This dissertation fixes a critical eye on the multiple uses of sex and sexuality in the works of four contemporary Spanish playwrights: Paloma Pedrero, Yolanda Pallín, Yolanda Dorado, and Margarita Reiz. All four authors examine issues of sexuality in their plays with regard to the characters, and demonstrate how these issues are inflected by the body and power. This project specifically seeks to analyze crisscrossed sexes and sexualities at the threshold of the difference between the sexes, as well as the notion of (em)powered bodies as they become manifest through the characters in two plays by each of the four authors. While the approach of each is different, the four playwrights in this study all present sex and the sexual in ways that undo typical, normative, or binarized views of such topics and instead proffer means of consideration that concentrate more on the interstices and slippages between traditional categories or manifestations, and, as such, merit inclusion in this project.
The theoretical framework implements postmodern theories of gender and sexuality throughout the entire study, drawing chiefly from Judith Butler, whose theorizations seek to move hegemonic views of sexuality and gender away from the binarized notion of ‘male’/ ‘female’ and toward the margins, where much deeper meaning may be derived. In addition, specific chapters concentrate on Foucauldian theories of power, Freudian theories of (homo)eroticism and gendered sexuality, as well as additional theories from Wittig, Bornstein, Wilchins, and others.
This study specifically seeks to demonstrate how the works of Spanish playwrights Pedrero, Pallín, Dorado, and Reiz offer a new understanding of sex and sexuality, characterized by a distancing from traditional or clearly-defined roles in favor of mixed or blurred understandings that transcend limitations. These theatrical works by the playwrights emphasize ‘liminal’ or ‘marginal’ sexes and sexualities so that typical notions of ‘man’ or ‘woman’, ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine,’ in addition to other traditional binaries are subrogated by that which succeeds in challenging the (hetero)normative or (hetero)patriarchal, thus demonstrating how these contemporary playwrights ‘eroticize the margins.’