Explores the contributions of three female free-thinkers to the development of feminist consciousness and democracy, examining their lives and works to discover their contributions to the Generation of 1898 in Spain.
Desired States challenges the notion that in some cultures, sex and sexuality have become privatized and located in individual subjectivity rather than in public political practices and institutions. Instead, the book contends that desire is a central aspect of political culture. Based on fieldwork and archival research, Frazier explores the gendered and sexualized dynamics of political culture in Chile, an imperialist context, asking how people connect with and become mobilized in political projects in some cases or, in others, become disaffected or are excluded to varying degrees. The book situates the state in a rich and changing context of transnational and localized movements, imperialist interests, geo-political conflicts, and market forces to explore the broader struggles of desiring subjects, especially in those dimensions of life that are explicitly sexual and amorous: free love movements, marriage, the sixties’ sexual revolution in Cold War contexts, prostitution policies, ideas about men’s gratification, the charisma of leaders, and sexual/domestic violence against women.
The four decades between the two Universal Exhibitions of 1888 and 1929 were formative in the creation of modern Barcelona. Architecture and art blossomed in the work of Antoni Gaudi and many others. At the same time, social unrest tore the city apart. Topics such as art nouveau and anarchism have attracted the attention of numerous historians. Yet the crucial role of science, technology and medicine in the cultural makeup of the city has been largely ignored. The ten articles of this book recover the richness and complexity of the scientific culture of end of the century Barcelona. The authors explore a broad range of topics: zoological gardens, natural history museums, amusement parks, new medical specialities, the scientific practices of anarchists and spiritists, the medical geography of the urban underworld, early mass media, domestic electricity and astronomical observatories. They pay attention to the agenda of the bourgeois elites but also to hitherto neglected actors: users of electric technologies and radio amateurs, patients in clinics and dispensaries, collectors and visitors of museums, working class audiences of public talks and female mediums. Science, technology and medicine served to exert social control but also to voice social critique. Barcelona: An urban history of science and modernity (1888-1929) shows that the city around 1900 was both a creator and facilitator of knowledge but also a space substantially transformed by the appropriation of this knowledge by its unruly citizens.
Engaging with pre-feminist and male-authored crime literature, Resisting Invisibility offers a comparative reading of women's bodies as represented in Spanish crime literature from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Utilizing the twin concepts of visibility and invisibility, the book establishes a genealogy of differing viewpoints regarding women's positions in these narratives, before and after the birth of the modern Spanish female detective. This examination of the politics of female visibility expands our understanding of the aesthetic regimes that have governed the female body from the early phases of the genre's evolution. While most scholars understand the feminization of the crime genre as a response to second-wave feminism, Resisting Invisibility demonstrates that even in the earliest representations of delinquent women, the politics surrounding the female body are problematized and are more complex than previously conceptualized. Drawing on gender and queer studies, Resisting Invisibility investigates the gendering of crime fiction, forcing us to reconsider the literary history of female visibility and prompting us to establish an alternative genealogy for Spanish crime literature.
The epic poems written during the rise of Portugal and Spain on the global stage often dealt with topics quite unimaginable to the likes of Virgil or Homer. These poems reveal the astounding opportunities for upward social mobility and self-promotion afforded by broader access to print and the vast amount of knowledge and material wealth accrued through maritime exploration. Iberian poets of the period were quite cognizant of their ventures into uncharted territory, and that awareness informed their literary journeys. The War Trumpet features nine substantial essays that expand our understanding of Iberian Renaissance epic poetry by posing questions seldom raised in relation to poems such as La Araucana, Os Lusíadas, Carlo famoso, El Bernardo, Arauco Domado, Espejo de paciencia, and Felicissima Victoria, among others. Particularly compelling are questions concerned with early modern understandings of the natural world, the practice of poetic imitation, the discipline of cartography, or the reception of Petrarchism in the newly established viceroyalties of the New World. Fostering a greater appreciation of the intersection between poetry, war, and exploration, The War Trumpet sheds light on the transformative changes that took place during the period of Iberian expansion.
A New History of Iberian Feminisms is both a chronological history and an analytical discussion of feminist thought in the Iberian Peninsula, including Portugal, and the territories of Spain - the Basque Provinces, Catalonia, and Galicia - from the eighteenth century to the present day. The Iberian Peninsula encompasses a dynamic and fraught history of feminism that had to contend with entrenched tradition and a dominant Catholic Church. Editors Silvia Bermúdez and Roberta Johnson and their contributors reveal the long and historical struggles of women living within various parts of the Iberian Peninsula to achieve full citizenship. A New History of Iberian Feminisms comprises a great deal of new scholarship, including nineteenth-century essays written by women on the topic of equality. By addressing these lost texts of feminist thought, Bermúdez, Johnson, and their contributors reveal that female equality, considered a dormant topic in the early nineteenth century, was very much part of the political conversation, and helped to launch the new feminist wave in the second half of the century.
This volume focuses on intersections of race, class, gender, and nation in the formation of the fin-de-siècle Spanish and Spanish colonial subject. Despite the wealth of research produced on gender, social class, race, and national identity few studies have focused on how these categories interacted, frequently operating simultaneously to reveal contexts in which dominated groups were dominating and vice versa. Such revelations call into question metanarratives about the exploitation of one group by another and bring to light interlocking systems of identity formation, and consequently oppression, that are difficult to disentangle. The authors included here study this dynamic in a variety of genres and venues, namely the essay, the novel, the short story, theater, and zarzuelas. These essays cover canonical authors such as Benito Pérez Galdós and Emilia Pardo Bazán, and understudied female authors such as Rosario de Acuña and Belén Sárraga. The authors included here study this dynamic in a variety of genres and venues, namely the essay, the novel, the short story, theater, and zarzuelas. The volume builds on recent scholarship on race, class, gender, and nation by focusing specifically on the intersections of these categories, and by studying this dynamic in popular culture, visual culture, and in the works of both canonical and lesser-known authors.
Chronicling sixteenth-century Spain to the present day, Beyond Human aims to decentre the human and acknowledge the material historicity of more-than-human nature. The book explores key questions relating to ecological equity, justice, and responsibility within and beyond Spain in the Anthropocene. Examining relations between Iberian cultural practices, historical developments, and ecological processes, Maryanne L. Leone, Shanna Lino, and the contributors to this volume reveal the structures that uphold and dismantle the non-human–human dichotomy and nature-culture divide. The book critiques works from the Golden Age to the twenty-first century in a wide range of genres, including comedia, royal treatises, agricultural reports, paintings, satirical essays, horror fiction and film, young adult and speculative literature, poetry, graphic novels, and television series. The authors contend that Spanish cultural studies must expose the material historicity that entangles today’s ecological crises and ecosocial injustices with previous, future, and contemporary entities. The book argues that this will require the simultaneous decentring of the human and of the Anthropocene as an ecocritical framework. By standardizing ecosocial analysis and widening avenues for ecopedagogical approaches, Beyond Human participates in the ecocentric transformation of Hispanic cultural studies.
Spanning cultures across the 20th century, this volume explores how marriage, especially in the West, was disestablished as the primary institution organizing social life. In the developing world, the economic, social, and legal foundations of traditional marriage are stronger but also weakening. Marriage changed because an industrial wage economy reduced familial patriarchal control of youth and women and spurred demands and possibilities for greater autonomy and choice in love. After the Second World War, when more married women pursued education and employment, and gays and lesbians gained visibility, feminism and gay liberation also challenged patriarchal and restrictive gender roles and helped to reshape marriage. In 1920 most people married for life; in the twenty-first century fewer marry, and serial monogamy prevails. Marriage is more diverse and flexible in form but also more fragile and optional than it once was. Over the century control of courtship shifted from parents to youth, and friends, as opposed to kin, became more important in sustaining marriages. Dual-wage-earner families replaced the male breadwinner. Social and political liberalism assailed conservative laws and religious regimes, expanding access to divorce and birth control. Although norms of masculinity and femininity retain huge power in most cultures, visions of more egalitarian and romantic love as the basis of marriage have gained traction-made appealing by the global spread of capitalist social relations and also broadcast by culture industries in the developed world. The legalization of same-sex marriage-in over twenty-five nations by 2020-epitomizes a century of change toward a less gender-defined ideal that includes a continued desire for social recognition and permanence. A Cultural History of Marriage in the Modern Age presents an overview of the period with essays on Courtship and Ritual; Religion, State and Law; Kinship and Social Networks; the Family Economy; Love and Sex; the Breaking of Vows; and Representations of Marriage.
The Spanish Civil War was idealized as a poet’s war. The thousands of poems written about the conflict are memorable evidence of poetry’s high cultural and political value in those historical conditions. After Franco’s victory and the repression that followed, numerous Republican exiles relied on the symbolic agency of poetry to uphold a sense of national identity. Exilic poems are often read as claim-making narratives that fit national literary history. This Ghostly Poetry critiques this conventional understanding of literary history by arguing that exilic poems invite readers to seek continuity with a traumatic past just as they prevent their narrative articulation. The book uses the figure of the ghost to address temporal challenges to historical continuity brought about by memory, tracing the discordant, disruptive ways in which memory is interwoven with history in poems written in exile. Taking a novel approach to cultural memory, This Ghostly Poetry engages with literature, history, and politics while exploring issues of voice, time, representation, and disciplinarity.