Drawing on feminist theories and cultural histories, this book interweaves historical and literary contexts of Spanish female writers and their works on war.
The ways in which women have historically authorized themselves to write on war has blurred conventionally gendered lines, intertwining the personal with the political. Women on War in Spain’s Long Nineteenth Century explores, through feminist lenses, the cultural representations of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish women’s texts on war. Reshaping the current knowledge and understanding of key female authors in Spain’s fin de siècle, this book examines works by notable writers – including Rosario de Acuña, Blanca de los Rios, Concepción Arenal, and Carmen de Burgos – as they engage with the War of Independence, the Third Carlist War, Spain’s colonial wars, and World War I. The selected works foreground how women’s representations of war can challenge masculine conceptualizations of public and domestic spheres. Christine Arkinstall analyses the works’ overarching themes and symbols, such as honour, blood, the Virgin and the Mother, and the intersecting sexual, social, and racial contracts. In doing so, Arkinstall highlights how these texts imagine outcomes that deviate from established norms of femininity, offer new models to Spanish women, and interrogate the militaristic foundations of patriarchal societies.
This book is a biography of Pueblonuevo del Terrible, a mining town located in Andalusia, Spain. Based on previously unexamined sources, the study paints a fresh portrait of industrial workers and their families in Córdoba province, enriching our understanding of this mostly agricultural region. Previous studies of laboring communities in Spain have identified radical workers, miners among them, as a destabilizing element due to their insurgent protest activity, including lethal violence. This study, by contrast, describes both worker activism and cross-class organizing as constructive, not destructive, and aimed at integration into Spanish society. Economically, the mining zone was dominated by a French company in the Rothschild portfolio. But by running their own city, waging peaceful labor strikes, raising a church, building housing, and honoring their dead, residents turned a quasi-colonial outpost into a pueblo worth defending, and they rallied in defense of the Republic at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. In the making of Pueblonuevo del Terrible, Spanish men and women contended with the perils of mine work, the jolts of industrial capitalism, creeping fascism, and civil war. As such, this book tells a village-scale story of global events that defined the twentieth century.
Comfort and domestic space are complex narratives that can help draw our attention to everything from urban planning, everyday objects, and new technologies to class conflict, racial and ethnic segregation, and the gendering of domestic labour. Comfort and Domestic Space in Modern Spain delves into the history of ideas surrounding the modern home. It explores how the collective experience of domestic space has been shaped by government ideologues, technocrats, and artists as well as working- and middle-class Spaniards since the late nineteenth century. The book focuses on the social and cultural meanings of domestic space in ways that invite us to cross boundaries between private and public, the particular and the general, the local and the global, and to pay attention to the role of the cultural imagination in making a house into a home. Considering a wide variety of voices and perspectives that have resulted in new ideas about how to inhabit domestic space, Comfort and Domestic Space in Modern Spain brings together an international, interdisciplinary group of scholars to illuminate the cultural history of everyday life.
Politically Animated studies the convergence of animation and actuality within films, television series, and digital shorts from across the Spanish-speaking world. It interrogates the many ways in which animation as a stylistic tool and storytelling device participates in political projects underpinning an array of non-fiction works. The case studies in the book cover a diverse geographical scope, including Spain, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico. They critically analyse different works such as feature-length animated documentary films, a work of animated journalism, a short animated essay, and micro-short episodes from a televised animated documentary series. Jennifer Nagtegaal employs the term "politically animated" in reference to the ideological implications of choosing specific techniques and styles of animation within certain socio-historical and cultural contexts. Nagtegaal illuminates the creative union of animated documentary and the comics medium currently being exploited by Spanish and Latin American cartoonists and filmmakers alike. By paying particular attention to cultural production beyond the big screen, Politically Animated continues to stretch the bounds of animated documentary scholarship.
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.
Bodies beyond Labels explores moments of joy and joyful expressions of self-identity, intimacy, sexuality, affect, friendship, social relationships, and religiosity in imperial Spanish cultures, a period when embodiments of such joy were shadowed by comparatively more constrictive social conventions. Viewed in this manner, joy frames historic references to gender, sexuality, and present-day concepts of queerness through homoeroticism, non-labelled bodies, gender fluidity, and performativity. This collection reveals diverse glimmers of joy through a variety of genres, including plays, poems, novels, autobiographies, biblical narratives, and civil law texts, among others. The book is divided into five categories: theatrical works that use mythology to enjoy themes of homoeroticism; narrative prose and visual arts that reveal public and private homoerotic expressions; scopophilia within garden and museum spaces that make possible joyous observations of non-labelled and non-corporeal bodies; biblical narratives and epistolary works that signal religious transgressions of gender and friendship; and sexual geographies explored in historic and legal documents. As new generations develop more nuanced senses of gender and sexual identities, Bodies beyond Labels strives to provide new academic optics, as framed by non-labelled bodies, queer theorizations, joy in unexpected places, and the light that has historically (re)emerged from the shadows.