>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^M00:00:03 ^M00:00:17 >> Francisco Macias: Thank you, everyone. Hello, and welcome. I am Francisco Macias from the Law Library of Congress. We have had an amazing series of events in observance of Hispanic Heritage Month. And I would like to thank all my colleagues for their commitment to making 2016 another huge success in the showcasing of our heritage. What is additionally noteworthy for today's program is that October is also LGBT History Month in the United States. So today's program is particularly significant for two communities that embody the American mosaic. I would like to thank the Hispanic Division, our natural partner, the Library of Congress Office of Equal Employment and Diversity Programs, the African and Middle Eastern Division, the Rare Books and Special Collections Division, LC GLOBE, and the LC Hispanic Cultural Society. It would be normal for quality to wane a bit at the end of a month-long celebration. But I know this isn't the case here. In fact, I believe we are ending on a very high note. And it is the collegial spirit of people from these custodial divisions and organizations that has made possible this program. Special thanks to my colleagues, Nicholas Brown and Roberto Salazar for their support throughout the planning and execution of these programs. Both of our guests today are extraordinary in caliber. So I will introduce them in alphabetical order, Dr. Josiah Blackmore is a Nancy Clark Smith professor of the Language and Literature of Portugal at Harvard University. For 22 years, he taught at the University of Toronto. In addition to the history of the sexuality in Iberia, especially that of Portugal, his research interests include the literary culture of maritime expansions, shipwreck narratives, Luso-African and counter narratives in the medieval and early modern periods, the Galician-Portuguese lyric schools of the 13th and 14th centuries and modern Portuguese poetry. He has held visiting professorships at Harvard, and at the University of Chicago. And in 2006, was visiting scholar at the Ernest Oppenheimer Institute for Portuguese Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand's Johannesburg, South Africa. And I have to pause there. His books include "Manifest Perdition," "Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire Moorings" -- pardon me, "Moorings: Portuguese Expansion and the Writing of Africa." And in addition, Fernando Pessoa's English translations of poetry of the first-known gay Portuguese poet, Antonio Botto, "The Songs of Antonio Botto." Professor Gregory S. Hutchinson is associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, an affiliated faculty in the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program at the University of Louisville. He has published on gender, sexuality, and queer desire in the Spanish Middle Ages, attributing to edited volumes, such as "Same Sex Desire Between women in the Middle Ages," "Queer in the Middle Ages," and, "Under the Influence Questioning the Comparative in Medieval Iberia. With Josiah Blackmore, he co edited the book "We Are Here to Learn about "Queer Iberia", Sexualities, Cultures and Crossing from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance." His current research explores the sites of negotiation between Islam and Christianity in Medieval Iberian text. Please join me in welcoming Professors Blackmore and Hutchinson. ^M00:04:10 [ Applause ] ^M00:04:16 >> Josiah Blackmore: Thank you very, very much, Francisco. I know -- and thank you all for attending. I know Greg and I want to extend a very sincere and heartfelt thanks to the Library of Congress, and to Francisco Macias for inviting us to come, because this has been something ever since we received the invitation we've been looking forward to. And we've been exchanging e-mails, and texts, and at the prompting of some excellent questions that Francisco provided us about a month ago, Greg and I are thinking of just having a conversation here about the book, how it was born, where we think the field is going; and we invite your participation. So Greg is going to begin by talking a little bit about the back story, the scholarly and disciplinary back story of "Queer Iberia" when we first started thinking about this project in the early 1990s. >> Gregory Hutcheson: Thank you, Joe. And I echo Joe's note of thanks for Francisco in particular. I feel like we've become old friends, even though today is the first time we're meeting. And actually PowerPoint, if you could bring up the first slide, which is going to very important. Joe and I have been talking about this, and actually not only Joe and I but also other colleagues in our graduate program. We were both graduate students at Harvard back in the '80s. We've been talking about this topic probably for a good 30 years at this point. And last night we had yet another animated exchange. Every time we get together, we end up talking about "Queer Iberia" and its resonance. Very animated exchange over drinks at my hotel, leading, once again, to new ideas and sparking new interests between ourselves in the topic, or what I've come to call the ""Queer Iberia" project. for me it all started with what you see on the screen right now, which is the volume that came out in 1980. John Boswell, I think for everybody, is the iconic volume for anybody who's studied homosexuality in the Middle Ages. "Christianity, Social Tolerance and Homosexuality," for those of us who were graduate students at that point in time, a seminal because it really gave us a sense that this is a legitimate topic of research. So much so for me that as I was trying to come up with a topic for my dissertation -- here I was a [inaudible] medievalist, working with a very renowned member of the Harvard faculty, Francisco Marquez Villanueva, who was my dissertation director. I in collaboration with him was trying to come up with a topic for my dissertation. So excited about this volume was I that I marched into his office in [inaudible] Library and said very boldly, "I would like to work on homosexuality Hispano Middle Ages." And his reply I'll give it to you in Spanish first and then, the translation, his reply was, "Pues, pues." And I don't -- Yan [phonetic] recognizes that accent, "Pues, pues. [Speaks Spanish]," which in translation means, "It would be better not to leave here, leave Harvard, with a sword in the hand." In other words, careful with that topic, careful with working on something that still is so terribly controversial in the academy. I ended up obviously working on a completely different topic, it was a song book from the 15th century. But Joe and I kept up the dialogue, and I guess shortly after we both had degree in hand and had our first professional appointments -- well I'm going to turn it over to Joe. He'll talk about what happened next. >> Josiah Blackmore: Well, I mean, Greg is completely right that as graduate students, this whole conversation began, And it was kind of -- it was like trying to find form for some ideas. And when the very first professional conference that Greg and I went to, we went to it together, which was Kalamazoo on a conferences on Medieval Studies, and in the early '90s, we were noticing that there was nothing on sexuality studies in medieval Iberia, participating in then current discussions of an evolving field. So we decided that maybe we could put together a small panel at Kalamazoo to think about some of these issues. So in 1994, we had our panel, "Queer Iberia", and four presenters; we had invited four presenters, who ended up being contributors to the volume. At the time, this was unheard of in Hispano medievalism in Iberia studies. This was a topic no one was touching. And the response was so vibrant in May of 1994 at that conference that we decided we needed to do something with this, something to take it beyond the conference circuit and integrate it into a larger scholarly conversation. And that's when we came up with the idea of simply a volume of essays. We ended up -- I remember our first talk was at the airport in Toronto. You had come up and you were going back to Chicago, and we were sitting in Terminal One, and we decided this might be a thing to do. And from that point on, the volume took on a life of its own. So we eventually -- we worked up a proposal, we submitted it to several presses, and we want to give a shout-out here today to Duke University Press and the then assistant editor, Richard Morrison, who -- Duke responded it was in about a week's time, I think, and they were so excited about this that it was exactly what two young scholars at the beginning of their careers needed to push something forward. >> Gregory Hutcheson: But I should add that Duke already had a demonstrated commitment to queer Hispanisms I guess is the best way to put it, with two volumes that had come out previously, "Entiendes Queer Readings Hispanic Writings," which came out in 1995, followed by "Hispanisms and Homosexualities" in 1998. So this is one of the reasons why we gravitated towards Duke, because of that demonstrated commitment to queer Hispanisms. But not queer Hispano-medievalism. Really, the inquiry of both of those volumes began with the early modern period. Nothing had been done in the Middle Ages. And if anything had been done on medieval sexualities, it tended to move in one of two directions, either sexuality in the Middle Ages was limited exclusively to heterosexuality, it was the study of heterosexuality, or if there was any treatment of queer sexualities, it was through a kind of sensationalistic framework, taking sodomy, for example, and sensationalizing it, rather than naturalizing it, and making it part of a spectrum of sexualities in medieval Iberia, so. >> Josiah Blackmore: Yes, yes. So one of the questions Francisco asked us to think about is, "Why "Queer Iberia"," in addition to what we've just said. And the subtitle -- to us one of the most important words of the subtitle is "crossings," because in Iberia, of course, there are borders and frontiers of many kinds; cultures, sexuality, language, religion. And these borders suggest something very rich and faceted that we wanted to explore as a whole. So between the kingdoms of what is now modern-day Spain, and the kingdom of Portugal, which came to have its current political boundaries in 1248, we were looking to think about how there was a certain fungability [phonetic], or precocity, as opposed to walls and obstacles. So it very much was a project of border crossings of many kinds. And I think when we were putting together the volume and doing our own essays, we certainly felt that. And in the past 17 years, that's one of the things I think that people at least have said to me most of all is how much they appreciate that Iberian perspective as a historical reality, as a methodology, as a critical methodology. So it was something we became very invested in, wouldn't you say? ^M00:13:49 ^M00:13:50 >> Gregory Hutcheson: Absolutely. I would also say that our queering of medieval Iberia really -- we ended up contextualizing it through a different kind of query, a cultural query that had already been a bit realized by Americo Castro. Americo Castro is one of the great Hispanics [phonetic] of the middle 20th century. He proposed a radically different reading of the medieval and early modern context in Iberia, one which took him to far greater consideration the 800th year presence of Islam in Iberia. And you can see on the map that's on the screen right now the furthest most northern region -- or border between Christian Europe and what was at that time Muslim Europe. The Muslim presence in Iberia began in 711 with a crossing of Arabic peoples along with Berber peoples into the space of Iberia, moved to the -- virtually to the border with France, and progressively over the course of several centuries the Christian north began pushing southward. But that border -- as Joe implied, that border was always a porous border, one not simply of conflict, but also of cultural negotiation. Medieval -- if you switch to the next side that will give us a sense of medieval Castro's notion of medieval Iberia. This probably summarizes it best. It's from his Espania in Historia Spain and its history that came out in 1948. He says that the most universal aspect of Hispanic character traced their roots to lifestyles forged during 900 years of Christian Islamic Jewish intermingling. This brought rise -- this, as we call it, the "cultural queering of Iberia," the destabilizing of Iberia as centered in Europe, this brought rise to immediate response in the part of more nationalist leading scholars, such as Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz, who re-described Iberia in the context of Europe and moreover, portrayed Iberian Spain in particular as the shield of Christian Europe against the Islamic intrusion. And eventually, that re-conquest that what was termed, the "Christian re-conquest of Spain," it eventually had its culmination in 1492, red-letter year, we just celebrated it I guess the other day, the discovery of the New World, but also for Spain, a red-letter year in other respects. The conquest by the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabelle of the last foothold of Islamic Iberia in the Iberian Peninsula, which was Granada, the Kingdom of Granada, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and this confluence of events for many contemporary scholars of a nationalist leading represents that moment when Spain recovered its original identity. It finally expelled that Semitic presence from the space of Iberia and reasserted its Spanish identity. For us that was the model for our own queering, our own destabilizing of Iberian sexualities in the Middle Ages. And what gave this further weight is a comment that came in one of Claudio Sanchez-Albornoz's later works in 1983. Speaking about the re-conquest, one of the consequences, the re-conquest for him was that homosexuality, as he put it, which was so widely practiced in Moorish Spain, would have triumphed had the Christians not managed to expel the Muslims from Spain. So Sanchez-Albornoz was also setting up that border between Christian Spain and Muslim Spain, as a border between heterosexual Spain, represented by Christian Spain, and homosexual Spain, represented by alandanos [phonetic], or the Islamic presence. These were all provocations for us, and gave further weight to the project that we were engaging in. And I would say I've been very critical of the "Queer Iberia" project since then, and probably far more critical than Joe. Joe has become one of the great cheerleaders of this project. I had ended up criticizing parts of it. One of the parts -- one of the defects I see in the "Queer Iberia" volume as it came out is that while some of us do engage with the cultural aspects of medieval Iberia, it doesn't really come to the fore that kind of intersection of sexual non-normativities with the othering of the Semitic presence in Iberia. And one of our challenges I think as we move forward with this "Queer Iberia" project is to pull into the project that constant cultural negotiation that's taking place throughout the medieval Iberian context. >> Josiah Blackmore: Yes, definitely so. >> Gregory Hutcheson: Joe, I'm sorry. >> Josiah Blackmore: No, I agree completely. One of the questions Francisco asked both Greg and me is to think about specific contributions, if we had favored contributions. And it's -- we both agree that we cannot single out one contribution, for a lot of good reasons. When I think back on this project, among other things, it was just like an amazing scholarly collaborative party. The collaborative aspect on this is what we treasured then and treasure now. One, we like so much the fact that we were able to get scholars of different critical, and methodological, and disciplinary stripes into the volume, literary scholars, cultural historians, historians, scholars of religion and spirituality. So that collaborative aspect is so strong, and it's one of the things we're simply most proud of. >> Gregory Hutcheson: Yes, absolutely. >> Josiah Blackmore: When we look back on that, and what a group of people working together even though with different ideas. I remember once we were thinking about -- and I just now remembered this, we were trying to decide when we were going to do the collection of essays, should we publish this, say, as a special issue of a journal, or should we try to publish it as a book? And one of my colleagues said, "Articles are good; books are better. Nothing like a book to make a statement." And so we thought, "Well, we're going to gun for the book then." So when -- and I think the collaborative multidisciplinary, multi-methodological approach that the volume represents shows the agility of Iberian studies as a field to engage in different kinds of persuasive scholarship to push at borders, to cause crossings, to find paths. So I think we're -- I would say I don't think either one of us could have done this alone. >> Gregory Hutcheson: No; absolutely not. >> Josiah Blackmore: And that's one of the -- what came to my mind the most and has been with me since 1994 when we did that session at Kalamazoo. >> Gregory Hutcheson: And I would say as well that the energy that came out of our dialogue, starting with that conversation in the airport in Toronto. Joe has an incredible memory for these details. I'm always struck when we chat because he brings up things I've completely forgotten. But the energy that came out of that dialogue is really what gave us the -- how can I put it, the cajones, I guess, to -- [laughter] as very junior scholars, to move forward with this project. And in fact we -- ^M00:22:26 ^M00:22:27 >> Josiah Blackmore: And in fact, you know, here we were, I was two years into a non-tenure track position. I didn't even know if my position was going to become tenured track. Greg was in a tenure track position, but seriously, pre-tenure scholars. And I mentioned this project to a senior colleague, and the answer was very preemptory, "Joe, if you do a book with 'queer' in the title, that would be professional suicide." And I thought, "Wow, what do I do now?" Right? I listened to my seniors in the field as guides. But we were so -- here again, this collaborative aspect between Greg and me, and between us and our collaborators, really gave us the oomph to say, "Well, but we believe in this." >> Gregory Hutcheson: Among senior colleagues as well, senior scholars in the field; and I think that was what ended up being most important to us, and gave us the wherewithal to move forward is the fact that so many senior colleagues in the field, whether in history, or in literary studies stepped up to be part of this volume. They recognized in this volume something that would be -- >> Josiah Blackmore: Yes, that's right. >> Gregory Hutcheson: Groundbreaking. And -- >> Josiah Blackmore: Yes. So the reception -- this is a way of us leading into the idea of the reception of the volume, which Greg is going to say some things which are really quite interesting, because the reception in North America, and the reception in Spain, and the reception in Portugal, those are very interesting parts of the story. Greg's going to talk about some of the more contentious reviews by North American scholars in Spain and Portugal, going to mention a few of these as well. As the volume made its way into libraries and onto people's desks to read both in North America and Iberia itself, every once in a while, we would get contacts, scholars, young scholars in Portugal and Spain, writing us saying, "Wow, we never thought we would see something like this." Because at the time, it was not possible for someone in Iberia to take on something called ""Queer Iberia"," right? And I remember getting e-mails from high school teachers in Portugal and Spain, saying, "This is something that finally, this is coming out in a major press, but it still would be very hard for us --" meaning Portuguese or Spanish nationals, to do this because it was so risky in an academy that was still very traditional, very traditional. But Greg's going to talk about some of the reviews, which are really interesting, I think. And these reviews -- in fact, our conversation last night, we spent most of the time talking about these reviews and what they mean to us now almost 20 years later. >> Gregory Hutcheson: Well, and I'll add to what Joe just mentioned about the reception here in the States, especially from -- or in Spain and Portugal from high school teacher. Here in the States, I'm still struck by the fact that when I attend conferences, graduate students, new colleagues in formation, when they meet me and they hear my name, are kind of star struck. I'm amazed by that. And then I realize that "Queer Iberia" is now part of the reading list for many graduate programs in Hispanic Studies. And I'm delighted to see that there is still interest, and that there's still a possibility these younger scholars moving forward the "Queer Iberia" project. That's something that Joe and I are completely invested in. But I think among the most critical -- among our American colleagues, the most critical were the historians. And Joe and I were coming out of a program of literary and cultural studies at Harvard, the historians -- and we'll mention no names because actually, they sort of -- they verge on the same criticisms in particular. And to my mind, in hindsight, many of them are legitimate criticisms, and yet I think they can all be contested to some extent, and serve as new impetus as we move forward. One of the criticisms was this notion of Iberian exceptionalism, that we were portraying "Queer Iberia" as exceptional within the context of medieval Europe. And this is predicated on the notion that's brought up my Americo Castro. We saw that previously, Americo Castro is also talking about Spain as being essentially different from Europe because of that intermingling of Christians, Muslims, and Jews. As our historian friends -- want to say -- one of them actually said, "Well, Americo Castro went out -- nobody over the age of 60 is still talking about Americo Castro." Another one said, "Oh, here we go again, Spain is different." And yet, and yet, Spain and Portugal, Iberia in the Middle Ages, is to my mind different in many respects. And sexuality is being negotiated and mediated through a different cultural context. It does, to my mind, make a difference, and is something we do need to tease out more and more as we move forward. What's interesting as well, Joe and I talked about this, Americo Castro in the 21st Century, that review came out back in the 1990s. Here in the 21st century, in 2016, we are still talking about Americo Castro. He is still coming to the fore in scholarship, and being -- if only to be contested, but he's still a point of contention enough so that we're being energized by that discussion, whether we're talking about sexualities, or cultures, or crossings in the Iberian Middle Ages. I should mention Americo -- we're both probably, I like to say, "intellectual grandchildren" of Americo Castro. He was the teacher of our teachers. And so we are, in some respects, very close to Americo Castro, and he still is essential to the way we read the Iberian Middle Ages. I don't know if you want to add anything to this notion of Iberian exceptionalism. >> Josiah Blackmore: Well, I think it would be just the say that when we think about the kingdoms of Spain and Portugal we do have different histories there. And it is the case -- Southern Portugal, you had the Muslim-Jewish-Christian mix, but certainly not to the extent, at least, that you did in the Al-Andalus, but it was there. So you have in Portugal a very interesting situation where oftentimes -- and this is something I'll get to in just a few minutes, documentary evidence or archival sources for medieval Portuguese, forms of queerness in all of the ways we tried to define that in the volume, are somewhat harder to come by. And I'll get back to that in a bit. But I think you wanted to talk about some of the reviews themselves, right? >> Gregory Hutcheson: Well, actually I wanted to -- that was one of the next points, one of the issues raised is that the volume wasn't fully representative of Iberia, but rather focused principally on the kingdom of Castile and what would become of the Spanish state. And Joe obviously as a scholar in Portuguese, has a few things to say about that as well. >> Josiah Blackmore: Yes. Well, again, the documentary evidence for the kinds of queerness we're studying in this volume tends to be scarce, up until the late -- or up until the mid -- beginning of the 17th century. Right; so you have a much more -- and then with the Inquisition you have -- and the records of the Portuguese Inquisition, you have a treasure trove of documentary evidence. But nonetheless, my own piece, which was on the medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric, to me is one of the most vibrant expressions of these crossings and borders that other scholars talked about in different ways having to do with Castile or other kingdoms of Spain. >> Gregory Hutcheson: Yes. >> Josiah Blackmore: So. >> Gregory Hutcheson: I think probably one of the best comments that came out of historical review was one that makes the case for contextualizing queerness in the local and in the particular. And as we move forward with this project that makes more and more sense to me. Yes; I do admit we cultural scholars and literary scholars tend to speak in broad strokes. And the historian does keep us true to the task of trying to determine what is going on. And whatever is going on in terms of sexuality in the Middle Ages does need to be negotiated, not in broad strokes, but within the particular as well. So it keeps us honest. And I delight in that kind of dialogue we've been establishing between historians and cultural scholars as well. But as one of our colleagues mentions, we tend to compartmentalize literary studies, and cultural studies, and historical studies in different compartments. Whereas in the Middle Ages, there was really no distinction between history, and literature, and culture. And from our contemporary perspective, by imposing those compartmentalizations onto areas of research and areas of knowledge, we in some respects are not being true to the Middle Ages. So the challenges move in several different directions, and all of it continues to be negotiated, and I think in very powerful ways. The Spanish reviews, I think -- >> Josiah Blackmore: Yes, yes, go ahead. >> Gregory Hutcheson: And that's what you want me to get to. >> Josiah Blackmore: That's what I want. >> Gregory Hutcheson: The most interesting. We didn't realize that we would end up in the popular press in Spain. I think that's the next slide. "Sero [phonetic] Magazine," which is a gay rag, I guess is the best way to put it, it's along the lines of "The Advocate" back in the '80s and '90s. I guess "The Advocate" was being published through that time period, and up to the present as well. "Sero" the Spanish response to a magazine along the lines of "The Advocate." And we ended up actually -- "Sero" gave us a very brief review in "The Advocate," if you push the button, this will come up, which I thought was illuminating. We had made the assumption -- as we edited this volume, we had made the assumption that we were speaking for Iberia as well. And the review in "Queer" -- you have to go forward. The review here in "Sero Magazine" talks about [speaks Spanish] -- I'm trying to get the word, the exact word there, [speaks Spanish] -- ^M00:34:23 [ Speaking in Spanish ] ^M00:34:24 >> [Speaks Spanish]. Thank you very much, [speaks Spanish], monolithism, there we go, in our use of queer theory. In other words, it was an Anglo -- as the review here puts it, "an Anglo-Saxon import," which for us would be Anglo-American, the Anglo-American School of Queer Theory. Here we were, colonizing the Iberian past, speaking in the name of Spanish and Portuguese scholars. My argument would be that really the queerest part about "Queer Iberia," in terms of queer theory, the queerest part was the title. And that really in individual pieces in "Queer Iberia," there were a few of us who were actually engaging in query theory, [speaks Spanish], as we put it in Spanish. And so I think the challenge of this review, though, is a pertinent one for us, and that is to get greater collaboration on the part of Portuguese and Spanish scholars in this long-term "Queer Iberia" project. Move forward? Probably one of the most amazing experiences that came out of the "Queer Iberian" project was our collaboration with Juan Goytisolo. Juan Goytisolo is, in essence, has been for a long time the kind of the gadfly of Spain's national Catholicism, the Nacional Catholicismo that came out of Franckewitz [phonetic] Spain. He had gone into exile in Paris, is currently residing in Morocco, and from his [speaks Spanish] in exile from the Spanish cultural establishment, he has written works that at every turn compromised that notion of essential Spanish -- Catholic Spanish identity. Juan Goytisolo jumped onboard immediately with the "Queer Iberia" project, wrote his own review, which came out in [speaks Spanish], one of the major publications in Spain, defending the project, but defending it specifically from the perspective of Americo Castro. Juan Goytisolo is very much in line with the Castro project of decentralizing Spain, destabilizing that nationalistic notion of Spanish identity. The review that he wrote calling -- which was titled -- ^M00:36:48 [ Speaking in Spanish ] ^M00:36:50 against an anemic reading of Spanish literature, ended up being anthologized in this volume which I think summarizes Juan Goytisolo's own project, "Pajaro que Ensucia su Propio Nido," which is in essence "The Bird That --" how can I put that politely, "The Bird That Soils its own Nest." And he saw himself as that bird that was soiling with every purpose of soiling, soiling the nest of Spain. And so he very incorporated -- very quickly incorporated "Queer Iberia" into his broader project of destabilizing essential Spanish identity. What's curious is that certainly, whereas the [inaudible] review understood our project as an importation of Anglo-Saxon queer theory, Juan Goytisolo and a few other reviewers as well understood it the way we intended it, as something very much in line with the Americo Castro project of destabilizing. He understood it specifically from that perspective, and sees us as allies, and sees the full project as allies in the effort to destabilize Spanish history. So we were delighted by that collaboration. And actually, Goytisolo took this review on the road. He presented it at New York University at my old home campus at that time, the University of Illinois in Chicago. And the review keeps going republished, not only this volume, but elsewhere as well. So I think it's very much in the forefront in his mind as he moves forward with his own destabilizing project. What's interesting, I was walking through the halls of the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid two years ago with a colleague in Hispano Medieval Studies. And in the entryway, you have the full array of winners of the Cervantes Award, awarded to those authors in Spanish language literature who have achieved the highest echelons. And I made comment -- made mention to my colleague, "Well, one day we will see Juan Goytisolo's portrait here in the Biblioteca Nacional." And his response was, "I doubt it. I doubt it," the notion being someone like Juan Goytisolo could never possibly win the Cervantes Award. Lo and behold last year, [laughter] Juan Goytisolo was awarded the Cervantes prize, and this is actually the portrait that is now hanging in the Biblioteca Nacional. But of course, for something like Juan Goytisolo, he is suddenly becoming canonical, which makes him very nervous. [Laughter] So we'll see how this plays out over the long term. Anyway so -- >> Josiah Blackmore: I'm wondering if now would be the time just to mention how -- and I want to make a comment on the cover image for the book that we're going to return to at the very end of our presentation. That it was very gratifying over the years to see how this project came to motivate other work. And what I mean by that is in 2001, so this was two years after the book was published, there was a conference at the University of Pennsylvania organized by Michael Solomon, called "Return to Queer Iberia," where scholars who hadn't participated -- a lot of scholars who hadn't participated came to speak about their own work. I never thought when Duke University Press contacted us now about eight years ago saying that "Queer Iberia" is going to a second printing. You know, when does that ever happen with an academic book on Iberian studies. And many projects since then have been one way or another taken a cue from our book, which we find very gratifying. Gary Chestaro, who was our classmate at Harvard, published a collection of essays several years ago called "Queer Italia," and he acknowledges us, which that was very nice of him. A book, "A Queer in Iberia" has come out recently, and now a new volume is in preparation, "Queer in the Mediterranean." >> Gregory Hutcheson: "Queer in the Mediterranean," yes. >> Josiah Blackmore: So these have been, to us, very gratifying moments. And it's just an interesting anecdote, I think, how that cover image came about. This is pure [inaudible]. When we were getting ready to publish the book and the editors of Duke said, "We'd like to have a cover image that really speaks to what you're doing." So I took that as a challenge to go into the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto and see what I could find. And I remember I had walked in and I was -- had a list of books I wanted to consult. And I noticed on the shelves from across the table -- I was sitting in a multivolume history of printing in Spain, that had one volume was dedicated to each city where -- that had a printing press or that somehow had an imprint on especially early modern books. And so I just pulled "Sevilla" off of the shelf, and the book fell open to that. [Laughter] And what that is, it is a [inaudible] romance that exists in a unique copy of the Hispanic Society of America in New York, Oliveros de Castilla. And by reading the description, it was almost too good to be true. Number one, there were a series of woodcuts for each letter of the alphabet that were reproduced in this printing catalogue. And so there, for series Q, you can see the Q beneath, those two young men represent Spain and Portugal. And to the right, you can see minarets off in the background, and to the left you can see a Christian church. And I hope I'm not revealing too personal information about our wonderful editor, Richard Morrison, [laughter] who had that Q tattooed on the back of his neck. [Laughter] So but we just thought it was so serendipitous that that -- I believe in signs and that was a sign. [Laughter] >> Gregory Hutcheson: Absolutely. >> Josiah Blackmore: So that's the story of the cover image of "Queer Iberia." >> Gregory Hutcheson: Well, very quickly, whereto from here, what work remains to be done. And one thing I do want to mention is that while research has exploded in early modern Iberian sexualities, both in Latin American, and in the Peninsula, medieval Iberian sexualities I would say really has gone -- has moved forth in fits and starts. But there's a reason for that, and that reason is 9/11. I think after 9/11, many of us in Hispano medieval certainly felt a pull in a different direction. If we intended to politicize our queering of Iberia through this volume, our political sensibilities were being drawn in a different direction, of pointing to a period in world history when Christianity and Islam were negotiating, were collaborating. And much of my scholarship -- as Francisco mentioned, much of my more recent scholarship looks at spaces of confluence between Christianity and Islam in the Iberian Middle Ages. So those of us who would have probably moved forward in the field of sexuality ended up being pulled in different directions. What's interesting is that now I'm trying to pull myself back into the center between the two, looking at sexualities, the negotiation of sexualities, in particular between Islam and Iberia. But as I said not much really has been done in terms of the "Queer Iberia" project. And Joe wants to talk a bit about what still has yet to be found in the archives. ^M00:45:46 ^M00:45:47 >> Josiah Blackmore: Well, I think that we'd like to say clearly for everyone here, and to anyone who might be watching this on YouTube, we still need to rattle this cage, right; that we're not at a -- I think there's a lot of work to be done, a lot of very exciting work to be done. Greg's going to give some ideas about that in just a second. One of the aspects that we became convinced of early on was essentially what we like to call the "archaeological aspect" of the book, that is simply presenting evidence, documents that people did not know about, or did not know about in a certain way. And I think there is still a lot of archival work to be done, both in Spain and Portugal, digging through archives. I love doing that, right, I love that sense of discovery with the text and [overlapping] -- >> Gregory Hutcheson: And I'm sure nobody here enjoys that. You just don't understand in the least. [Laughter] >> Josiah Blackmore: So that definitely there is an archival aspect of this that I would want to encourage, both established and younger scholars to approach with appetite and verve. Because I think that there's still a lot of discovery to be done. Greg's going to talk a little bit about work to be done on the Spanish side of things, and then I'll go back to the Portuguese. >> Gregory Hutcheson: Well, and if you go I think it's two slides down the road. Let's see, maybe past this one. Let's take a look at [speaks Spanish] very quickly. One of the things that -- as Joe mentioned, one of the things that we intended to do through the "Queer Iberia" volume is give voice to queer subjects in the Iberian past. And certainly through Joe's work on the -- I'm not sure we can translate this on YouTube, so we'll leave it in the Portuguese, the [speaks foreign language]. >> Josiah Blackmore: Okay; yes. >> Gregory Hutcheson: His work on the Galician Portuguese [speaks Spanish] brings forth these fascinating, fascinating queer subjectivities, moving forward into the historical documentation of interesting friendship, reliances between kings and their favorites, and into the early modern period with what you see now being the so-called monja alferez, or the non-lieutenant. This is -- and I'm going to call him [inaudible], and I'm going to use the masculine, because I think it's important to return to this story. Mary Elizabeth Perry, the historian, brilliant historian, worked on this figure in particular; and her chapter is included in "Queer Iberia." She tells about the non-lieutenant. She opts to switch back and forth between the masculine pronoun and the feminine, this in recognition of Irouso's [phonetic] constant crossing of gender boundaries. Irouso was born in Northern Spain, was sent to the convent very quickly. At the age of 14, she escaped from the convent, dressed as a man, assumed the name "Francisco Loyola," and lived his life from that point on as a man, moving to the New World, getting into bar brawls, getting very close to marrying as well. Coming back to Spain, after having been discovered as not really being a -- having the masculine gender at birth, that's a good way to put it, he was brought before the Inquisition. And it was finally determined by the pope himself, finally determined that he could indeed live his life as a man; and he died as a man. What I think is most interesting about the text -- and I've given it to you in the Spanish, is in the narrative it's told by Irouso himself. You can see, if you can read closely -- and I've left it in the Spanish because we lose it in the translation into the English, she begins the text, "[Speaks Spanish]. I was born Dona Catalina de Irouso." A little further on, "Y yo muchahca." She had an encounter with another nun who would abuse her in the convent. "Y yo muchacha," and "I, a young girl." But there's a point in the text when Irouso assumes, embraces a masculine identity. And what's curious is that the pronoun changes at that point. And he says, "[Speaks Spanish]. When I entered [inaudible]," using the masculine, "entrado." Further on, "[Speaks Spanish]. I named myself, I embraced this gender." And who are we to determine the gender of Irouso? Who are we even to impose the moniker, [speaks Spanish], which keeps his gender indeterminate. No, no; Irouso made the determination. Irouso embraced gender. Irouso lived the gender. And to my mind, we need to return to these stories, multiple stories -- if you read the inquisitorial documentation, multiple stories about subjects from the past making determinations about their own sexual and/or gender identity. We need to return to this documentation and really bring contemporary trans-theory to bear on these subjects from the past. So that's certainly one of the directions that a newly-invigorated queer Iberia project, one of the areas we need to explore with greater verb, as Joe has put it. >> Josiah Blackmore: Yes, yes. And we think also, at least as we get to the end of the Middle Ages and the transition into the early modern period, the trans-Atlantic enterprise, which offers some very interesting possibilities, I think, on the Portuguese side of things -- I'm thinking of a fairly old but still definitional book Richard Trexler's, "Sex of Conquest." I'm think of [speaks French], or "Perverts in Paradise," as it was translated into English and published. The work of my late Toronto colleague, David Higgs, who was doing work on early modern male homosexuality in Portugal and in Brazil. So these areas with -- I would probably say with the exception of Irouso and Barbara's essay, that trans-Atlantic queerness is something that we just kind of hinted at and touched upon in the volume. And I think there's a lot to be done with that. >> Gregory Hutcheson: And the burning question for many of our colleagues in studies of sexuality, where is the lesbian? Many feminists have talked about the lack of documentation of lesbian or same-sex sexualities between women in the medieval past. Well, a lack of documentation can be explained very readily by the fact that what was being legislated against was sodomy. And sodomy was principally a sin committed between -- or it was exclusively a sin committed between two men. If you move onto the next slide very quickly. I wanted to give you some manuscripts as well, which of course makes Joe and Lee very excited to look at manuscripts, to feel manuscripts, and also to see these manuscripts now being digitalized so that we have ready access to them. This is the law code of [speaks Spanish], which was pulled together by Alfonso X in the 13th century, or complied by order of Alfonso X. This is the iconic title which condemns the vice or the sin of sodomy. And what's interesting is that the formulation is strictly in terms of male-male sexuality, "[speaks Spanish]. Sodomy is the sin in which men lie with other men," no mention of women whatsoever until the 16th century in addition of the [speaks Spanish] by Gregorio Lopez. Gregorio Lopez includes the original text with the Latin gloss surrounding the text. And we can see -- next slide; we can see that the he makes an addition. He says in the note you can see at the top, he says, "[Speaks Spanish], and also with women who happen to commit the same sin with other women." What's interesting here, though, is that it's still conceived of as an active sin, as an active act. In other words, the one who was sinful in this act is the woman who penetrates the other woman. So it's still understood in terms of an active sodomy, of a woman's appropriation of the male prerogative. So there's so much more to be teased out of these texts, so much more that we need to do. Not only in terms of our archaeology of queer subjectivities in the past, but those mechanisms of control by which these sexualities are being configured, or through which these sexualities are being configured. I would love to see scholars look more diligently at the archival record for same-sex desire between women in the past. Because if it's not being -- if it's not cropping up in [inaudible], if it's not being legislated against, that does mean to some respect that it's happening legitimately, that it's listened [phonetic], that that there's an area that's not being legislated within which these same-sex desire between women could be actively pursued. And we need to find ways of documenting same-sex desire between women in the pre-modern period. >> Josiah Blackmore: I wonder if now will be a good time to go to our final -- >> Gregory Hutcheson: Yes, absolutely; very final one. Go past that one. One more. There we go. >> Josiah Blackmore: So Greg? >> Gregory Hutcheson: Ah, returning to the cover image. ^M00:56:31 ^M00:56:34 David Halperin came out a few years ago with a book by the name of "How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality," and he renders in far more complex terms the notion of friendship and male-male sexuality in the past. The question we pose to ourselves as we look at this -- as we read Halperin's scholarship and take a look at this woodcut is what sexuality is being represented by this woodcut, or what genders are being represented by this woodcut, what subjectivities are being represented by this woodcut? So this cover image, which actually is not even mentioned in any of the essays in the volume, and in fact, we were remiss in not including it -- we simply have an acknowledgment of the Hispanic Society of America, but we completely forget to identify the source of this woodcut in the volume itself. However, it does incite us to go back and reexamine not only this woodcut, but the broad genre of romances of chivalry. And the visual representations of friendship, or male-male relationships, or female-female relationships, whether visual and textual. And what I love is the fact that one of our reviewers makes note as well as the cover image. And I will go ahead and translate very quickly from the Spanish the two Oliveros de Castilla on the cover end up being in the final analysis much more than a mere decoration or a dormant. Without a doubt, more efforts, such as the "Queer Iberia" body, more efforts are needed so that we end up understanding among ourselves or all of us, we end up understanding what actually is happening in that glance between the two of them, and in the holding of hands. So here's one of our colleagues in Spain in Iberia itself looking at that image and projecting forward areas -- potential new areas of research, and potential new collaborations between Iberia and the Anglo-Saxon school, or the Anglo-American school. Fruitful areas of research that will begin exploring the broad range of queer subjectivities, also an effort -- and I want to say this, this is important as well, an effort not to sensationalize these queer subjectivities, but rather to pull them out of -- as one of colleagues has said, "Out of their closets of wonder, and to naturalize them as part of the broad range of sexual and gender identities in the Iberian past." So -- >> Josiah Blackmore: Good. Francisco, I wonder if we could take a few questions. >> Francisco Macias: Sure. We may have time for just one or two questions before we wrap up. And then we want to invite you to stick around for a book signing afterwards. Yes, sir. >> Oh, George [inaudible] from the College of William and Mary. I'd like to thank you for starting with John Roswell, an alumnus of our college. And tomorrow we start our homecoming weekend, and as always we start with the John Roswell Memorial lecture. >> Gregory Hutcheson: And your college is? >> George: The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. Also want to agree with Joe that [inaudible] [laughter]. The [inaudible] was very happy to republish the results of that conference. >> Gregory Hutcheson: Yes; absolutely. >> Josiah Blackmore: That was excellent. >> Gregory Hutcheson: Absolutely. >> Josiah Blackmore: That was very good. Thank you. >> And it's still the first of our list of online resources. It's available online at [inaudible] website, and we're grateful to continue to offer that -- >> Josiah Blackmore: Thanks, George. >> Dialogue. The 15th anniversary of publication of that "Return to Queer Iberia" series, and we're really grateful -- >> Gregory Hutcheson: Right. Oh, boy. >> To have that on our website as one of the authors -- >> Josiah Blackmore: Well, here is a -- thank you, George. Here is a perfect example of what I am talking about scholarly collaboration. [Speaks Spanish], which is an award-winning journal of Hispano medievalism under George Greeney [phonetic] as editorship has been more than accommodating. And that kind of scholarly collaboration is really priceless. So thank you, George. >> Gregory Hutcheson: And I should say as well that [speaks Spanish] was a very willing potential first site for the publication of the original volume. We -- George was more than ready and more than willing to publish [overlapping] -- ^M01:01:07 [ Inaudible Comment ] ^M01:01:10 But we came back; we came back. >> We lost to Duke. It's okay [inaudible] "Queer Iberia," so thank you for [inaudible]. >> Gregory Hutcheson: Thank you, George. Thank you, George. >> Francisco Macias: And I believe that's all the time we have today, folks, but please stick around for the book signing, and to chat with them a little more. Thank you so much. >> Josiah Blackmore: Thank you. Thank you, Francisco. ^M01:01:29 [ Applause ] ^M01:01:35 ^M01:01:40 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov ^E01:01:45