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

Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Edited by Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Pp. 478. $59.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Rarely does an academic tome of well over four hundred pages induce in its readers a page-turning gluttony, yet such is the case with this intellectual feast of a book that is as sumptuous as a carnival banquet consumed by the pre-Lenten revelers in the Book of Good Love. As editors Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson reflect, Iberia has always been Europe's queer "other," located on the reaches of the continent, its white, European, Christian homogeneity irredeemably tinctured by proximity to the suspect Semitic populations that inhabited the peninsula for eight centuries. As such, "queer Iberia" is "only incidentally a space bound by history and geography, the domain of a recoverable past; it exists primarily (perhaps paradoxically) as a space within which to rethink the very idea of boundaries, within which to explode categories, multiply centers, and begin imagining [to borrow from Michael Warner], a 'desirably queer world'" (p. 13). Queer Iberia constitutes the third volume published by Duke University's Series Q, following ¿Entiendes? (1995) and Hispanisms and Homosexualities (1999), both of which explore issues of homosexuality and the Hispanic world; this pioneering project brings its sparkling and nuanced tapestry of gender, cultural, literary, and queer theory, polyglot expertise, and impeccable archival research specifically to medieval and renaissance Iberia, and is certain to advance the entire field of Iberian historiography and criticism. The essays work together in a rich polylogue, revisiting and expanding upon each other's leitmotifs throughout the volume.

The beginning section, "Queering Iberia," provides a lucid blueprint of theoretical, textual, and historical terrain that subsequent essays elaborate. Mark D. Jordan skillfully teases out the contradictions embedded in hagiographic representations of Saint Pelagius, martyred for resisting the Moorish king Abd ar Rahman III's advances. He shows how the cult of Pelagius retains the Christian construct of blasphemous, sodomitic caliph, while defusing the ephebe's troubling erotic appeal for Christian chroniclers and communities by transforming him from erotic object to military religious crusader in a "curious sublimation of homoerotic desire" (p. 40). Benjamin Liu disinters analogous cultural anxieties by examining the medieval Galician-Portuguese burlesque poetic cycle, cantigas d'escarnho e de mal dizer (CEM), in light of Alfonsine law; both texts cross-reference and map onto the Moorish body apostasy and sodomy, revealing a complexly internalized Christian fear of and fascination by the Muslim enemy so close to home. Catherine Brown cogently foregrounds similar ambiguities by showing how Alfonso Martínez's infamous Arcipreste de Talavera, a fifteenth-century treatise against women, paradoxically co-opts and performs the very effeminacy and femininity that it would condemn.

The next section, "Iberian Masculinities," begins with an insightful reading by Sara Lipton of French clerical discourses of effeminacy, femininity, and sexuality as these undermined Pedro II of Aragon, the feudal overlord of the Languedocian Catholic lords and their vassals who were accused of heresy by Pope Innocent III in the Albigensian Crusade. Contrapuntally, Roberto J. González-Casanovas examines the complexities of medieval discourses of "noble male bonding [that] transcends not only sex-based marriage and interest-defined society, but also same-sex relations and like-gendered affinities" (p. 188). In a particularly rewarding essay, Louise O. Vasvári dissects the plurivalent ways that in Juan Ruiz's Book of Good Love (Libro de buen amor, or LBA) "the semiotics of phallic aggression and anal penetration refers to sex not as a hetero- or homosexual act but as a game of dominance and submission where the male organ becomes a kind of weapon and where the passive position is equated with dishonor, weakness, and feminization" (p. 130). Vasvári's stunning analysis of this...