Dartmouth Events

Noël Valis Lecture

“Homosexuality on Display in 1920s Spain: The Hermaphrodite, Eccentricity, and Álvaro Retana”

Tuesday, May 12, 2015
4:00pm – 5:30pm
Room 002, Rockefeller Center
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Lectures & Seminars

For centuries, homosexuals have been viewed as freaks of nature. As one of those “mistakes,” the erotic novelist Álvaro Retana (1890-1970) made a rather remarkable writing career out of what he sometimes called his eccentricity and sometimes his double-sided monstrosity. He turned his persona and his fiction into an extravagant, ironic display, while performing the role of showman. In using such qualifiers, especially the monstrous, he appears to embrace a status seen today as unwanted and undesirable, but as I argue here, the aesthetics of oddness he fashions reveals even as it occludes an early twentieth-century homosexual subculture in Spain that was far more visible than previously thought. In the larger sense, Retana’s work also allows us to consider qualities and aspects that, to my knowledge, have been largely overlooked in a period marked by great social, cultural, and political change and fluidity: a renewed and modern sense of the marvelous, as reenvisioned through the ambiguous hermaphroditic forms of the monstrous and the eccentric, a sense of the marvelous we may only have glimpsed in other writers and artists of pre-civil war Spain.

For more information, contact:
Courtney Whisman

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.