Speaker: Felipe Valencia, Department of World Languages and Cultures, Utah State University - Academia.edu, Google Scholar, Knowledge Commons, ORCID

Abstract: »Don Quijote’s sexual assault on Maritornes in part 1 of Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quijote de la Mancha (1605–1615), largely hidden in scholarship and teaching, derives from his erotic or, more properly, pornographic project: his quest to obtain erotic fulfillment and accompanying expectation that, as a knight errant, he has a “right to sex” (to borrow Amia Srinivasan’s recent formulation) with a certain kind of women. This project lies at the heart of his chivalric quest, on a par with his ethical and political goal of restoring the age of chivalry and his literary goal of composing a libro de caballerías. This paper analyzes Don Quijote’s assault on Maritornes in light of several contexts: the early modern burlesque motif of the feeble old man who cannot accomplish a rape; Don Quijote’s comments on the erotic exploits of knights errant; his interactions with adolescent young women, for instance Palomeque’s daughter and Altisidora; his explosive reaction to Maese Pedro’s puppet show; and particularly his angry appraisal of Angelica’s preference for the African infantryman Medoro over many Christian knights in Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. This last episode, as I will show, allows us to unravel the hiddenness of sexual violence in Don Quijote.« (Source: Online Program)

Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of Spain / Habsburg Spain | Fiction: Fictional victims of sexual assault | Literature: Spanish literature / Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote | Sex and the law: Sexual assault