1st Edition
Pornographic Sensibilities Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production
Pornographic Sensibilities stages a conversation between two fields—Medieval/Early Modern Hispanic Studies and Porn Studies—that traditionally have had little to say to each other. The collection offers innovative new approaches to the study of gendered and sexualized bodies in medieval and early modern textual production, including literary and historical documents. The volume’s embrace of the interpretative tools of Porn Studies also inscribes a critical provocation: in what ways can contemporary modes of reading the past serve to freshly illuminate not only the contours of that same past but also the very critical assumptions of the present upon which fields like medieval and early modern Hispanic Studies are built? In this way, Pornographic Sensibilities encourages at once both rigorous historicizations of pre- and early-modern culture, and playful engagement with "presentism," considered here as a critical tool to undress the hidden assumptions of both past and present. This move substantively challenges long-held critical orthodoxies among scholars of pre-Enlightenment periods, for whom the very category of "pornography" itself has often problematically been framed as an anachronism when applied to their work.
Introduction Rethinking the Pornographic in Pre-modern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production
Nicholas R. Jones, Bucknell University and Chad Leahy, University of Denver
Part One
Pornographic Hispanisms:
Canon Formation, Erotic Concepts
Chapter 1 "¿Una paja mental?": The Fiction of Friction in the Arcipreste de Hita’s Story of Pitas Payas
Ross Karlan, Geffen Academy at UCLA
Chapter 2 Celestina, Prostitution, and Canonicity—or, the Book as Brothel
Emily C. Francomano, Georgetown University
Chapter 3 "Y assí su alma con su mármol arde": Garcilaso de la Vega and Renaissance
Erotica
Casey R. Eriksen, Shenandoah University
Chapter 4 Witty and Brief Eroticism: The Epigrams of Baltasar del Alcázar
J. Ignacio Díez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Chapter 5 Cervantine Obscenity in Translation
Sherry Velasco, University of Southern California
Chapter 6 Dys/Eu-phemisms: The Pornographic and the Erotic in 18th-Century Spanish
Poetry
Elena Deanda-Camacho, Washington College
Part Two
On the Visceral and its (Dis)Contents
Chapter 7 On Thresholds, Pygmalionesque Fantasies, and the ‘lascivo impulso’ in Erotic Poetry
Alani Hicks-Barlett, Brown University
Chapter 8 Picarasploitation: From the Early Modern Period to the 80’s Spanish TV
Series
Enriqueta Zafra, Ryerson University
Chapter 9 "Tan mal francés como gastas": Syphilis in the Poetry of Quevedo
Adrián J. Sáez, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia
Chapter 10 María de Zayas and Woman-Authored Pornography
Margaret Boyle, Bowdoin College
Part Three:
Haptic Arousals, Titillating the Senses
Chapter 11 "Cuando te tocares, niña": An Approach to Images of Masturbation in Medieval and Early Modern Spanish Poetry
Álvaro Piquero, Universidad Complutense de Madrid / Fundación Ramón Menéndez Pidal
Chapter 12 Pornophonic Noise and the Erotics of Listening in Juan Pérez de Montalbán’s La
mayor confusion
Víctor Sierra Matute, New York University
Chapter 13 Materializing Desire in Two Literary Traditions: Celestina and the Romance of
the Western Chamber
Yang Xiao, Zhejiang University
Chapter 14 Police Voyeurism in Enlightenment Mexico City
Nicole von Germeten, Oregon State University
Biography
Nicholas R. Jones is an Assistant Professor of Spanish and Africana Studies (Bucknell University) whose research agenda explores the agency, subjectivity, and performance of black diasporic identities in early modern Iberia and the Ibero-Atlantic world. He is the author of Staging Habla de Negros: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (Penn State University Press, May 2019) and a co-editor of Early Modern Black Diaspora Studies: A Critical Anthology (Palgrave, December 2018) with Cassander L. Smith and Miles P. Grier. Jones also is a co-editor of the Routledge Critical Junctures in Global Early Modernities book series with Derrick Higginbotham and has published widely in peer-reviewed venues such as Hispanic Review, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, and University of Toronto Quarterly.
Chad Leahy is Assistant Professor of Spanish at the University of Denver, where his research and teaching focus on medieval and early modern Spanish cultural studies. He is currently completing a monograph entitled Jerusalem and the Early Modern Invention of Spain, and is also co-author (with Ken Tully) of Jerusalem Afflicted: Quaresmius, Spain, and the Idea of a 17th-Century Crusade (Routledge, 2019). His research has appeared in journals including Anuario Lope de Vega, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, Cervantes, Criticón, Hispanic Review, Lemir, Revista de Literatura Medieval, Romance Notes, and Translat Library.
