Organizer: Elizabeth L Spragins, Spanish Department, College of the Holy Cross - Academia.edu, Google Scholar

Description: »This seminar critiques the widely accepted idea that Cervantes’s writings display feminist sensibilities. While the participants do subscribe to the view that Cervantes’s portrayals of women and gender are dynamic and thought-provoking, they also question the accepted critical opinion of Cervantes’s feminist leanings by underscoring certain portrayals of women. Our research, teaching, and close readings of Cervantes’s texts have made us consider more reactionary or misogynist elements in them, such as the undisputed endorsement of patriarchy, the sexual violence against women characters, of the celebration of feminine youth and beauty, and the depravity and voyeurism that undermine an uncomplicated reading of these texts as feminist and subversive. Women characters who have come, as of the late twentieth century, to represent agency and autonomy for the 17th century reveal problematic and disturbing currents that militate against interpretations of their independence and free will. We are interested in unpacking the implicit and explicit privileging of an uncontested masculine prerogative in these portrayals. In our view, one framework that helps interpret this dynamic is “perversity,” hence the tentative title of the collection. The papers for this seminar reveal the centrality of this perversity, especially in the treatment of female characters, to the Cervantine aesthetic, and thus expose the problematic and disturbing currents that question and upend the validity of women’s independence, agency, and free will in Cervantes’s works.« (Source: Online Program)

Presentations:

	4:30 PM Feminists writing with and against Cervantes Margaret E. Boyle
	4:50 PM Seemingly Unimportant: An Elliptical Reading of Female Perversity Ana Maria Diaz-Burgos
	5:10 PM Substituting White Bodies for Black in Micomicón: The Perversity of Race in Don Quijote Elizabeth L Spragins
	5:30 PM Perverse Agency in La fuerza de la sangre: Leocadia and the Third Space Sonia Perez-Villanueva

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Spain / Habsburg Spain | Literature: Spanish literature / Miguel de Cervantes | Sex and the law: Sexual assault