What Queer Iberians Have to
Say Gregory S. Hutcheson, University of
Louisville
During a trip to Spain in the summer of 2000, I stumbled
across a blurb in Zero, a glitzy Spanish monthly that touts itself as
la primera revista gay de información y estilos de vida en
español. Its readership is young, affluent, caught up in all of
the obsessions of the American urban gay community (especially the cult to the
male physique). Zeros take on Queer Iberia is grudging at
best, acknowledging as it does the import of the volume while taking exception
to the colonization of Iberian materials by American interlopers. It makes bald
reference to what it perceives to be a gay Anglo-Saxon agenda (cierto
monolitismo del pensamiento gay anglosajón), one informed
primarily by Foucault and reduced in essence to the drive to entender el
centro a través del margen. (Sour grapes, I thought, especially in
a magazine that looks every bit the clone of Out or Genre or
The Advocate when it was still in its crashing-out
phase....)
If truth be told, however, the queer of Queer
Iberia is the extent of our gay Anglo-Saxon posturing. Joe Blackmore and I
had certainly intended the title as an activist act, one we aimed at the
American academy in hopes of destabilizing the rigid academic discourse
inherent in medieval studies (and in Luso-Hispanic medieval studies in
particular). But few are the contributions that subscribe to queer theory a
secas, fewer still those that draw deliberately on Foucault. The bulk of us
engage in readings informed by the terms of feminism or new historicism. And
some of us are decidedly (although perhaps not deliberately)
counter-Foucauldian in our efforts to salvage a gay history in much the same
way as John Boswell did in his now classic Christianity, Social Tolerance,
and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the
Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century.
Whats more, Joe and I
for our part had attempted in our introduction to define queerness
in terms informed less by Foucault than by Américo Castro,1 a
critical move that cost us credibility in some quarters, but earned us
accolades from the likes of Juan Goytisolo. On a lark Id sent Goytisolo a
copy of the volume shortly after it came out in July 1999. His support was
immediate and uncompromising. In a review essay entitled Contra una
lectura anémica de nuestra literatura: a propósito de Queer
Iberia (which he read at both NYU and the University of Illinois at
Chicago in April of 2000 and finally published as the first of his regular
contributions to ABC Cultural in February of this year), he argues for
endeavors such as Queer Iberia as a vital antidote to those
sterilized and dogmatic readings of medieval literature plaguing
the classrooms and lecture halls of the modern Spanish university.He
understands queer as precisely that which the Spanish academy,
still mired in Francos national Catholic discourse, refuses to
acknowledge in medieval Spanish society, a society that was
hetero-génea y abigarrada, formada por grupos muy diversos y de
fronteras mudables e indecisas (8). Its not difficult to see Castro
lurking in formulations such as these, or in the particular attention Goytisolo
pays to essays that tease out the relationship between sodomitic discourse and
constructions of ethnic difference. A no dudar, he concludes,
la sodomía, como sinécdoque, se convierte en la mejor y
más eficaz arma arrojadiza de la casta cristiana vieja (10).
Whats new here is the insertion of sodomy into Castros reading of
the so-called edad conflictiva, but the discourse remains entirely
castrista, and Goytisolos admiration for the volume contingent on
the degree to which Castro is palpably present.2
Back to
Zero. Again, whence the notion of an Anglo-Saxon agenda if, in the final
analysis, Castros is by far the more deliberate presence? A third review,
this one appearing in the premiere issue of Reverso, Spains first
academic journal devoted to queer studies, provides at least a partial answer.
Penned by Alfredo Martínez-Expósito, author of Los escribas
furiosos: Configuraciones homoeróticas en la narrativa
española, it is given the rather oblique title Hispanismos
queery la Iberia medieval. Martínez-Expósito demonstates
little if any antipathy toward so-called gay Anglo-Saxon theory, citing as he
does not only Teresa de Lauretis, whom he considers the doyenne of queer
theory, but also the two other volumes to come out of Duke on the matter of
Hispanic sexualities: Bergmann and Smiths ¿Entiendes?: Queer
Readings, Hispanic Writings (1995) and Molloy and Irwins
Hispanisms and Homosexualities (1998). With respect to Queer
Iberia in particular, he admits without compunction that [l]os
medievalistas se beneficiarán sin duda de un volumen que, en conjunto,
demuestra que los estudios queer tienen mucho que aportar a nuestro
conocimiento de ese período (106). What intrigues me is the
following assertion: En su introducción, los editores abundan en
la idea, lugar común ya del hispanismo anglosajón, de que
la historia de los pueblos peninsulares es un rico compendio de hetero-doxias
(razas, religiones y lenguas con muy distintos entendimientos de la sexualidad)
que parecen estar reclamando un estudio desde la perspectiva queer
(105, emphasis mine). Castro emerges again, in this quotation by allusion, in
the gloss that follows on its heels by name:
La historia de la
sexualidad pone de nuevo sobre la mesa las disputas históricas entre los
seguidores de Menéndez y Pelayo y los de Américo Castro, es
decir, entre una esencia, la hispanidad -precedente de la
España eterna- y una práctica, la convivencia (si
bien violenta) de gentes diferentes. La historia de los sodomitas, de las
travestidas, de los hermafroditas incluso, se nos va dibujando poco a poco en
trabajos que comienzan a ofrecer una silueta de nuestra historia de perfiles
insospe-chados: esas historias largamente silenciadas, olvidadas, esclarecen
los avatares de la difícil convivencia peninsular. Están en el
centro de nuestra historia, no en sus márgenes; al menos eso es lo que
este queering pretende sugerir, con no pocas ni nimias razones.
(105-106)
Martínez-Expósito reads our queering
project in much the same way as Zero, as an effort to reach the center
through the margins, only he understands that project to be informed by Castro,
not Foucault (this very much in line with the paradigms of Joes and my
Introduction to the volume). Nonetheless -and this is what made the lightbulb
click on for me- he perceives our particular strain of queer theory, even if
informed by Castro, to be just as much an Anglo-American innovation. Castro may
have founded a school of Spanish historicism, but it was the Americans (and
Spanish ex-patriots living in the US) who were his most zealous disciples, and
whats more, hell-bent on dropping Castros historical vision back on
Spains doorstep.
While attending The Future of the Queer
Past conference at the University of Chicago in Fall of 2000, I was
struck by Argentinian activist Alejandra Sardás intervention in
the closing plenary session. She warned against what she called American
gay cultural imperialism, that is, the deliberate forging of a global gay
culture and the presumption of a common sociopolitical agenda. The Stonewall
model, she pointed out in what came surely as a shock to many of the American
activists in attendance, is not necessarily consonant with the social,
cultural, and political realities of other countries, and indeed, it might very
well be the exception rather than the rule. Latin America in particular, while
certainly embracing American models, has also begun resisting these same
models.
I suppose we shouldnt underestimate the extent to which
our selection of the title Queer Iberia smacks precisely of
this sort of imperialism, the extent to which the term queer is
shorthand in some circles for Anglo-American gay activism at its most
self-serving and myopic. What we didnt bank on when devising the title
was its absolute resistance to translation. I had occasion to ponder possible
Spanish titles with Goytisolo when he was in Chicago: Iberia mariconil
(hopelessly reductionist); Iberia torcida (taking off on the term coined
by Ricardo Llamas in his landmark Teoría torcida:Prejuicios y
discursos en torno a «la homosexualidad»); and finally, a
translation suggested by Goytisolo himself, Iberia loca, which, to my
mind, is as problematic as mariconil in that it imposes a
female-identified male homosexuality as the default. Ultimately,
queer is a term so entrenched in both its etymology and the history
of its deliberate appropriation by the Anglo-American gay community that it
cannot be rendered by any single term in the Spanish. By using
queer in our title, we unwittingly created an entity that resists
a priori a quick-and-easy translation of the whole, that appears to
impose English as the default when speaking about the Iberian subjects we
study, that perpetuates Anglo-American models of writing queer
history.
Back to Zero. Im only now beginning to understand
why it sticks in my craw. It forces me to recognize my own biases both as a gay
man who came to self-awareness in post-Stonewall America and as an American
stepchild of the Castro school. I applaud so readily both Goytisolos
essay and Martínez-Expósitos review because they speak the
historical discourse I cut my teeth on, because they mirror my epistemology and
legitimize my incursions into a history that is, ultimately, not my own.
Zero refuses to let me off the hook so easily. Nor should
it.
Zero certainly goes so far as to call Queer Iberia
fundamental, but it prefers to see the volumes value as
provisional. [I]niciativas semejantes, it says, han de ocupar
un lugar preferente en nuestra biblioteca hasta que se consiga crear (parece
que ya se va logrando) un corpus hispánico de análisis de
nuestra propia queer historia. In the end Id have to agree.
We need not become canonical in order to feel weve had an impact on
medieval Iberian studies. If Queer Iberia serves only as a jump-start to
Iberias appropriation of its own queer past, whatever term it might end
up using to designate that past,3 then I think we have ample reason
to congratulate ourselves.
Whether there will be a translation of
Queer Iberia into the Spanish remains to be seen. It seemed probable as
little as a year ago. It seems less relevant these days, now that a home-grown
queer studies is taking off in journals such as Reverso and
in the research not only of Llamas and Martínez-Expósito, but
also of Xosé M. Buxán and Alfredo Miras. Those of us still intent
on queering Iberia would be well advised to begin listening more carefully to
what queer Iberians themselves have to say.
1 Castro and
his school effected in essence a queering of Iberian history by
exposing the Semitic roots of modern Spanish identity and by outing
as the descendants of Jews or Muslims such icons as Fernando el
Católico, Teresa of Avila, and Cervantes. His was not a campaign
of cultural iconoclasm, as some of his detractors have implied, but rather an
embracing of difference that obliterated the need to read Spain always as an
appendage to greater Europe. It was Castro who brought Spain out of the closet
and forced it to face -ultimately to celebrate- the complexities of its
cultural and even its racial identities. It is in this sense that we might
understand queerness, as that which normativity -in this case a cultural
normativity- must reject or conceal in order to exist. Its presence is always
palpable in the incongruities, excesses, or anxieties of normative discourse,
but it is only exceptionally given expression, and this only at the
margins... (Hutcheson and Blackmore, Introduction
3).
2 Not coincidentally, of the five contributors Goytisolo mentions by
name in his excursus on the discourse of sodomy, four studied with the likes of
Stephen Gilman and Francisco Márquez Villanueva, both unapologetic
disciples of the Castro school. It seems we all wore our allegiances on our
textual sleeves.
3 Of note is Reversos subtitle: Revista
de estudios lesbianos, gays, bisexuales, transexuales,
transgénero... It would seem that by the ellipsis the editors mean
to approach queer as closely as possible without actually deploying
the term. Such is their prerogative, I would argue.