Trans Consciousness: Labors of Love in Iberian Colonial Archives

WOMEN, GENDER, AND CULTURE IN THE EARLY MODERN WORLD

SPEAKER: Esteban Crespo, Boston College

Esteban Crespo’s research and teaching focus on 15th-, 16th-, and 17th-century Iberian cultures and literatures. His research explores gender, desire, race, and sexuality in relation to the history of the book, contemporary critical thought, and colonial studies. His current book project, Queer Pleasures: Constructing Early Modern Dissident Sexual Cultures, analyzes the presence of sexual and gender variance in the Iberian Peninsula and the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This project argues, on the one hand, that early modern Iberian cultures incorporated dissident sexualities and gender variance in richer, more quotidian ways than only through policing systems, including mainstream culture. On the other, it demonstrates that such ways were ubiquitous and coterminous on both sides of the Atlantic. Before joining Boston College, Dr. Crespo has taught at Boston University and has held fellowships at Harvard University (Houghton Library), Brown University (John Carter Brown Library) and the Folger Memorial Library.