ABSTRACT
Until the advent of scholarship informed by feminism and gender theory in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, literary critics tended to ignore representations of sex, sexuality, or gender that deviated from traditional patriarchal norms. It should not be surprising, therefore, to learn that cultural production throughout Imperial Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries provides today’s scholars with abundant opportunities to explore and challenge the purported rigidity of sex-gender roles and conventional binary oppositions (i.e., man/woman, male/female, masculinity/femininity). Through a review of recent critical debates, the present chapter focuses on the concept of masculinity, introducing readers to scholarship on its perception and representation in early modern Spain.
