In Masculinity and Queer Desire in Spanish Enlightenment Literature, Mehl Allan Penrose examines three distinct male figures, each of which was represented as the Other in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Spanish literature. The most common configuration of non-normative men was the petimetre, an effeminate, Francophile male who figured a failed masculinity, a dubious sexuality, and an invasive French cultural presence. Also inscribed within cultural discourse were the bujarrón or 'sodomite,' who participates in sexual relations with men, and the Arcadian shepherd, who expresses his desire for other males and who takes on agency as the voice of homoerotica.
Analyzing journalistic essays, poetry, and drama, Penrose shows that Spanish authors employed queer images of men to engage debates about how males should appear, speak, and behave and whom they should love in order to be considered 'real' Spaniards.
Penrose interrogates works by a wide range of writers, including Luis Cañuelo, Ramón de la Cruz, and Félix María de Samaniego, arguing that the tropes created by these authors solidified the gender and sexual binary and defined and described what a 'queer' man was in the Spanish collective imaginary.
Contents: Introduction: inventing the queer; Part I The Reinvention of Masculinity and the Problematic Petimetre; The invocations of hermaphroism in the periodicals El Censor, El Duende Especulativo, and El Pensador; Proto-camp: humor as critical instrument in Ramon de la Cruz's El petimetre and La oposicion a cortejo. Part II The Invention of Sexuality and the Homoerotic Male: 'I don't burn candles of that sort': male homoerotica as sexual violence in Enlightenment poetry; Male friendship, love, and longing in the poetry of Manuel Maria del Marmol; Conclusion: a newly emerging consciousness; Works cited; Index.
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