October 10th
Free admission until full capacity is reached
Presentation of the book «Sodomites, vagrants and malents: History of deviant Spain from Atapuerca to Chueca» (Planeta, 2024). This book is a journey into the LGTBIQ+ history of Spain from before those acronyms, or Spain, existed until today. Here, other historical subjects are explored, and those anonymous dissidents, as a way of understanding the construction of dissent and the norm in terms of sex, sexuality, gender and affection. This approach, from a transfeminist history and archaeology, allows us to explore the relationship between family, gender and class, and those who escaped from these norms.
The presentation will consist of a discussion about research into archaeology and queer history in Spain since Prehistory. In this activity we will discuss some of the ways in which sexual and gender dissidence has been explored in the past, what sources we have, how we study them and how we can approach these pasts in a rigorous manner, avoiding presentism and the transfer of current categories to the past.
An entertaining LGTBIQ+ story from Spain that tackles hoaxes and misinformation with rigor and sources. Did you know that medieval Islam considered lesbianism a higher form of love? Do you know Estebanía de Valdaracete, the intersex man who challenged several of Charles V’s officers to a duel and won them all? Did you have any idea that one of the oldest joint burials of two men is documented in the Iberian Peninsula more than 3,500 years ago?
This is a story of deviants: the faggot, the lesbian, the sodomite, the invert, the transvestite, the hermaphrodite…; those who challenged the norm of desire, gender or sex. You could say that it is the LGTBIQ+ history of Spain since long before those acronyms or even Spain existed. On this journey, which begins in Prehistory and takes us to the present day, we will meet those who do not usually appear in books: the deviants who lived, flouted the norms and wove their own networks and spaces.
“It is said that we are a danger to the nation, to the State, to society, to marriage, to men, to women and to children. It is said that we are a lobby “that seeks to appropriate series and films, that we are a modern invention, a whim of idle youth or, worse still, the result of an agenda. And yet, when we look back in time, in one way or another, we have always been there.”
Mikel Herran SubiñasGraduated in archaeology from the Complutense University of Madrid and master’s degree in Archaeology of the Arab and Islamic world from UCL Qatar, he has worked as an archaeologist on various projects in Qatar and Morocco. Doctor from the University of Leicester where he completed his thesis on the study of domestic space in al-Andalus, and domestic space and practices as spaces of Islamization. In addition, she combines her research work with dissemination in media such as radio (Las Tardes RNE) and television (El Condensador de Fluzo) as well as on social networks through the PutoMikel channel.