Queer Women in Modern Spanish Literature

"Queer Women in Modern Spanish Literature is an innovative, engaging, and eye-opening volume about gender dissidence and the significance of community. Particularly accessible and clear, its contributors show the continuum of unconventional women writers who made of their queerness a legacy of experiences that embrace women's desires, while pursuing social justice. These essays will certainly inspire new literary, gender, and LGBTQ studies, and constitutes a well-deserved recognition of extraordinary writers from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries often overlooked in canonical approaches to the period."

Nuria Godón, Florida Atlantic University, USA.

"This is a fascinating collection of essays about women and queerness in modern Spain. The protagonists of Queer Women in Modern Spanish Literature are nonconformist women writers and activists who defied prevailing gender norms and conventional femininity in multiple, often unexpected ways. Thanks to this original and thought-provoking book, a series of queer women, relevant cultural figures, jump from the margins of history to the center of the analysis, showing us the many meanings of gender dissidence. If they imagined and pursued a different present, we can imagine a different past through them now."

Nerea Aresti, historian, University of the Basque Country, Spain.

"This innovative volume features a gallery of ‘queer women’ (‘mujeres raras’) in the world of letters in modern Spain, who challenged established gender norms in their private and public lives. By embracing the notion of ‘queer’ beyond sexual orientation, the contributors establish original and unexpected connections among these women who expressed their gender in unconventional ways, venturing into public spaces, and engaging in relationships and activities that defied societal expectations. Queer Women makes an important contribution to modern Iberian gender and cultural studies by showcasing the lives and writings of ‘queer women’ who dared to imagine identity differently."

Akiko Tsuchiya, Washington University in St. Louis, USA.

"This extremely rich volume edited by Lou Charnon-Deutsch and Ana Simón-Alegre explores through numerous literary and social scenarios what it meant to be a 'chica rara' or 'woman' in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain. From cross-dressing to feminism and from women’s involvement in spiritism to queer narratives under Francoism, this volume provides an incisive engagement with the history of gendered relations and sexuality and the pressing relevance of yesterday’s debates to today’s struggles. The accounts of women’s friendship, agency, and contestation against gender and sexual norms in the Spanish present and past make for essential reading for scholars in the fields of Gender Studies and Cultural History."

Richard Cleminson, Professor of Hispanic Studies, University of Leeds, UK.

"Queer Women in Modern Spanish Literature is an original collection of essays that explores the expression of gender dissidence from a variety of angles. The authors examine the chicas raras’ provocative means of vindicating female production of knowledge, interrogating subjectivities and claiming traditional male spaces. The essays take us from cross-dressing and dandyism to the assertion of non-binary identities; from spiritism to queer tertulias; from reform pedagogy to sisterhoods and female associationism … These are but some of the compelling subjects readers will encounter. The study of this group of unconventional women and their unconventional tools is an essential contribution as we continue building the archive of Spanish women’s writings and activism."

Rosalía Cornejo-Parriego, University of Ottawa, Canada