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A Queer History of Flamenco
Diversions, Transitions, and Returns in Flamenco Dance (1808–2018)
Fernando López Rodríguez, translation by Ryan Rockmore
University of Michigan Press, 2024
A Queer History of Flamenco offers a groundbreaking exploration of flamenco through the lenses of queer theory and cultural studies. Previous histories have provided a largely distorted image about why, where, and how people have done flamenco—as well as who has performed flamenco. Yet feminists, transvestites, butches, femmes, the Spanish Roma, disabled people, guiris, and “incomprehensible” artists have been determined to do things differently without giving up their flamenco status. In this skillful translation of his book Historia Queer del Flamenco, Fernando López Rodríguez draws on diverse archival materials as well as his own lived experience and artistic practice, unearthing queer flamenco histories, voices, and perspectives that were previously unknown, avoided, or purposely hidden. 

Tracing flamenco’s development from its birth up to the contemporary era, the book places flamenco within significant historical periods such as the Spanish Civil War, Franco’s dictatorship, the transition to democracy, and the economic crisis of 2008, up to contemporary performances of the late 2010s. In taking a queer approach to History, the author abandons antiquated debates about purities and impurities; anecdotes about the lives of artists that are completely detached from their processes of creation; and myths about geniuses who seem to make art alone and completely detached from their collaborators and the historical, social, economic and artistic moment in which they lived. A Queer History of Flamenco is not only about the present and the queerness of people living, performing, or creating in it, but also about flamenco’s past in which so many queer artists and practices and their lives have remained unearthed and unaddressed.
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front cover of Queer Iberia
Queer Iberia
Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson, eds.
Duke University Press, 1999
Martyred saints, Moors, Jews, viragoes, hermaphrodites, sodomites, kings, queens, and cross-dressers comprise the fascinating mosaic of historical and imaginative figures unearthed in Queer Iberia. The essays in this volume describe and analyze the sexual diversity that proliferated during the period between the tenth and the sixteenth centuries when political hegemony in the region passed from Muslim to Christian hands.
To show how sexual otherness is most evident at points of cultural conflict, the contributors use a variety of methodologies and perspectives and consider source materials that originated in Castilian, Latin, Arabic, Catalan, and Galician-Portuguese. Covering topics from the martydom of Pelagius to the exploits of the transgendered Catalina de Erauso, this volume is the first to provide a comprehensive historical examination of the relations among race, gender, sexuality, nation-building, colonialism, and imperial expansion in medieval and early modern Iberia. Some essays consider archival evidence of sexual otherness or evaluate the use of “deviance” as a marker for cultural and racial difference, while others explore both male and female homoeroticism as literary-aesthetic discourse or attempt to open up canonical texts to alternative readings.
Positing a queerness intrinsic to Iberia’s historical process and cultural identity, Queer Iberia will challenge the field of Iberian studies while appealing to scholars of medieval, cultural, Hispanic, gender, and gay and lesbian studies.

Contributors. Josiah Blackmore, Linde M. Brocato, Catherine Brown, Israel Burshatin, Daniel Eisenberg, E. Michael Gerli, Roberto J. González-Casanovas, Gregory S. Hutcheson, Mark D. Jordan, Sara Lipton, Benjamin Liu, Mary Elizabeth Perry, Michael Solomon, Louise O. Vasvári, Barbara Weissberger

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