Masculinidades en obras: el drama de la hombría en la España imperial, by José R. Cartagena-Calderón (Pomona College).
Masculinidades en obras: el drama de la hombría en la España imperial brings together close textual analysis with cultural criticism to examine the role of material culture, literature and, above all, theater in the inherently unstable construction of masculinities in early modern Spain. The book addresses the need in literary and cultural studies for a more intricate appreciation of the intersections of empire, ethnicity, class, sexual practices, erotic desire and masculinity in historically specific contexts. It does so by moving beyond the traditional view of masculinity as a natural and monolithic essence while demonstrating its different, often competing and changing forms.
Cartagena-Calderón examines the complex ways in which dominant forms of masculinities were defined and performed in early modern Spanish theater, literature and culture not only in relation to and in tension with women, but also, and more significantly, in relation to “other” men, such as Jews, Moors and their descendents, foreigners, Amerindians and sodomites.
Paying particular attention to the transformation of the feudal warrior nobility into the sophisticated urban courtier of the rising nation state, this book additionally examines the crisis of masculinity produced by this cultural, military and political shift in early modern Spain. Displaced from the battlefield by innovations in military technology and no longer performing the martial masculinity of his warlike ancestors in the effeminized court culture, the nobleman’s sumptuous display and debilitating effeminacy was linked by many anxious voices of the period to the so-called emasculation of Spanish society and to the troubling decline of the Spanish empire in the 17th century.
Masculinidades en obras provides numerous points of comparison and contrast with the imagining of a complex web of hegemonic and subordinated masculinities —epic, heroic, imperial, courtly, transgressive, and subaltern— in selective plays and non-theatrical works by major literary figures such as Lope de Vega, Cervantes, Tirso de Molina, Moreto and Calderón de la Barca. Theoretically informed and historically grounded, the book will make a significant contribution to the emerging field of masculinities and cultural studies. Attentive to the cultural and historical realities in which the texts studied were produced and consumed, Masculinidades en obras explores how men were defined as men in Imperial Spain. More importantly, it examines how literary production helped to shape, and was shaped by, early modern conceptions of masculine identity, an area of inquiry which Hispanists and those generally interested in gender and cultural studies are just beginning to explore.
This book is written is Spanish.
ISBN: 978-1-58871-127-4 (PB, 382 pp.) $50