Recent book bans have galvanized the fields of queer bibliography (Noble and Pyke 2024, 2025; Noble and Ott 2025) and queer print culture studies (Byrd and Samper Vendrell 2026) in the past few years. A considerable part of the English-language scholarship focuses on the United States and Great Britain, with some attention to France (Frydman 2025) and Germany (Samper Vendrell 2020), and far less on the Spanish-speaking world. Conversely, work on book history and print culture in Hispanophone settings tends to omit queer perspectives (Botrel 2024; Sorá 2021), with occasional exceptions (Zamostny 2026). Addressing this gap, this panel’s case studies foreground aspects of Hispanic cultures that promise to shed new light on connections between books, reading, and queer cultures: heterodox practices within Catholicism, racial and ethnic hybridity, regional language variation, and global literary flows.
The papers have been intentionally selected to explore a range of historical and geographical frameworks, genres, and queer concerns. This diversity echoes panelist Toloo Riazi’s insight that, in Frederick Luis Aldama’s young adult novel The Absolutely (Almost) True Adventures of Max Rodriguez (2024), the Chicano/Navajo protagonist’s textual encounters allow them “to recognize themselves within a broad queer lineage, discovering that others like them have existed across time, language, and geography.” At the same time, the papers converge on common themes: reading as a catalyst for non-normative identifications, affects or attachments; books as a vehicle for negotiating identity and community; and border crossings through translation, transgender performance, and transnational social media.
Associate Professor Yonsoo Kim will open the panel reading the visionary sermons of Juana de la Cruz Vázquez as a site where sacred reading practices generated alternative configurations of gendered embodiment and communal belonging in late medieval Castile. Drawing on queer theory and premodern affect studies, Kim proposes that Juana’s homiletic performances and the material and vocal circulation of books (lectionaries, psalters, sermon compilations) cultivated queer relationality, a form of collectivity organized around ecstatic identification, cross-gendered Christological imagery, and porous boundaries between divine and human bodies. Lecturer Toloo Riazi will follow analyzing the role of books and reading in the construction of queer identity in Aldama’s The Absolutely (Almost) True Adventures of Max Rodriguez. Although Aldama’s illustrated novel is set in 1980s California, seemingly at a far remove from medieval Castilian convents, the protagonist’s readings form a dense intertextual web encompassing Sappho, Anna Karenina, Whitman, Baldwin, Mesoamerican cosmologies, and—sure enough—the early modern Castilian knight errant Don Quijote.
Continuing in the area of Latinx literature, PhD candidate Anaridia R. Molina will explore the Instagram archives and interviews of several Latinx women bookstagrammers who are based around the U.S. and have ties to Caribbean and Central American countries. Molina focuses on bookstagrammers’ engagements with queer themes, authors, and texts, arguing that Instagram shapes reading practices, literary promotion, and literary circulation in ways that both support and limit Latinx subjectivities. Finally, PhD candidate Olivia Magaña-Andaluz will apply a two-pronged approach to studying the transnational circulation of Hispanic queer literature through publicly funded translation initiatives. Combining Digital Humanities and Big Translation History with qualitative analysis, Magaña-Andaluz examines the presence of LGBTQ+ authors and queer texts within a dataset of translations supported by ten national translation programs in Latin America and Spain before contrasting two case studies: Loco afán (1996) by Chilean author Pedro Lemebel and Napalm al cor (2021) by Catalan author Pol Guasch.
Together, the four papers trace a genealogy of books and reading in Hispanic queer cultures cutting across time, space, genre, and agents (readers, writers, translators, promoters). Each panelist will speak for a maximum of fourteen minutes, leaving approximately nineteen minutes for robust conversation.
In recent years, queer cultures have confronted a resurgence of hatred that threatens to censor and silence queer words and books. The MLA Convention offers a needed forum for investigators who face mounting challenges to presenting their work through teaching and public scholarship elsewhere. The panel assembles researchers from across academic ranks and from a range of institutions in the U.S. and Catalonia (Spain). Collectively, we view our panel as an act of resistance and the convention as an opportunity to continue cultivating transnational queer community through books, reading, and scholarship.