Theorizing Gender, Sexuality, and the Body in Calderonian Theatre

This work applies postmodern theory to selected seventeenth-century play texts of the dramatist Pedro Calderon de la Barca to effect a systematic reinterpretation and reevaluation of the playwright's dramatic output. The focus of the work lies especially upon the concept of "excess," which, in a psychological and political sense, challenges conceptions of gender, sexuality and subjectivity dominant in Early Modern Spain.

This book is concerned with the ways in which Calderon's deviant figures, such as transvestites, scolds, sodomites and monsters, embody this concept of "excess," destabilize the boundaries between the sexes or the different classes on which the social order depends. These dramatic figures, marginalized by the society portrayed in the plays, are, in reality, not "Other," because they stand for the perversion and corruption inherent in society but frequently denied through the psychological process of projection.

Calderonian theater thus analyses fear and desire in the face of excess, defining and simultaneously questioning cultural norms.