De madres, sabias y amantes: La construccion cultural de la mujer judia y musulmana en la literatura castellana medieval.

Literary texts function as social and symbolic acts that pose questions of identity and identification, reflecting sometimes the socio-cultural attitude of the dominant majority in a historical era. Thus, medieval Castilian works often contain a biased portrayal of Muslim and Jewish women, by depicting them as genetically lascivious, sexually accessible, and worthy only of casual relationships. The few gender-oriented critical studies hitherto published deal mainly with the depiction of these aspects in Muslim and Jewish maidens, but pay little attention to the roles that other categories of women (mothers, wives, wise women) played in medieval Castile.An examination of all categories of Muslim and Jews women (in works such as Alfonso X's Cantigas de Santa Maria, Don Juan Manuel's El Conde Lucanor, some ballads and epic poems) reveals a Christian socio-political agenda of domination and appropriation. During the Iberian Reconquest, female Others are marginalized, treated as sexual objects, or integrated in the Christian culture through an acculturation process. Even their progeny, the result of sexual relationships with Spaniards, are appropriated by the dominant culture. Such a process foreshadows a concatenation between the Reconquest and later European colonialism: women are the first members of the Other's culture to be incorporated into the culture of the conquerors.Once Castile achieved the Reconquest (1492), literature ceased to produce texts depicting sexual contact between Christian men and women of marginal cultures. Instead, in later works such as EL Abencerraje the focus shifted towards an ethical parameter: the praise of the Christian man, capable not only of controlling his own sexual impulses, but also of canalizing similar impulses in the Other (the weak Muslim man and the still excessively erotic woman) towards matrimony. In conclusion, Christians had won also because they reconstructed the sexuality of the Others.Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, 2004.School code: 0093