Gender in Spanish Urban Spaces

Literary and Visual Narratives of the New Millennium

Maria C. DiFrancesco, Debra J. Ochoa, Maria C. DiFrancesco, Debra J. Ochoa

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319473253
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This edited collection examines the synergistic relationship between gender and urban space in post-millennium Spain. Despite the social progress Spain has made extending equal rights to all citizens, particularly in the wake of the Franco regime and radically liberating Transición, the fact remains that not all subjects—particularly, women, immigrants, and queers—possess equal autonomy. The book exposes visible shifts in power dynamics within the nation's largest urban capitals—Madrid and Barcelona—and takes a hard look at more peripheral bedroom communities as all of these spaces reflect the discontent of a post-nationalistic, economically unstable Spain. As the contributors problematize notions of public and private space and disrupt gender binaries related with these, they aspire to engender discussion around civic status, the administration of space and the place of all citizens in a global world.

© The Author(s) 2017

Maria C. DiFrancesco and Debra J. Ochoa (eds.)Gender in Spanish Urban SpacesHispanic Urban Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47325-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Maria C. DiFrancesco¹ and Debra J. Ochoa²

(1)

Modern Languages and Literatures, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY, USA

(2)

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Trinity University, San Antonio, TX, USA

Maria C. DiFrancesco

is Associate Professor of Spanish and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures at Ithaca College (Ithaca, NY). She holds a Ph.D. from the University at Buffalo, where she specialized in twentieth and twenty-first-century Spanish peninsular literature. She is particularly interested in issues of gender and sexuality in contemporary Spain and has more recently focused her research on human immigration as portrayed in Spanish literature, film, and other popular media. She is the author of Feminine Agency and Transgression in Post-Franco Spain (Juan de la Cuesta, 2008) and has written peer-reviewed articles that have appeared in academic journals such as Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, Letras femeninas, Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Literatures, and the Journal of Lesbian Studies. DiFrancesco is also currently President of the Northeast Modern Languages Association, a service to the profession that she truly enjoys.

Debra J. Ochoa

is Associate Professor of Spanish at Trinity University (San Antonio, TX). She specializes in contemporary Spanish literature and culture. Her research appears in Letras hispanas, Letras femeninas, Confluencia, and Ámbitos feministas among other publications. Her book chapter “Comedies of Crisis in Post-2008 European Cinema: La vida inesperada and Casse-tête chinois” will appear in the forthcoming volume edited by Ana Corbalán and Betty Kaklamanidou, European Film and Television: Crisis Narratives and Narratives of Crisis. She is currently working on a book project on Spanish cultural production set in New York.

End Abstract

Despite the progress that Spain has made to extend equal rights to all its citizens, the fact remains that not all subjects—particularly women, immigrants , and members of the LGBTQ community—possess equal autonomy. The root of this problem can be found in the origins of urban design as tied to the administration of space. In Western societies, patriarchal spatiality has maintained its stability through the link between civic standing and gender in so much as one’s citizenship status impacted one’s right to the city. Dating to Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, author of De Architectura (30–20 BC) and father of architectural theory, urban planners conceived of themselves not simply as designers of public buildings, but as servants entrusted to create entire cities that would enable harmonious, systematic governance of space. ¹ This authority shared links with biological sex and civic status because only male citizens were viewed as legitimate participants in events that occurred in legislative buildings, religious temples, and the market place. Even if the right to the city, since Roman times, attempted to serve the needs of all inhabitants, urban “planning” in the broad sense was linked to the knowledge and limited perspective of those who defined the urban subject as a heteronormative, male citizen. ²

To address the advances and challenges that subjects face in contemporary Spain , our volume Gender in Spanish Urban Spaces: Literary and Visual Narratives of the New Millennium examines cultural production since 2000. We analyze the different ways various subjects encounter and relate to one another, how they network and intermingle. Gender in Spanish Urban Spaces thus treads into new territory as we approach points of conversion among disciplines—gender studies, urban studies, and Spanish Peninsular studies—knowing that this figurative intersection has not been carefully designed by a planner but is organic, having emerged from more natural disciplinary processes over time. These areas of inquiry dialog with and inform the narrative landscape of millennial literature and visual texts.

Why Gender in Spanish Urban Spaces?

As editors, we took note of certain incongruences from the very inception of this project. While a small number of Peninsularists have published studies related to urban space, few scholars approach gender and urban space head on. A notable recent contribution to this area is Jill Robbins’s Crossing through Chueca: Lesbian Literary Culture in Queer Madrid (2011). Robbins’s study affirms that the sheer physical presence of LGBTQ community members in a geographic area—Madrid’s Chueca neighborhood—does not give the individual members of that community de facto visibility, social equity, or authority. Of special interest to us as editors was Robbins’s discussion of Chueca’s territorial integration into Madrid. The author explores how this part of the city, part of the Justicia neighborhood, became incorporated into the nation’s capital as a result of wider Francoist political strategies meant to regulate the movements of potentially rebellious working-class citizens inhabiting the neighborhood. Ironically, this preemptive conservative tactic became a source of rupture once Franco died. In as much as artists and intellectuals sought to “resemanticize” the city, Robbins notes that the once peripheral Chueca became emblematic of the Movida’s rebellious response and attitude toward necessarily heteronormative authority and standards. By drawing attention to queer Madrid, Robbins problematizes hegemonic notions of essentialist terms and focuses almost exclusively on lesbian identity and romantic relationships as portrayed in Chueca. While this goal evidences Robbins’s incomparable pioneering spirit, the intent of our volume is to focus on gender and geography, keeping in mind a range of issues related to gender as understood to exist within a continuum.

In addition to Robbins’s study, Ann Davies’s Spanish Spaces: Landscape, Space, and Place in Contemporary Spanish Culture (2012), focuses on contemporary Spanish literary and cinematic narratives—ranging from a selection of novels by Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (1910–1999) to films by Guillermo del Toro (1966–) and Imanol Uribe (1950–)—to consider how subjects experience space, place, and landscape in an era of post-nationalism. Davies’s research analyzes the themes of memory and forgetting, nationalism and terrorism, crime and detection, gender, and tourism and immigration. Although Davies bases her theoretical framework on theories about space—including Lefebvre and Massey, two of the theorists that inform this volume—her focus on landscape studies distinguishes Spanish Spaces from our volume. Davies’s chapter on Giménez Bartlett’s female detective series and Icíar Bollaín’s film Mataharis (2007) does examine gender, but our contributors extend their questioning further to study how both men and women, both heterosexual and homosexual, occupy urban space.

Another study that complements this book is Estrella Cibreiro and Francisca López’s Global Issues in Contemporary Hispanic Women’s Writings (2013), which focuses on Latin American and Spanish texts that explore gender, violence , the environment, and politics. The sections “Women and the Environment” and “Global Politics from a Gendered Perspective” situate their volume within an intellectual discourse that diverges from our concentration on gender and urban space in contemporary Spain. In comparison with our book, that volume has a broader scope and examines gender in a more diffused light to address lesser explored topics of women’s writings about the environment and global politics. It is worth noting that Cibreiro and López’s section “Reshaping Gender by Rethinking Genre” does examine gender; however, the topic of urban space is only indirectly addressed. Peninsularist scholars will appreciate that our contributors focus exclusively on Spain.

Of the most recent Peninsularist volumes, Ana Corbalán and Ellen Mayock’s volume Toward a Multicultural Configuration of Spain (2015) shares certain commonalities with our volume because a few of our contributors do examine immigration but to a lesser extent. Corbalán and Mayock categorize their volume by genre and focus on three main themes: literary representations of the local and the global; documentary films that explore migration, space, and tourism; and cinematic depictions of multicultural encounters. To distinguish Gender in Spanish Urban Spaces, we have chosen to focus on literary and filmic texts from 2000 to the present and, as a result, this volume contains studies on lesser known yet significant cultural productions that deserve critical attention. We are aware that two of the texts examined in our volume—namely Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful (2010) and Lucía Etxebarría’s Cosmofobia (2007)—have been widely studied, but our readers will find that Catherine B. Ross, in “Defining Mother’s Place in Barcelona : Women in Biutiful (2010),” and N. Michelle Murray, in “On the Affective Politics of Cosmopolitanism: African Migration, Lavapiés, and the Domestic Realm in Lucía Etxebarría’s Cosmofobia (2007),” insert their arguments among other studies on these cultural artifacts, and also examine motherhood and immigration from an innovative angle. It is our hope that Gender in Spanish Urban Spaces will not only engage in pre-existing dialogs but also foster new discussions on contemporary Spanish narrative and film.

Finally, it would be remiss of the editors not to recognize Ana Corbalán and Lorraine Ryan’s recent edited volume, The Dynamics of Masculinity in Contemporary Spanish Culture (2017), which serendipitously coincided with our volume’s submission date. Corbalán and Ryan’s groundbreaking volume identifies the spectrum of masculinities found in contemporary Spanish cultural production. Their volume addresses ranges of masculinity, from hegemonic representations of manhood, with attendant ties to colonial conquest and nationalistic Francoism, to masculinities that bring into question definitions of what it means to be a “Spanish” male subject when existent models of this type have so categorically turned a blind eye to individuals historically marginalized within Spain’s geographic borders, including immigrants as well as ethnic and religious minorities. We believe that the chapters in our volume which focus on masculinities complement those found in The Dynamics of Masculinity in Contemporary Spanish Culture. For example, our contributors—namely Adrián Gras-Velázquez, Antoni Maestre-Brotons, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. Masculinities and Gender Dynamics in Urban Space
• Part II. Immigration and Female Subjectivity in Urban Peripheries
• Part III. Interior and Exterior Spaces of Gender in Madrid and Barcelona
• Part IV. Gender and Migration in Urban Spaces
• Back Matter