ABSTRACT
The profusion of star-crossed Auristelas and cross-dressed Doroteas who along with their geminated male figures wander restlessly through Cervantes's fiction, confounding textual and extratextual readers alike by their gender ambiguity, remarkably emblematize the de-essentialization of sexuality proposed by feminist theories. The studies assign to Cervantes's female protagonists the same liberal, heroic spirit most often attributed to their creator. The contrast between Cervantes's moral intent and the three conjectured reading groups is drawn too explicitly and disapprovingly to ignore Márquez Villanueva's reproof of those critics who see in Dorotea's desire a celebration of free-spirited sexuality, instead of an Erasmian triumph of Christian virtue over neo-pagan lasciviousness. The American biographer William Byron depicts Cervantes's mother and other women in his family as imbued with precisely the same strong, aggressive and, consequently, "virile" qualities that never fail to surprise of his female protagonists.
