Intersecting Identities: Troubled and Troubling Representations of Queenship on Stage

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Identity has long been acknowledged as the dynamic interaction between experience, allegiance and community, between difference and belonging. More recently, however, has come a recognition of its intrinsic plurality: identity is constructed at the intersection of multiple social and ideological demands. Using the notion of intersectionality, my research will explore seventeenth-century Spanish drama in relation to a historicised concept of identity and the crisis it was undergoing as a result of tensions within Spanish imperial ideology.Specifically, my project will examine the problematic paradox of the queen, whose gender demanded subordination but whose hierarchical position necessitated authority. By analysing the representation of queenship in the drama of the period in relation to concurrent scholastic literature and political writings, I will uncover tensions and intersections within a queen's political, personal and social identities.My approach to this project is inherently interdisciplinary it will apply both Renaissance political theory and current strains of gender theory to Early Modern Spanish drama. In so doing it will move the extensive criticism concerning kingship and woman's position forward and will also fill the significant lacuna in scholarship relating to the dynastically essential yet generically unstable figure of the queen.