At Their Word: Towards a Trans Reading of Cervantes's La gran sultana

Abstract: Taking the character of Lamberto at his word when he tells us that he is a trans man, this essay rereads Cervantes's La gran sultana and its entire cast through the lens of early modern trans and queer studies. The tropes of the closet, of coming out, of transitioning, and of the beard can shed a new light on the psychological and erotic life of the character of Catalina de Oviedo. Read in this new light, Catalina comes across not as a woman forced into an undesirable interfaith marriage, but as a woman carving out a space for herself to experience the forbidden interracial love she wants to experience, and her attachment to her Spanish Catholic identity comes across as a cover enabling her to enter an experimental space where racial whiteness might inspiringly exist in a defanged state, that is to say, detached from white supremacy.