Women in Warfare: Spanish Christian Soldiers as Rapists in Early Modern Romances (original) (raw)
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Hispanic Review, 2016
The persistent problem of violence against women in Spain has often been obscured by the representation of female pain and suffering as a form of beauty. The film Te doy mis ojos provides an important critique of such historical, patriarchal representations of women in art and literature by portraying a unique female perspective of gendered violence in all of its brutality. This article studies Te doy mis ojos from three perspectives. First, it provides a historical context of violence against women through an examination of the Spanish legal system from medieval times to the present. Second, it analyzes the film as a response to the politics This article is part of a book project on the aesthetics of violence against women from early modern times to contemporary Spain as seen by María de Zayas, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Icíar Bollaín, and Alicia Luna, among others. The elaboration of this essay has been possible thanks to a research fellowship from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of Lesley University. I am grateful to Dr. Irene Mizrahi and Dr. Yolanda Gamboa for their insightful comments about the article. Special thanks are due to Dr. Linda Grabner for her thorough reading of the final draft and her generous edits. j 125
"'They Said, She Said': Making the Case for Rape in Fuenteovejuna" (Draft)
While the rape of Laurencia in the iconic early modern drama Fuenteovejuna serves as the catalyst that provokes the townspeople to avenge the wrongs done to them by the Comendador Fernán Gómez, another female character-Jacinta-suffers an equally if not more egregious assault. When she vigorously resists the Comendador"s attempts to seduce her, he turns her over to his soldiers to be gang raped as one of the spoils of war, telling her, "Ya no mía, del bagaje / del exército has de ser" (2.1270). I.A.A. Thompson"s study demonstrates the danger posed by soldiers to the general public. The annual movement of forty or more companies [of soldiers] across Castile left in its wake a trail of destruction and rapine. An endless series of robberies, murders, rapes, malicious and wanton violence, jailbreaks, even pitched battles between soldiers and civilians repeated year after year stretched along all the most traversed routes of the kingdom. The coming of a company of soldiers was awaited with the same trepidation as a hurricane. Those who could fled its path; those who could not were forced to abandon their trades to stay at home to protect their wives, their daughters, and their property. (My emphasis, 113)
Women’s Exemplary Violence in Luis Vélez de Guevara’s La Serrana de la Vera
Bulletin of the Comediantes 66.1, 2014
When Gila, the protagonist of Luis Vélez de Guevara’s La serrana de la vera (1613), is betrayed by her lover, she decides to kill every man with whom she comes into contact until she can find and murder the man who left her. Although the protagonist is celebrated early in the play for her masculine prowess, her murderous rampage dominates the stage, and the play’s finale condemns her to a public execution. This essay explores how the spectacle of Gila’s body—as hunter, lover, murderer, and corpse—achieves a moralizing effect with attention to two unique aspects of the play’s production. First, the role of Gila was written for and played by one of the generation’s most prominent actresses, Jusepa Vaca. Second, the play is also one of the earliest stagings of femicide as a play’s conclusion. By studying the topic of exemplarity through these aspects, my goal is to illuminate how this comedia plays an important role in illustrating the complex relationships among gender, violence, and spectacle in the early modern period.
The Language of Female Violence in Jorge Ibargüengoitia's Las muertas
I n the early 1960s in Mexico, accounts of three notorious sisters inundated newspapers. Delfina, María de Jesús and Luisa González Valenzuela, known as "Las Poquianchis," 2 were accused of crimes including mass murder, torture, the kidnapping of women for prostitution, and the clandestine operation of a brothel. Due to the extensive coverage of the case by the Mexican media, the Poquianchis became an infamous sensation, captivating the interest of the Mexican people and even drawing in international press. 3 With his novel Las muertas (1977), Jorge Ibargüengoitia responds to the overzealous media damnation of the women by providing an alternative narrative of the crimes of the Poquianchis.
Victims and Victrices. Women and War in Calderón's Historical Drama
Keynote talk, "War and Society in Early Modern Europe", University of Oxford, 11 September 2023, 2023
Gender studies and war studies seldom enter into direct contact with one another. Within my own field of expertise, scholars of early modern historical dramaa type of theatre replete with representations of armed conflicthave for instance paid little attention to the question of gender. Mostly, the women that appear in these plays are considered in their capacity as individuals whom war and other calamities ‘happen to’: the mothers, daughters, and wifes of belligerent males; the raped and the civil casualities. Thus, in his famous study of the baroque Trauerspiel, Walter Benjamin noted that this significant form of early modern historical drama chiefly represents women as stoic heroines who have no agency but their inner resistance and who must therefore endure the hardships inflicted upon them by by the destructive forces of history, as symbolized by the male tyrants who viciously persecute and kill them. Yet, while this perception of women may pertain to the German plays that are the chief object of Benjamin’s study, and (to some extent) to the Shakespearean histories, it is not true of early modern Spanish historical drama. In Spain, playwrights such as Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca penned strong female parts which wereexceptionally for the ageacted by female actors on the stages of Madrid and other cities. In my talk, I will use a selection of Calderón’s war plays as a prism for scrutinizing the multifarious and nuanced representation of women in his work broadly and establish a provisional typology of the woman-war nexus in his historical drama. Though the victims are of course also there, the Madrid dramatist’s plays about the Eighty Years’ War (El sitio de Bredá, 1625), the sixteenth-century war of the Alpujarras (Amar después de la muerte, c. 1640), ancient combats between Babylonians and Lydians (La hija del aire, 1653), and the Battle of Cartagena Nova (El segundo Escipión, 1667) present a variety of female characters which, taken together, suggest a more nuanced approach to female historical agency than the one found in the plays examined by Walter Benjamin. As Antonio Regalado (Calderón. Los orígines de la modernidad en España del Siglo de Oro, 1995) has suggested, we may tentatively speak of a Calderonian “feminismo”, though the applicability of that term to seventeenth-century authors can of course be debated. In Afectos de odio y amor (c. 1656), Calderón had Queen Cristierna declare that women should both study and fight (1, 717). As a dramatist of war, he certainly created engaging portraits of both victims and victricesthose wars happen to and those who start wars or wage wars themselveschallenging modern perceptions of early modern notions of gender.
They Said, She Said: Making the Case for Rape in Fuenteovejuna
Bulletin of the Comediantes, 2015
hile the rape of Laurencia in Lope de Vega's iconic early modern drama Fuenteovejuna serves as the catalyst that provokes the villagers to avenge the wrongs done to them by the Comendador Fernán Gómez, another female character-Jacinta-suffers an equally if not more egregious assault. When she vigorously resists the Comendador's attempts to seduce her, he turns her over to his soldiers to be gang-raped like one of the spoils of war, telling her, "Ya no mía, del bagaje / del exército has de ser" (2.1270). I. A. A. Thompson's study War and Government in Habsburg Spain 1560-1620 demonstrates the danger soldiers posed to the general public: 34