Transgender Romance

20th Annual Cervantes Symposium of California
The University of California, Berkeley October 17-18, 2008
Cervantes and Romance

Deportment, Reading and Passing: Transgender Spotting in Cervantes's La española inglesa
Harry Vélez Quiñones (University of Puget Sound)

I gently asked the physician if she could put the chart down and look at me. After she did so, I explained much to her surprise that I was a transgender woman and that a pap smear wasn’t necessary. She laughed, and I did as well, since I had assumed that I rarely pass. The lesson is one we all can learn. Sometimes we pass and sometimes we don’t.
- Gianna E. Israel

La española inglesa is one of the least popular of the twelve short novels included in Miguel de Cervantes’s Novelas ejemplares of 1613. Its generic filiation is probably to blame for that. As Carroll B. Johnson confessed in his masterful essay of 1988: “For years I had my students read only the “realistic-novelistic” stories, because they are obviously and immediately relevant to a number of contemporary concerns (…). I had always shunned La española inglesa because of its membership in the “romance” group” (377). Indeed, early critics of this work such as Rafael Lapesa and Alban K. Forcione had long established how this text is much closer to romance than to the modern novel. Dealing with the conflicted love-affair between the valiant Ricaredo and the beautiful and resourceful Isabela the novel is set in a courtly milieu and it abounds in exotic twists and turns. As Marsha S. Collins puts it:

The protagonists’ tortuous path traces a series of adventures that, by accident or providential design, test the steadfastness of their love and religious faith, which are inseparable in La española inglesa. Fate, challenges, and remarkable coincidences —staples of romance fiction— saturate the plot of the tale. (57-8)

Piracy, abduction, duels, poisoning, disfigurement, murder, and captivity get in the way of both lovers and parents, who, predictably, live long enough to witness a miraculous happy ending. That being said, it is also the case that other more historically grounded critics such as Joseph V. Ricapito, Carroll B. Johnson, and Barbara Fuchs see in this text the very real presence of historical, economic, and cultural conflicts affecting early modern Spaniards. Yet, it would be as interesting to note the extent to which the text’s identity as romance appears to cover up something far more problematic, novelistic, and ─perhaps─ “essential”. Taking Barbara Fuchs’s use of the term “passing” back to its material origins, I propose that we read La española inglesa as a “transgender romance”. That is, I want to suggest that strategies used to create a performance of gender that conceals one’s genetic sex assignment are also at play in texts that gain by covering up their “essential” filiation. The practice as well as the politics of passing in the crossing between ethnicity, gender, and caste and how they structure this transgender romance is at the heart of what this paper aims to discuss.