New Essay: Extranjeras in the Lettered City
Book
Can a woman be an intellectual? Can she share spaces of knowledge, culture, or political deliberation with men? What happens if the existence of the female citizen, the woman writer, or the political propagandist is allowed? How does that web of power sustained by law and language—what Ángel Rama called the “lettered city” to explain the consolidation of colonial power in the Americas—react? Is this image useful for discussing the structure of the Bourbon state in Spain from 1700 onward? This book offers a journey through women’s access to the realm of the cultural, intellectual, and political public sphere in modern Spain: from the first debates over women’s admission to the eighteenth-century Economic Societies, to the discussion of women’s suffrage during the Second Spanish Republic, including the so-called “academic question” in the nineteenth century—the impossibility of gaining entry to the Real Academia Española.
This April, my new monograph, Extranjeras in the Lettered City: On Power, Writing, and Women’s Citizenship in Spain, is being published by Ediciones KRK as part of the Alternativas collection, devoted to feminist and gender studies.
