations of Cervantes’s Dulcinea at the Graphic Humour Museum That Bears Her Name
María José Domínguez

7. Gardens of Gendered Joy in Tirso de Molina’s El vergonzoso en palacio (1621)
Lizette Arellano

Part IV. Joys of Heaven and Earth

8. The Laugh of the Tenth Muse
Emilie Bergmann

9. "Special Friendships" in the Convent
Bárbara Mujica

10. Trans-figura-d in Joy: The Sensuality of Celestial Feasts in the Pageants of Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534)
Jessica A. Boon

Part V. Finding Joy in Unexpected Places: Geographies of Sexual Exploration

11. Early Global Sexualities: Antonio Pigafetta and Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
Juan Pablo Gil-Oslé

12. (Dis)locations of Sodomy in Early Modern Spain
Gregory S. Hutcheson

Contributors
Index

Daniel Holcombe is an associate professor of Spanish at Georgia College & State University.

Frederick A. de Armas is Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago..