Hispanisms and Homosexualities

“Hispanisms and Homosexualities is an important collection of essays on the intersection of ‘Hispanism’ (as a cultural and linguistic orientation that goes well beyond any simple relationship to Spanish, or to Spain) and ‘homosexuality’ as a sexual orientation undergoing constant improvisation. . . . The essays are uniformly excellent, and will reward any discretionary reader with invaluable information about a history and a culture whose complexities cannot be reduced to the kind of easy fetishism that reigns in many Gay clubs on ‘Latino night.’ ” — Washington Blade

“Hispanisms displays a remarkable internal coherence often rare in essay collections. . . . [T]he essays dialogue. . . in productive and enlightening ways. An accomplishment no doubt due to the excellent work of the editors who have coalesced around their project a number of mostly eloquent, erudite, and convincing essays. . . . [A] forceful tool for Hipanists committed to widening the scope and import of our field and to conversing across traditional periodizations and geographic demarcations. Most importantly, Molloy and Irwin’s anthology behooves Hispanists to reckon with queer readings in a productive, engaging manner so that we may better serve our students and our field.” — Gema P. Pérez-Sánchez , Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

“[A] fascinating collection of essays covering different aspects of current lesbian and gay scholarship in the area of Hispanic Studies. . . . To its academic rigour and theoretical sophistication the collection offers distinctively queer insights on a number of previously unexplored areas both within and without the canon of Hispanic studies. Moreover, its thoughtful and often disquieting reflections on ‘identity politics,’ as the editors argue, serve to destabilize univocal constructions of mainstream homosexuality, which may be as disquieting to the resistant reader of traditional Hispanisms as it is for queer Hispanists.” — David Vilaseca , Bulletin of Hispanic Studies

“[A] volume as strong in its defence and revitalization of new queer thought through reconfigurations of its title’s twinned terms as in its attacks on the homophobic and xenophobic exclusions still exercised from within ‘Hispanism.’ ” — Chris Perriam , Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánícos

“[D]estabiliz[es] the traditional assumptions and dogmatic approaches which have, for many years, characterized Hispanic studies. Readers in general, but especially students, will certainly benefit from the critical stance of these discussions and most importantly from the theoretical, cultural, and political implications of the use of the plural in the volume’s very title.” — Gustavo Geirola , Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies

“[T]his excellent volume of essays should help very nicely to demonstrate that the entire canon of Hispanic literature is now on the queer critical agenda.” — David William Foster, World Literature Today

“[T]houghtful, complex, sometimes disturbing. . . . The anthology makes a crucial contribution to the fields of Latin American and Iberian studies and Gay and Lesbian Studies by erasing some of the disciplinary distinctions between those very fields.” — Laura J. Beard , Intertexts

“A collection of essays that makes compelling reading on many previously unexplored Hispanic aspects of gay and lesbian scholarship. . . . The contributions are both thoughtful and rigorous, bearing witness to the multiplicity of homosexual meanings and experiences in the Hispanic world, successfully covering aspects that are rarely debated and expanding upon the concept of identity politics.” — British Bulletin of Publications

“Readers in general, but especially students, will certainly benefit from the critical stance of these discussions, and most importantly from the theoretical, cultural and political implications of the use of the plural in the volume’s very title.” — Gustavo Geirola , Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies

“The volume maintains the critical edge of the difference and challenge of homosexualities in the plural, not reducible to any single historical or cultural meaning and refusing as well a simple, singular notion of Hispanism. . . . [A] high level of research and writing. . . .” — Amy Kaminsky , Latin American Research Review

“This volume effects a timely and highly significant dialogue between queer theory, gender and feminist studies, Peninsular and Latin American scholarship, and aesthetic history, and should be an invaluable resource for scholars in these fields.” — Leora Lev , South Atlantic Review

"[T]his is one good place to begin to rethink Hispanic literature from a queer perspective. More important, its contributors are already the nucleus of a community of queer scholars who will have much to contribute to rereadings of Hispanic literature." — Revista de Estudios Hispanicos