Pornographic Sensibilities: Imagining Sex and the Visceral in Premodern and Early Modern Spanish Cultural Production ed. by Nicholas R. Jones and Chad Leahy (review)

The creaTion of a new field of inquiry may often constitute the academic equivalent of extreme sports, and that is certainly the case when it takes place in the arena of medieval and early modern Hispanic Studies. The mere act of not specifying the exact rules of that intersection within such broad an area is still met in some circles with a resistance that is not surprising given the traditionally strict divisions that have dominated the Hispanic humanities. Hispanic literature is one of the disciplines where tradition has wielded greater power, making novel approaches seem more transgressive than they would probably appear in other disciplines. In this context, what editors Nicholas R. Jones and Chad Leahy propose in Pornographic Sensibilities falls beyond the transgressive into the downright subversive, and it does so in the best possible way. The editors propose a dialogue between medieval and early modern Hispanic Studies and Porn Studies as a productive critical approach to a vast corpus of writings where the body and its most intimate aspects feature in openly graphic and uninhibited ways. Although sex encompasses most of these representations, more extreme manifestations like disease and violence complete the continuum of problematic and uncomfortable subject matter that has challenged those who have tried to present the canon of Hispanic cultural production as aseptic and respectable. These are cultural products that resist being neatly packaged into the usual categories and critical molds required to fit the rigid canonical standards of traditional publication, both academic and commercial. Therein lies the value of this volume, in the opening of an interdisciplinary space where, instead of being classified and described, these texts and other cultural artifacts become party to a larger conversation that touches on some of the most current and interesting lines of intellectual inquiry across a wide variety of disciplines.