Porno­graphic Sensibilities

Nicholas R Jones & Chad Leahy

¶ Porno­graphic Sen­si­bil­ities: Imag­ining Sex and the Vis­ceral in Pre­modern and Early Modern Spanish Cul­tural Pro­duction stages a critical con­ver­sation between two fields—Medieval/Early Modern His­panic Studies and Porn Studies—that tra­di­tionally have had little to say to each other. This unfor­tunate dis­connect is the product of a long-held scholarly rejection of treating the “porno­graphic” reg­ister in pre­modern and early modern His­panic Studies as crit­i­cally valuable, or even possible.

¶ We begin by asking why Porn has hitherto been rejected or ignored as a valid cat­egory of analysis, noting the foun­da­tional his­torical, ide­o­logical, moral pos­turings of Philology as a dis­ci­pline, a position that has thank­fully been reversed in recent decades by an avalanche of gen­er­ative schol­arship probing the sala­cious, raunchy, erotic canon that marks our field. We next inter­rogate the limits of more recent his­toricist cri­tiques that con­sider “pornog­raphy” to be a phe­nomenon that can only be read as belonging to the cul­tural, social, political, aes­thetic regimes of Modernity. We suggest that the peri­odizing of pornog­raphy itself deserves to be rethought as part of broader cri­tiques of the ide­o­logical armature of Modernity itself, and of the pol­itics of time upon which Modernity as a cat­egory depends. In making this move, however, our goal is not to simply push tem­poral bound­aries further back, asking us to swap out other standard nomenclature—“erotic,” “obscene,” even “amorous”—for a new label: the “porno­graphic.” On the con­trary, we do not feel invested in this book in con­sid­ering certain modes of medieval and early modern erotic rep­re­sen­tation or con­sumption to be more or less properly “porno­graphic.” Such debates strike as both tired and ulti­mately fruitless. What we do aim to do, rather is to inten­tionally high­light the sorts of politically- and ethically-minded cri­tiques that look at the complex poly­system of which erotic tex­tu­al­ities form a core part in medieval and early modern culture. And in doing so, we are fore­grounding con­cerns that are espe­cially central to Porn Studies as a field, including problems of power and agency, cen­sorship and expression, craft and form, psy­chology and ethics, vio­lence and freedom, class and economy, insti­tu­tional medi­ation and the tech­nologies of con­sumption, and the key role of gender and sexual identity, race, age, ability, and performance—among other categories—in the rep­re­sen­tation and con­sumption of graphic sexualities.

This is not to suggest that scholarly approaches com­mitted to the study of the “erotic” or the “obscene” cannot be equally com­mitted to studying these very same topics. It is, however, to rec­ognize that the entire field of Porn Studies is already devoted to scru­ti­nizing such ques­tions. The cross-pollination of Pre­modern and Early Modern His­panic Studies with Porn Studies thus serves as an explicit, mindful way of clar­i­fying method­ological and ethical prin­ciples, above all by openly fore­grounding the erotic as indis­so­ciable from the material and the political. Porno­graphic Sen­si­bil­ities asks us to con­sider what might be gained from con­sid­ering the medieval and early modern “porno­graphic” not as a genre, form or content but rather as a par­ticular way of seeing and reading, as an argument and a method­ology. In con­cluding, we offer the fourteen chapters that make up Porno­graphic Sen­si­bil­ities as a sam­pling of just some of the critical pos­si­bil­ities that the porno­graphic offers to the field of pre­modern and early modern His­panism. We are hopeful that future work in the field will con­tinue to build upon the critical promise of the pornographic.

In writing the Intro­duction, and in com­piling the book’s fourteen chapters, ¶ we would have liked to have more space in order to volume wide open by con­sid­ering an even more diverse set of dis­ci­plinary approaches, drawing on fields such as Anthro­pology, Art History, Reli­gious Studies, Soci­ology, Material Culture Studies, and other adjecent fields, in order to trace in more rich profile the com­plexity and diversity of expe­ri­ences and rep­re­sen­ta­tions that might be read ‘porno­graph­i­cally’ in the period under survey here. We would have also loved to embrace a delib­er­ately global approach to take into con­sid­er­ation the pre­modern / non­modern / early modern ‘porno­graphic’ across the many geo­gra­phies in which Iberian history is enmeshed, including the Mediter­ranean, the Atlantic, the Indies, East Asia, Africa, and diverse places in Northern Europe.

¶ Finally, we should acknowledge that the very sug­gestion of “pornog­raphy” as a legit­imate term of inquiry might be read as a violent provo­cation, serving as a token of the very ide­o­logical and method­ological divi­sions that con­tinue to fracture the field of His­panism itself. And in a sense, it is. We insist that Porno­graphic Sen­si­bil­ities leaves space both for rig­orous his­tori­ciza­tions of pre- and early-modern culture, and for playful engagement with a form of ‘pre­sentism’ that know­ingly applies a term that scholars asso­ciate with Modernity to pre- and early modern culture. We are con­fident that such an approach ulti­mately helps us undress the hidden assump­tions of both past and present in ways that are crit­i­cally and his­tor­i­cally respon­sible. That said, “pornog­raphy” is pol­itics and we can’t get around the fact that our critical inter­vention in the field inevitably marks a position that many col­leagues will dismiss out­right as emblematic of the kind of anachro­nistic, Anglo-centric, Post-modern, Marxist, Pre­sentist excess that renders His­panism in the US a sort of dan­gerous or pathetic aber­ration worthy of righteous scorn. We suspect some, if not all, of the scholars who share such per­spec­tives are of the same per­suasion as those who tore their beards and rent their gar­ments when Cer­vantes got painted in San Fran­cisco. We are unapolo­getic in insisting that Philology and Lit­erary and Cul­tural Studies alike, like Porn Studies, are nec­es­sarily always bound to exist in and through the political. Hon­estly, it strikes us that the fantasy of a depoliti­cized dis­ci­plinary position is pol­itics at its worst. As we both sug­gested in our inter­ven­tions in an earlier session of Iberian Con­nec­tions,  in the end we can’t get around the fact that we live in and for the present. The ques­tions we ask of the past, the lenses we adopt, the readings we offer, can not be divorced from the world we live in now. To con­clude, we are advo­cating for a turn to the “porno­graphic” as a field of study in its own right in the end because we see in Porn Studies a politically- and ethically-engaged dis­ci­plinary space of pos­si­bil­ities. We expect some will not agree. And we’re ok with that.

Mar­garet Boyle

¶ In Search of a Witness: Vio­lence and Women in María de Zayas: The essay focuses on Zayas 17th c. novellas (Novelas amorosas y ejem­plares [Exem­plary Tales of Love](1637) and Los desen­gaños amorosos [Tales of Dis­il­lusion] (1647)] as a way to comment on expe­rience of SEEING and OBSERVING recurrent accounts of vio­lence against women; rape, torture, murder and betrayal.^[1] On one hand, the reader plays voyeuristic witness to numerous scenes of vio­lence inscribed on women’s dis­played bodies.^[2]  On the other, these stories ask readers to become desen­gañado [unde­ceived], thus par­tic­i­pating in a dense didac­ticism, where scenes of vio­lence against women impart ethical con­cerns onto its readers. I lead my essay with a quote from Zayas where she asks her readers: “para hacer sin tes­tigos la cru­eldad que ahora diré” (283) [commit without witness the cruelty I am about to relate], so you as reader are now set to witness the for­bidden; cruelty that was meant to be kept secret.^[3] Re-considering Zayas under the framework of the porno­graphic allows us to examine various inter­sec­tions between a number of inter­re­lated the­o­retical cat­e­gories: judicial and political wit­nessing, per­for­mative spec­ta­torship, and the mar­keting and mor­al­izing of sexual pleasure and women’s bodies. I argue that Zayas writes moral pornog­raphy as an emotive genre — with sto­ry­telling that is polit­i­cally and per­sonally resistive.

Although I have been long inter­ested in the rep­re­sen­tation of gender in early modern texts, since 2017 I have been tracking ¶ how early modern nar­ra­tives are sit­uated and revived within the recent history of global fem­inist social move­ments, including #MeToo, #TimesUp, #YoSíTeCreo, #NiU­na­Menos and other public debates com­bating misogyny, gender inequality, gender-based vio­lence. With attention to the history of gender and gender-based vio­lence in early modern Spanish nar­rative, the essay makes space to con­sider why and how the resur­gence of these texts and topics appeals to con­tem­porary audi­ences. It also spec­u­lates on the futures of early modern gender in the context of social and political activism.

Finally, in the context of our con­ver­sation of vis­ceral expe­ri­ences it has been helpful to think about ¶ the pop­u­larity of Zayas’ short stories during her own lifetime and the idea of popular con­sumption tied to pornog­raphy. Writing this chapter has been dif­ficult for the way it forces the acknowl­edgement of audi­ences that consume vio­lence against women for pleasure. From the per­spective of fem­inist praxis, there is sig­nif­icant work we can do with this col­lective recognition.

Nicole von Germeten

¶ Police voyeurism in Elight­enment Mexico City: This essay uses the records of Mexico City’s night watchmen in the 1790s to explore sex­u­ality at the street level, as well as how doc­u­mentary sources create a paper trail of desire from their cre­ation to the present. I wanted to explore the idea of tit­il­lation expe­ri­enced by law enforcement patrols, in an era when solic­iting sex took place on the street. I pur­pose­fully tried to use more recent aca­demic sources on policing to imagine the expe­rience of patrolmen who walked their beats 230 years ago. An important goal was to seek the humanity of men and women during these noc­turnal encounters. This essay links my 2018 book on Mexico City sex work with my current project on law enforcement, as they used some of the same doc­u­ments, but in very dif­ferent ways.

¶ What I wish I could have said: I can only spec­ulate that the men who chose to work as night watchmen had voyeuristic desires. Watching people at night obvi­ously rep­re­sents essence of their task in this occu­pation, and this neces­si­tates observing sex, vio­lence, and gross intox­i­cation every working night. As thinking and feeling humans, I am curious how they reacted to what they observed. I want to imply a link with current moti­va­tions to take on this job. My book Profit and Passion attempted to present sex work from the female point of view, and this article took the other side. His­toric sources for New Spain give so much infor­mation, but not enough to have a grasp of explicit feelings or desires. I wish I had more infor­mation, but each record con­sists of only about 20 words, even if thou­sands of these logbook entries have sur­vived. I needed to fill in the inter­pre­tation and I welcome the oppor­tunity this volume pro­vided to spec­ulate on desire and how paperwork sus­tains it over cen­turies. The dockets tell a story, but there are many steps to take to turn it into a cohesive nar­rative. I wish I could provide a more detailed nar­rative of the inner world of these men and women for my readers, which is why I need to turn to modern aca­demic perspectives.

¶ Intel­lectual provo­cation: I have a few goals in researching law enforcement and sex work in this essay and my 2018 and 2022 books. First, I wish my readers to see that problems and con­flicts in policing go back right to its origins. Sec­ondly, we can learn about the history of policing outside of the USA. Mexico has not fea­tured in this his­to­ri­og­raphy, which is of course dom­i­nated by the history of the USA, the UK, and France. Since my 2013 book Violent Delights, Violent Ends, I have attempted to com­plicate the history of sex­u­ality, espe­cially as it relates to the history of racial dif­ference and impe­ri­alism, specif­i­cally in Latin America, but I hope with some echoes beyond. Like many other scholars of sex­u­ality, I want to con­tribute desire and emo­tions to the more standard inter­pre­tation focused on power and dif­ference. Although his­to­rians may view it as “pre­sentist,” I want to pur­pose­fully look at history with an activist point of view, espe­cially in terms of the basic tenets of sex worker activism.

Alani Hicks-Bartlett

¶ On Pyg­malionesque Fan­tasies in Erotic Poetry, and ‘Rethinking the Porno­graphic’. Taking as my point of departure Ovidian and Petrarchan models of the love lyric that center vision as the priv­i­leged vehicle for love, or as a frus­trating imped­iment to it, for my essay I was pri­marily thinking about how many of the erotic and porno­graphic poems of the Spanish Early Modern period dra­matize ocu­lar­ce­ntric poet-lovers’ attempts to control visual stimuli. This battle for control is often cast as a scopophilic struggle fre­quently aligned with efforts to direct and possess the beloved’s “body,” with the hope, of course, that the desired body cedes and com­plies with the lover’s wishes. Offering a materially-oriented take on the common lyric trope of an elusive, distant beloved, and cen­tering the wish for com­pliance and reci­procity through sar­torial and artistic ref­er­ences, Garcilaso’s famous “Con ansia estrema de mirar,” and the stunning, artis­ti­cally grounded sonnet “Mudo des­per­tador del apetito” offer dra­matic descrip­tions of the bar­riers and thresholds dis­tin­guishing the mal­leable, plastic forms that the lovers of each poem desire from the imper­vious mate­rials they cannot govern. In addition, I was par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in inves­ti­gating how both sonnets recall clas­sical stories of agal­matophilia. With this frame of ref­erence, popular anec­dotes sur­rounding the statues of Pyg­malion and Prax­iteles, for example, inform the material frus­tration and enargeic expe­rience that “Con ansia estrema de mirar” and “Mudo des­per­tador” both detail. In each poem, the coveted body cap­tures the eyes of poet and reader, in pur­pose­fully dra­matic (and highly inter­textual!) ways, yet access to this body is pur­posely cir­cum­scribed and denied.

¶ There is so much more to be said about these poems, and about vision in Early Modern Spanish poetry more broadly! I am truly not one for puns, but in regards to “Mudo des­per­tador” in par­ticular, I think of the silent object and the “defunct” plastic form that still is able to incite, inspire, and move (“a que el tacto inves­tigue, toque, y pruebe”) when I confess that my chapter only touches the surface of things. I would have liked to give more attention to the muteness that “mudo des­per­tador” aligns with art, and to silent pic­torial rep­re­sen­ta­tions that nonetheless seem to speak, as they inspire and provoke. This topos directly recalls clas­sical and early modern aes­thetic and artistic debates about the function of poetry and art, from Plutarch’s “Poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens,” to Alberti’s ani­mistic descrip­tions of painting’s resus­ci­tating capa­bil­ities (“la pittura…rappresenta a i vivi quei, che son morti dopo lunghi secoli,” [p.315, painting… rep­re­sents as living those who are dead after so many cen­turies])^[4], and beyond.

Addi­tionally, as the term “mudo des­per­tador” ges­tures directly to clas­sical painting con­tests and anec­dotes, such as those that Pliny recounts in his Nat­u­ralis His­toria about Par­rhasius and Zeuxis. Had I more time and space, I would have included a section on these artistic chal­lenges, and the inge­nious ways they are taken up in Early Modern Spanish poetry, and by Vin­cente Car­ducho, Jusepe Martínez, and Fran­cisco Pacheco, among others in trea­tises and debates. The con­tests between Par­rhasius and Zeuxis, between painting and sculpture, and then between art and poetry take a dra­matic turn if one con­siders the effect that art and poetry wage on the artist (and here we might think not just of the com­pe­tition between poet and sculptor in “Mudo des­per­tador,” but even of leg­endary tales about Zeuxis’ own raucous death from portraiture).

Along these lines, in the Pyg­malion myth, for instance, the sculptor laments the statue’s imper­vious silence. He “blames” the statue for awak­ening his desire, even prior to her “acti­vation” by Venus and/or by his prayers to Venus, depending on the version of the story in question, and despite the fact that the statue’s apparent “modesty” and exan­imate state serve to curtail any erotic actions orig­inary to “her,” as Ovid recounts it: “Vir­ginis est verae facies, quam vivere credas,/ et, si non obstet rev­er­entia, velle moveri” (vv. 250–1; The face is that of a real maiden, whom you would think living and desirous of being moved, if modesty did not prevent.)^[5] Pygmalion’s delu­sions and fan­tasies are what first poten­tialize the object of art: they allow him to see past the marble form and dis­regard the stoniness of his lady, so to speak, and imagine that he touches flesh instead of stone. The prox­imity of the statue to womanly beauty, or rather, the advantage that the statue has over both Nature and womanly beauty (since no human woman can truly rival it), allow him to entertain the concern that his touch might bruise the perfect ivory limbs that he clutches too tightly. Indeed, the “con­ception” of his love—with “con­ception” pro­lep­ti­cally ges­turing towards the par­tu­rition of a son, Paphos—is indi­visible from his own artistic product and cre­ative process: “operisque sui con­cepit amorem” (v.249). At the same time, Ovid’s tricksy “quam vivere credas,” involves the reader directly, further playing on the dynamics of scopophilic desire and the type of cre­ative tri­an­gu­lation we see in “Mudo des­per­tador”; the use of the Potential Sub­junctive sim­i­larly draws more attention to the vividness of enargeic expe­ri­ences. As such, and aligned with the statue’s frus­trating plas­ticity, we might ask what role “her” “modesty” really plays in the myth. We can bring this angle to the clothing that covers or shields in “Con ansia estrema de mirar,” and to the muteness of the “mudo des­per­tador” that foils reci­procity and vexes the very desire that it incites.

“Con ansia estrema de mirar” is a sonnet to which I have given a lot of thought over numerous years, while “Mudo des­per­tador” is a more recent interest of mine. It was by looking closely at the anec­dotes recounted by Ovid, Jean de Meun, and Petrarch, just to name a few, that I gained a new awareness of the frus­tration that material objects, from stone and cloth, to a coyly angled hand or a closed door, and thresholds of all kinds, rep­resent for the voyeuristic artists, lovers, and poets yearning for reci­procity and the sat­is­faction of their erotic and cre­ative aims.

A last brief note about a direction I’m looking at now for another project: a fas­ci­nating theme in the erotic poetry of the Golden Age are the material impediments—the vil­ified shirts, bed­sheets, skirts, lace, and veils, often described like sar­torial malefactors—that impede the advancement of imagined, oneiric, and ‘real’ rela­tion­ships. Similar to “Con ansia estrema de mirar,” we have fan­tastic poems like “Alzó el aire las faldas de mi vida,” which fea­tures a “camisa rig­urosa y cruel”; the focal­ization on the space “donde la camisa os toca” in “Si osase decir mi boca”; and the “alcandora” hoisted “hasta los hombros” in “Soñaba estaba anoche Artemidora,” to give just a few examples.

¶ I can’t help but think of the ety­mology of “provocation”—from incitement, sum­moning, and calling to speak, to stim­u­lation, vex­ation, and tit­il­lation, and finally, to urging, chal­lenging, and the call to action (the last of which has its own par­ticular res­o­nance in stories of agal­matophilia). Needless to say, I was very inspired by the approach Nick Jones and Chad Leahy put forth as they came up with this volume, and found it “intel­lec­tually pro­voking” in many ways… On a very literal level, and one that is closely related to my essay, the “trans­gressing [of] imag­inary binaries” made me think of the fraught and some­times hazy divide between exterior and interior, between cloth and flesh, and between stone and flesh that the poems I focused upon rep­resent. More broadly, one of the major con­tri­bu­tions of Porno­graphic Sen­si­bil­ities emerges even in the ques­tions regarding socio­cul­tural context(s), identity, and ori­en­tation that the editors pose in their intro­duction, which aptly calls for a “rethinking” of the porno­graphic in pre­modern and early modern Spanish lit­er­ature and culture.

This opens a “provocative” and capa­cious avenue of study that allows us to bring attention to primary mate­rials that have often been dis­re­garded, while turning with new eyes to some familiar paths of inquiry. Porno­graphic Sen­si­bil­ities enters in dia­logue with works like Alzieu, Jammes, and Lisourges’ Poesía erotica del siglo de oro, from many years ago, as well as with more recent schol­arship like Adriene Martín’s excellent An Erotic Philology of Golden Age Spain, Albrecht Classen’s study of pros­ti­tution in pre-modern lit­er­ature, Félix Can­tizano Pérez’s work on eroticism and adultery, and the recent anthology “Aquel coger a oscuras a la dama”: Mujeres en la poesía erotica del Siglo de Oro, and so on. Even from a ped­a­gogical per­spective this capa­ciousness is clear, and pornog­raphy, as the “roomy cat­egory” Jones and Leahy propose, offers pro­ductive inter­dis­ci­plinary oppor­tu­nities as well. Indeed, the essays they bring together can pro­duc­tively be read alongside seminal critical inter­ven­tions in Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Gender, Sex­u­ality, and Women’s studies, and even Film and Media Studies, as pressing con­tem­porary ques­tions of agency, power, policing, and consent, are at the crux of many of the material that Porno­graphic Sen­si­bil­ities explores.

Adrián J Sáez

¶ Este capítulo, ded­icado a la rep­re­sentación de la sífilis en la poesía de Quevedo, es un buen ejemplo del cruce de cues­tiones en juego en la lit­er­atura del Siglo de Oro: a partir de un origen muy cir­cun­stancial, surge un tem­prano interés poético por la enfer­medad que se mezcla con la búsqueda de un remedio, al tiempo que pervive un uso bélico desde el nombre. Lejos de ser solo una provo­cación (pre­gunta 3), se presta a un acer­camiento inter­dis­ci­plinar (de la filología pura y dura a las Medical Human­ities) que tengo en cuenta, pero fun­da­men­tal­mente pre­tendo examinar la relación de Quevedo con la tradición de la cosa, para explicar las car­ac­terís­ticas de sus poemas sifilíticos, trazar una clasi­fi­cación comentada de las difer­entes ten­dencias y conec­tarlo con otros aspectos de la poesía queve­diana (de la descriptio puellae a las reflex­iones morales marca de la casa).

Un aspecto sola­mente apuntado, pero que ya me interesaba por aquel entonces, era ¶ Aretino como posible emba­jador de la materia erótica y prostibu­laria en España tanto con los Sonetti lus­su­riosi como espe­cial­mente con las Sei giornate (nombre popular del Ragion­a­mento y el Dialogo). Más que por las lim­ita­ciones de espacio, todavía estaba dando vueltas al estudio que estoy ulti­mando sobre las rela­ciones de Aretino con la lit­er­atura española, que en realidad se mueve en otras coor­de­nadas muy dis­tantes del erotismo.

¶ Que este libro porno busque provocar es claro como el agua, pero, más que la materia sexual con­tem­plada desde difer­entes per­spec­tivas, Iberian pornogra­phies creo que rep­re­senta una llamada de atención crítica en dos sen­tidos: 1) la nece­saria lucha contra tabús críticos que todavía hoy per­viven, con lo que es una invitación a poder adoptar cualquier per­spectiva de estudio; y 2) la posi­bilidad de mirar los textos de siempre con ojos nuevos, lle­vando la con­traria a la cacareada idea que descarta tra­bajar sobre textos más o menos canónicos porque ya han sido estu­diados en pasado.

Víctor Sierra Matute

Líquidos, sonidos, sen­si­bilidad mon­tal­ba­niana: La mayor con­fusión (1624)

¶ Cuando se me planteó la opor­tu­nidad de par­ticipar en un volumen tit­ulado Porno­graphic Sen­si­bil­ities, me vino inmedi­ata­mente a la cabeza una de las novelas corte­sanas que más revuelo causó en el siglo XVII: La mayor con­fusión, de Juan Pérez de Mon­talbán. Esta novella narra la his­toria de un doble incesto. Resum­iendo: Casandra engaña a su hijo Félix para tener sexo con él; del coito resulta una hija, Diana, cuya iden­tidad es ocultada a Félix; años más tarde, Félix y Diana se enamoran sin saber que son her­manos y, a la vez, padre e hija; de la relación nacen dos hijos; cuando Félix des­cubre que sus hijos son fruto de un doble incesto se produce “la mayor con­fusión”, reacción que título a la novella. Tal trama ha provocado la indi­gnación y los ataques de moral­istas de todas las épocas. Fran­cisco de Quevedo, par­o­diando los enredos mon­tal­ba­nianos, dedicó su mordaz Perinola “al Doctor Pérez de Mon­talbán, graduado no se sabe dónde, en lo qué, ni se sabe ni él lo sabe”, mientras que Agustín González de Amezúa cal­ificó la novella como “una de las obras más mon­struosas y hediondas de la lit­er­atura castellana”. Además de expresar su espanto, el emi­nente his­to­riador se pre­guntaba cómo una novella de estas car­ac­terís­ticas pudo pasar la censura “en un medio pro­fun­da­mente reli­gioso como el español, cara a cara con la Inquisición, y pasando por las manos de aprobantes de la talla del maestro Sebastián de Mesa y Lope de Vega”. En mi capítulo recojo el guante de González de Amezúa e intento explicar los motivos de este supuesto desliz inquisi­torial. Mi capítulo quiere, por encima de todo, reivin­dicar una “sen­si­bilidad montalbaniana”.

“Humors and Rumors: Sonic Vis­cer­ality in Juan Pérez de Montalbán’s La mayor con­fusión” demuestra que ¶ los cen­sores inquisi­to­riales no pudieron ver nada reprochable porque la carga erótica del texto es invisible a los ojos: está implícita en el paisaje sonoro de Madrid y en las inter­ac­ciones sónicas de sus pro­tag­o­nistas. Mi análisis de La mayor con­fusión se basa en las impli­ca­ciones vocales y audi­tivas de la eti­mología de “con­fusión” (‘fusión de líquidos o de sonidos’) y en el espectro marcado por los tér­minos sonoros recur­rentes en el texto de Mon­talbán: “mur­mullo” (‘ruido confuso de voces’) y “suspiro” (‘aspiración de deseo’). Bajo estas coor­de­nadas, analizo las escenas sonoras de la obra —con­ver­sa­ciones pro­hibidas, secretos a voces, per­for­mances can­tadas, rumores, ruidos noc­turnos—  para mostrar cómo el sonido es la fuerza sub­ter­ránea que mueve la trama. En un angus­tioso desenlace, Félix “se iba al campo a dar voces” y “[no] puede callar su deshonra”, alivio que solo alcanza cuando con­fiesa su his­toria ante un consejo de sabios formado por reli­giosos y cat­e­dráticos. Es entonces cuando el sonido, volcado y encap­sulado en la letra, genera una “porno-grafía” que esquivó la censura con mayor facilidad, pues la acción de la palabra impresa restaura la con­fusión causada por la sen­su­alidad sonora.

¶ Quizá esta colección pueda con­fundir a muchos. Porno­graphic Sen­si­bil­ities es una respuesta a quienes, como González de Amezúa, se han escan­dal­izado y se escan­dalizan con la carga erótica y pornográfica de la cul­turas ibéricas medievales y tem­pra­nomod­ernas. Pero, sobre todo, Porno­graphic Sen­si­bil­ities es una invitación a abrazar su sen­su­alidad. Como reivin­dican Nick Jones y Chad Leahy en el prólogo del volumen, “lo pornográfico” depende siempre de la inter­acción entre pro­ducto y con­sumidor, entre objeto y expe­ri­encia sensual, entre mirar y ver/no ver, entre texto y proceso de lectura. En este sentido, la colección propone una serie de cambios pro­fundos en las estrategias que uti­lizamos para aprox­i­marnos a nue­stros objetos de estudio.