Identity in early modern Spanish theater

In my dissertation, I analyze the ways in which hegemonic discourse was challenged by the representations of Moriscos, Africans, women and captives within theatrical plays of the seventeenth-century. The representations employed in these texts contest the definition of the exemplary Spanish subject as set forth by the Church and the Crown. I examine how gender, race, and religion are used to not only enforce hegemonic discourse but also to defy it. In all the works that I will be analyzing, the possibility of agency is present through the construction of identities, and the authors of the texts I will be analyzing consistently reconfigured the positions of their subjects. More than seeing how the Other is represented, I analyze how they deliver their own unique discourses of resistance but also observe how the hegemonic discourse was applied, at times in overpowering ways.