Dressing Up Anxiety and Pleasure: Cultural Drag in Galdós’s Aita Tettauen

Using the practice of drag as a tool to demonstrate “that ‘reality’ is not as fixed as we generally assume it to be” (Butler, Gender Trouble xxiii–xxiv), this essay studies the Orientalized drag that two characters in a novel by Benito Pérez Galdós take on and how their costume disrupts the alleged fixity of various identity categories. Set during the Spanish-Moroccan War, Aita Tettauen (1904) reveals anxiety, pleasure, and the phantom of queerness that hide behind the hegemonic structures of masculine, national identity. This study utilizes drag’s disruptive possibilities to demonstrate the surfacing of queerness in discursive formations of race and identity and the narrative itself. I propose that not only do homosocial bonds turn towards a decidedly homosexual tension but also that such deviance is already inscribed directly into the relationship between representations of Orientalism and nationality in Galdós’s novel.