Performing Knighthood

Abstract

The chivalric romance Tirant lo Blanc, composed by Joanot Martorell between 1460 and 1464, very clearly epitomizes an alternative to constructions of masculinity in the genre. The hero, Tirant lo Blanc, often performs a challenge to archetypes of masculinity in Medieval Iberia. The author's objective is to analyze several episodes where Tirant is depicted as ''queer'' or effeminate and discuss the implications of placing such episodes in a text of a genre usually viewed as a paradigm of masculinity. This article will examine these instances and seek to demonstrate that preconceived ideas about Hispanic archetypes of being a man constructed in modern times often have distorted early modern male behavior. KeywordsIberian chivalry romances, ''Tirant lo Blanc'', masculinity in Tirant lo Blanc, queerness in Tirant, gender role-reversal, performance, sexual identity in Tirant lo Blanc, film, Vicente ArandaGender and sexual identity have been constructed in many different guises in medieval romances of chivalry. Although often interpreted as works which epitomize a very conventional and patriarchal view of sexuality, a close reading of all these texts demonstrates that medieval ideas about sexuality were not fixed or static. Moreover,

On Don Juan and Beyond: Masculinity Studies in Modern Spain

“…One example of this is the analysis of Tirant lo Blanch carried out by Montserrat Piera, who discovers in the hero a model of masculinity akin to the queer. 40 Another, appearing in Chapter 2 of Queering Iberia, is the work of Begoña Regueiro-Salgado 41 on models of masculinity that also disassociate themselves from the philanderer and which are also to be found in the works of Rosalía de Castro and Antonio Trueba, two writers, one Galician and the other Basque, of the 'Second Romanticism'.…”