Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama, and the Crisis of Masculinity

Donnell engages gender theory and cultural studies in order to shed light on cross-dressing- a common though poorly understood practice- in plays performed in Spain and Colonial Spanish America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The author shows how certain naturalized assumptions about masculinity and femininity are unmasked through the cross-dressed performance of works attributed to Lope de Rueda, Morales, Lope de Vega, Monroy y Silva, and Calderon.