Monstrous Displays: Representation and Perversion in Spanish Literature

Monstrous Displays explores how Spanish literature from the early seventeenth to the twentieth century represents some behaviors, ideologies, and identities as perverse. It shows the ways in which narratives of perversion, steeped in religious, legal, and scientific strictures, appropriate the language of a highly ambiguous discourse, that of monstrosity, to render visible their abhorrent and alluring qualities. Through readings of overlooked aspects of classic texts (Lope de Vega’s El Castigo sin Verganza, Benito Pérez Galdos´Doña Perfecta) and non-traditional interpretations of lesser-known texts, Vélez-Quiñones shows how the presence of a monstrous order of things can sometimes conceal a more troubling and relevant domain of perversion, and how sometimes, instead, it indicates a subversive political program. With its use of a wide variety of theoretical discourses – Renaissance teratological treatises as well as the work of Judith Butler, Jonathan Dollimore, Marjorie Garber, and others – Monstrous Displays will engage readers and scholars in the fields of Hispanic Studies, Queer Theory, and Gender Studies.