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Sidney E. Donnell, associate professor of foreign languages and literatures, has published a book, Feminizing the Enemy: Imperial Spain, Transvestite Drama, and the Crisis of Masculinity, and will give a related talk 8 p.m. today in the Kirby Hall of Civil Rights auditorium.
Free and open to the public, the talk, titled “Drag Performance and Habsburg Spain,” is the spring 2004 Jones Faculty Lecture. It is one of two sponsored this school year by the Thomas Roy and Lura Forrest Jones Faculty Lecture and Awards Fund, established in 1966 to recognize superior teaching and scholarship at Lafayette. The fall talk featured Derek Smith, assistant professor of mathematics.
Published by Bucknell University Press, Feminizing the Enemy asserts that Spanish theater is an insightful area for the study of masculinity and femininity in the early modern period. Focusing on plays that deploy cross-dressing as an important element of plot or performance, Donnell charts the fluidity of gender identity on the Golden Age stage and relates it to wider gender anxieties in Spanish cultural history.
Since the Spanish stage during the Habsburgs maintained a long-standing tradition of transvestite performance, it is a literary genre connected to cultural anxiety surrounding the potential feminization of Imperial Spain’s masculine self-image, according to Donnell. He examines changes in attitudes and actual staging practices, especially the sudden shift from the customary all-male casts whose members specialized in feminine roles during much of the 16th century, and the abrupt adoption of what today might be called “gender-appropriateness” on the late 16th- and early 17th-century stage. He argues that “queer” readings of Golden Age drama can provide insight into the cultural and historical context in which gender “performativity” plays out.
Donnell shows how certain assumptions about masculinity and femininity are unmasked through cross-dressed performance of works attributed to Lope de Rueda, Morales, Lope de Vega, Monroy y Silva, and Calderón de la Barca. He explores how these works denaturalize understandings of gender, class, and ethnicity by examining the way gender-role reversals comment on both homosocial relations under patriarchy and the complex interplay of sexuality, class, ethnicity, and power. Donnell also demonstrates how theatrical cross-dressing often led to the possibility of same-sex desire, which, in turn, further undermined social hierarchies under patriarchy and the genre’s own purportedly conservative tendency to support the status quo.
In addition to academic publications about cross-dressing on the Spanish stage during the early modern period, Donnell has written scholarly articles about generic closure and exiled Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s career in Mexico. He has shared his research through journal articles, book chapters, invited talks, and conference presentations, including a recent talk at the University of Pamplona in Spain and others at Emory University, Haverford College, University of Miami, Purdue University, the International Spanish Golden Age Theater Symposium, several Modern Language Association Conventions, and the Latin American Studies Association Convention.
His research with Lafayette students has included an EXCEL Scholars collaboration with mechanical engineering major Monika Serrano ’04 (Caracas, Venezuela) that examined cross-dressing in 16th- and 17th- century drama in Imperial Spain, specifically in the drama of Sister Juana Inez de la Cruz, Maria de Zayas, Ana Caro, and others. The pair investigated how numerous women playwrights of the early modern period used cross-dressing in their respective works as a means of addressing the gender politics of their day.
Donnell led students in a study abroad program in Spain during the 2002-03 school year and is a former director of Lafayette’s First-Year Seminar. He helped write a successful proposal to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for funding of a self-paced language study program. His teaching areas include Spanish medieval and early modern classics and the civilization of Colonial and Imperial Spain.
A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Donnell earned a master’s degree and Ph.D. in Spanish language and literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989 and 1994, respectively, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Austin in 1985.
He is a member of the Modern Language Association and the Association for Hispanic Classical Theater, and a former member of the Northeast Modern Language Association.