CFP for NEMLA 2022: The Female Gothic in Latin America and Spain

Sandra García Gutiérrez Announcement
Location
United States
Subject Fields
Latin American and Caribbean History / Studies, Literature, Spanish and Portuguese History / Studies, Women's & Gender History / Studies, Film and Film History

This panel aims to approach the Female Gothic through texts and other media ranging from the 19th to the 21st century in Latin America and Spain, including Latinx authors living in the United States. With the publication of the foundational Literary Women in 1976, Emily Moers coined the term “female gothic” in the second wave of the feminist movement. Almost three decades later, Maria Purves points out in Women and Gothic (2014) that “The gothic voices the sublimities of female experiences but is also used to darken and devalue them” (1). Gothic readers have been traditionally young women, and in postmodern Gothic this has been taken as a feminist vindication in which female writers, such as Liliana Colanzi, Mariana Enríquez, Patricia Esteban Erlés, Cecilia Eudave or Elvira Navarro, explore the possibilities of this particular mode of representation. For the purposes of this panel, the Female Gothic refers to any work that can be understood as a space where anxieties on sex, gender, marriage and/or motherhood play out against traditional or modern gothic backdrops. Of particular interest are theoretical approaches to monstrous female characters (femme fatales, vampires and the like) and/or texts that destabilize the “angel of the house” or similar bourgeois ideological constructions.

Contact Information

Sandra Garcia Gutierrez (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Megan DeVirgilis (Morgan State University)

Contact Email
sangarci@ad.unc.edu