Mujeres de Papel: Figuras de la "Lesbiana" en la Literatura y Cultura Españolas, 1868-1936

Mujeres de papel examines the representation of female same-sex desire in Spanish literature and culture between 1868 and 1936, drawing on novels, popular sex manuals, sexological treatises, postcards, and illustrations. While scholars have productively attended to Post-Francoist literary and cinematographic expressions of non-normative sexualities, my dissertation sheds new light on its rich yet discontinuous prehistories. I argue that the figure of the “lesbian” is a convergence point for the ideas, beliefs and anxieties of Spanish modernity. From the will to know and categorize to erotic fantasies, the “lesbian” constitutes a pervasive yet unstable trope, which resists and at the same time motivates its definition and control. Chapter one analyzes Francisco de Sales Mayo’s 1869 La Condesita (Memorias de una doncella), a work halfway between a private diary, an erotic novel, and a medical treatise, which features a provocative case of female homosexuality. The next two chapters grapple with literary, (pseudo)scientific, and visual artifacts of the so-called “sicalipsis,” or erotic wave that inundated Spanish culture between the late 19th century and the 1930s. Works studied in these sections include novels by Rafael Cansinos-Assens, Álvaro Retana, Artemio Precioso, and Felipe Trigo, popular sex manuals by Vicente Suárez Casañ and Ángel Martín de Lucenay, and visual erotica. Chapter four turns to the fiction of Feminist writer Carmen de Burgos in conjunction with the theories on “intersexuality” formulated by Gregorio Marañon, Spain’s most renowned scientist and public intellectual of the 1920s.Romance Languages and Literature