Review of Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama, and the Crisis of Masculinity, by S. Donnel

Lehfeldt, Elizabeth

English

Cleveland-Marshall College of Law

Cleveland State UniversityEngagedScholarship@CSUHistory Faculty Publications History Department3-2006Review of Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain,Transvestite Drama, and the Crisis of Masculinity,by S. DonnellElizabeth LehfeldtCleveland State University, e.lehfeldt@csuohio.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clhist_facpubPart of the History CommonsHow does access to this work benefit you? Let us know!Publisher's Statement© 2006 by University of Chicago Press. Available on publisher's site at http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/502752.Repository CitationLehfeldt, Elizabeth, "Review of Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama, and the Crisis of Masculinity, by S. Donnell" (2006).History Faculty Publications. 12.https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/clhist_facpub/12This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the History Department at EngagedScholarship@CSU. It has been accepted forinclusion in History Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of EngagedScholarship@CSU. For more information, please contactlibrary.es@csuohio.edu.Original CitationElizabeth A. Lehfeldt, "Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama, and the Crisis of Masculinity, by S. Donnell,"Journal of Modern History 78 no. 1 (2006): 238-239.238 Book Reviewsby the continuing rule of a party, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia, which inherited manylocally entrenched Maﬁa-inﬂuenced clienteles when it ﬁrst came to power in 1994).Reversible Destiny is a major work of scholarship that offers fresh perspectives notonly on the Maﬁa and anti-Maﬁa in Sicily but also on the nature of social movements,urban renewal, and the question of civil society more generally.NELSON MOEBarnard College, Columbia UniversityFeminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama, and the Crisis ofMasculinity. By Sidney Donnell.Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003. Pp. 312. $44.50.In Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama, and the Crisis of Mas-culinity, Sidney Donnell analyzes the signiﬁcance of male cross-dressing characters onthe Spanish stage of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He contends that mostscholars of the golden age of Spanish drama have neglected the larger signiﬁcance ofthis feature. Donnell’s goal is not simply to resurrect these intriguing ﬁgures but toplumb the depths of their cultural meaning. As he puts it, “The deployment of dragperformance in these theatrical pieces tends to parody several signs of identity at thesame time, revealing the social constructions (and lack of biological essence) behindgender, class, ethnicity and ‘race’” (31). He argues that these examples of maletransvestism can illuminate the cultural and political landscape of early modern Spainby telling us more about the trafﬁc in women, the crisis of absolutism, the politics oftheater, homosociality, and anxieties over masculinity. While this is a provocativeproposal, Donnell’s work falls short in two ways. First, he fails to make convincingconnections between the cultural commentary contained in the plays and the historicalcircumstances of early modern Spain. Second, he overreaches in his analysis, weighingdown male cross-dressing characters and the plays in which they appear with too muchcultural baggage.Donnell believes that Spanish audiences would have found the sight of male cross-dressing provocative. He also argues for the subversive potential of this device: forexample, men who appeared as women challenged the presumed authority of men overwomen and the culturally sanctioned deﬁnitions of masculinity. The potential disrup-tiveness of this practice, in fact, led to the Spanish government’s 1587 ban on mendressing as women on the stage. The interest of playwrights in employing this device—perhaps a testimony to the appeal of these characters to Spanish audiences—led to aninteresting way around the ban. Rather than relying on men to play female parts, play-wrights began writing roles for men that required their characters to cross-dress.Donnell proffers various bold analyses, but they are often unsatisfactory. Chapter 3,for example, explores a late sixteenth-century play, Comedia de los amores y locurasdel conde loco (ca. 1585), in which the protagonist, a Spanish nobleman, slowly goesmad as he is betrayed by and alienated from his absolutist ruler. As he descends intomadness, the count begins to cross-dress. For Donnell, the count’s “mental state be-comes an expression of the pitfalls of gender essentialism through which strength be-comes masculinized and weakness is feminized” (103). He further posits that thecount’s compromised masculinity “parallels” (138) a similar crisis facing Spain in thelate sixteenth century. There are several problems with this thesis that are symptomaticof the work as a whole. The ﬁrst is that Donnell does not persuasively link the issuesBook Reviews 239being tackled in the plays and historical developments in early modern Spain. In chapter3 he sketches inadequate parallels between the madness of the play’s protagonist andthe madness “in the theater of Iberian history” (109). In one paragraph, Donnell rushesthrough a litany of Iberian insanity that includes Don Quixote, King Sebastian of Por-tugal, Don Carlos, and Juana la Loca. Had he grounded his historical interpretation ofthe count’s madness in the recent work of historians, such as Sara Nalle and BethanyAram, who have explored the social, political, and even gendered meanings ofmadness,his argument would have achieved greater depth and persuasiveness.Donnell also fails in this chapter and throughout the book to make a convincing casefor a crisis of masculinity in early modern Spain. While the assertion that such a crisisexisted is probably accurate and an analysis of it would be a welcome addition to thegender history of Spain, Donnell fails to martial the evidence to prove it. He suggeststhat by the 1580s there was “debate inside the country over the nation’s perceivedfeminization at the height of the Spanish Habsburgs’ imperial expansion” (47) butseems himself to equate femininity with weakness. Anytime the monarchy faltered oroverextended itself (and it is debatable whether or not Philip II was really doing eitherin the 1580s), Donnell reads this as a crisis of masculinity that contributed to thecountry’s “feminized self-image” (45). When he delves into the seventeenth century—a period in which his contention might be expected to bear more fruit—he again failsto take advantage of both primary sources (the writings of moralists and others) andsecondary sources (Antonio Feros, Paul Allen, and Ruth Mackay, for example) thatwould enhance his argument about a crisis of masculinity and expand his groundingin recent work on seventeenth-century Spanish history.Beyond his attempts to situate these plays in their historical context, Donnell’s workalso disappoints because it is too ambitious. Donnell enthusiastically contends thatthese plays and their cross-dressing male characters can speak to us about questions ofgender, class, and ethnic identity. While this is the well-rehearsed triad of culturalstudies, and invariably they are categories that cannot be examined in isolation fromone another, Donnell would have done better to conﬁne himself more closely to thestudy of gender identity. In his discussion of Lope de Rueda’s Comedia Medora, forexample, he successfully demonstrates that a cross-dressing male character disruptssocial and cultural assumptions about the ability of men to control the behavior ofwomen. But then he gets carried away, turning his attention to another of the play’scharacters, who “wishes to cross the barriers of his class and ethnic origins, not nec-essarily those of masculine and feminine identities” (88). In his haste to analyze theplays, Donnell also neglects frequently to explain their basic plots. This deﬁciency willmake it difﬁcult for him to gain an audience among those not well-versed in Spanishdrama.Donnell’s work is thought-provoking and contains important observations, but thesesuccesses are overshadowed by his inadequate grasp of recent work in Spanish historyand a tendency to try to do too much. Had he simply conﬁned his thesis to a carefularticulation of the cultural meaning of male cross-dressing on the Spanish stage—anarea in which he clearly has expertise—and shied away from making broader connec-tions to the imperial stage of Spanish political history, the work would have been muchstronger.ELIZABETH LEHFELDTCleveland State University

Review of Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama, and the Crisis of Masculinity, by S. Donnell

https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1010&amp;context=clhist_facpub

Review of Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama, and the Crisis of Masculinity, by S. Donnell

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Cleveland-Marshall College of Law