Browsing by Author "Sieburth, Stephanie"

Gendering Anti-Francoism reinterprets Spain’s tradition of protest music, offering the first monographic study of Iberian female singer-songwriters (cantautoras). Implementing an interdisciplinary methodology—based on the combination of textual and sonic close readings, oral history interviews, criminal records, and extensive archival research—this dissertation demonstrates that cantautoras played a major role both in the anti-Franco struggle and in the second-wave feminist movement, between 1952 and 1986. Songs were crucial for community-building, for bearing witness to different forms of violence, and for steering feminist progress. They soon became instrumental in raising individual and collective consciousness. Existing scholarship has mainly examined the lives and work of white, heterosexual, male singer-songwriters, from Paco Ibáñez’s first recordings (1956) until Franco’s death in 1975; and it has also organized cantautores by territories, e.g., studying all Catalan singers together, in isolation from their counterparts elsewhere. My periodization foregrounds a new-found group of over 70 female performers playing since the ‘50s; it extends through 1986 to include a decade of feminist activism previously overlooked. Furthermore, my analyses offer a new Iberian multilingual, multicultural, and intersectional approach, placing minoritized languages among other interconnected identity struggles involving gender, sexuality, and class. Adopting a cultural-historical perspective, I demonstrate how cantautoras confronted together the status quo, i.e., the far-reaching effects of the ultra-Catholic, sexist, and nationalist ideology of Francoism. I track how performers endured state repression and music censorship in several multi-artist tours in the 1970s. Meanwhile, concert-goers protested concert cancellations, as well as fines, arrests, and incarcerations that targeted singers. I further argue that most cantautoras put forward a feminist way of thinking that qualified and sought to inflect the priorities of left-wing political parties during the years of clandestine activism, and later, during Spain’s Transition to democracy. Thus, cantautoras performed for the left-leaning political parties and the feminist movement, pushing forward multiple struggles. During the Transition, many cantautoras sang to denounce all discrimination against women remaining from Francoist legislation. I also investigate collaborations between cantautoras, writers, and other female artists; the potential of ambiguous love songs for the LGTBIQ+ community; and the political ideas that cantautoras conveyed through children’s music.

This dissertation is a preliminary attempt to define and theorize Spanish literature of the late nineteenth century from the perspective of the colonized. I take as my starting point the novels of the Filipino writer José Rizal: Noli me tángere and El filibusterismo. Although these novels are considered to be the foundational texts of the Philippine nation, I will instead focus on their relationship to Spain and the literature produced there around the same period. This analysis will be contrasted with a reading of Benito Pérez Galdós's novel Doña Perfecta, which, as many critics have claimed, bears a resemblance to Rizal's first novel. I will show how Galdós's novel demonstrates a colonizing mentality despite being nominally about an internal Spanish conflict. In conclusion, I will argue for the necessity of an understanding of Rizal's novels in order to better grasp the total context in which peninsular Spanish novels were produced.

This dissertation explores how the depiction of gender-differentiated economic roles in women’s magazines contributed to shaping Spanish women as economic actors during the first 30 years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1968). The analysis focuses on eight publications: Y, Revista para la Mujer and Teresa, published by the Sección Femenina (Women’s Section) of Spain’s fascist Falange party; Senda and Para Nosotras, published by the women’s wing of the lay religious group Acción Católica (Catholic Action); and commercial magazines El Hogar y la Moda, Marisol, Ama, and Telva. My interdisciplinary methodology combines a close reading of these magazines with an analysis of relevant economic data from this historical period. This approach sheds new light on the conflict between magazines’ idealized rhetoric, which centered primarily around models of feminine domesticity and motherhood, and the desperate economic circumstances that many Spanish women endured under Francoist rule.

The years immediately following Spain’s brutal Civil War (1936-1939) were marked by violent repression and devastating material conditions, which were exacerbated by the Franco regime’s failed attempts to achieve economic self-sufficiency. In my analysis of magazines published during the 1940s, I track the discursive strategies that editors used in an attempt to shift the blame for the country’s post-war economic woes away from the regime and onto women. I then explore how magazines’ discourses evolved in the 1950s and 1960s, as the regime began to embrace more liberal economic policies and reopen Spain to international trade. I demonstrate how comparatively more permissive models of economic womanhood appeared in the magazines of the 1950s in the context of Spain’s reentry into global society. But I argue that a reactionary backlash arose in the magazines of the 1960s as more and more women began to actually embrace economic opportunities and identities that fell outside traditional norms.

Throughout this work, my analysis draws attention to the numerous contradictions that existed, both between women’s magazines’ messages and their readers lived experiences, and within magazines’ discourses themselves. I therefore challenge previous readings of these popular media texts as straightforward propaganda tools, arguing instead that they served as a crucial site in an ongoing struggle for cultural hegemony in Francoist Spain. While magazines’ editors sought to reinforce a dominant narrative regarding women’s roles in Spanish society against the looming threat of potential counter-narratives, I argue that their attempts were not entirely successful. Rather, I demonstrate how didactic elements like fictional dialogues, and collaborative components like advice columns, enabled provocative queries, and even dissent, to enter into and disrupt the discursive exchange between editors and readers.

What does it mean in Spain to talk about national cuisine? This dissertation examines how three of Spain's most prominent intellectuals of the early twentieth century—Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos, and Gregorio Marañón—confronted that question in their writing in cookbooks at a pivotal moment in Spain's history. Pardo Bazán, a feminist writer and novelist, authored two cookbooks, La cocina española antigua (1913) and La cocina española moderna (1914). Burgos, a teacher, newspaper columnist, and novelist, authored La cocina moderna (1906), ¿Quiere usted comer bien? (1916), and Nueva cocina práctica (1925). Marañón, a physician and statesman as well as a writer, penned the prologue to Basque chef and restaurant-owner Nicolasa Pradera's 1933 cookbook La cocina de Nicolasa. These authors were active during a period that saw enormous changes in Spain's political structure and demographics, and in social and gender roles, and each of them engaged with the debates about Spain and the modern nation that consumed intellectual thinkers of the time. And yet each of these authors chose to write about cooking and food in a genre intended for the use of middle-class women in their homes.

Their writing in cookbooks, I posit, offered Pardo Bazán, Burgos, and Marañón the opportunity to address directly the middle-class female readers who stood at the nexus of their anxieties regarding Spain's modernization. These anxieties were generated by shifting social structures as women gained access to education and to paid employment outside of the home, and as a newly mobilizing working class threatened the social order through political and labor organization, as well as with violence and unrest. By teasing out the contradictions in their cookbook prologues, I show how these intellectuals use Spanish cuisine to promote a vision of Spain's modernization that corrects for the instabilities generated by those same modernization processes.

In Chapter One, I demonstrate how Pardo Bazán uses Spain's cocina antigua, catalogued in La cocina española antigua (1913), to "write the nation into existence" (Labanyi). By positioning cooking and cuisine in parallel to the dominant masculine nation-building discourses of the period, Pardo Bazán maps a role for her women readers, and for herself as a woman writer, in the task of building a modern Spanish nation. In Chapter Two, I focus on Pardo Bazán's second cookbook, La cocina española moderna (1914), and show how she uses Spain's modern cuisine to inculcate her female readers with the middle-class values that she believes will serve as a bulwark against the increasing unrest of the working class. In contrast to Pardo Bazán, who designates a conventional role for middle-class women in return for protection against the working class, Carmen de Burgos argues that there is no contradiction between women's domestic roles and having a public role and an intellectual life. Chapter Three analyzes how she uses a strategy of "double writing" (Zubiaurre) to show the importance of cuisine to the public sphere and to criticize the still extant obstacles to women's public activity. Chapter Four focuses on Gregorio Marañón's construction of Basque chef and restaurateur Nicolasa Pradera in his prologue to her cookbook. Marañón uses the prologue to promote a palatable version of Spain and its modernity to outsiders. Yet his version of Spain's modernity depends on reinscribing figures like Pradera into traditional, anti-modern gender and class roles.

At a moment in which the international media identify in Spanish cuisine "the new source of Europe's most exciting wine and food" (Lubow 1), this project historicizes the notion of "Spanish cuisine" at the center of Spanish haute cuisine. It also represents a foundational study in food cultural studies in Spain, offering a critical examination of cookbooks as a genre and as crucial texts in the oeuvres of Emilia Pardo Bazán, Carmen de Burgos, and Gregorio Marañón.

The late-nineteenth-century realist canon in Spain is filled with male characters who are physically weak, effeminate, ineffectual, infantilized, or impotent, and, thus, decidedly "unmanly," which indicates a collective societal anxiety about masculinity in Spain at the end of the nineteenth century. I argue that this anxiety about masculinity stems from another societal worry about Spain's backwardness with respect to its more modern European neighbors and the uneven rate of modernization with its own borders. I explore these issues in four novels by Galician-born realist author Emilia Pardo Bazán: La Tribuna (1882), Los Pazos de Ulloa (1886), La Madre Naturaleza (1887), and Memorias de un solterón (1896). I analyze these texts in light of historical and theoretical work on post-Enlightenment masculinity by scholars, such as George Mosse, John Tosh, Christopher Forth, and R. W. Connell.

In the first chapter, I trace the development of the post-Enlightenment, Western, model of manliness, a primarily urban, bourgeois phenomenon, which privileged rational intellect and individual hard work. I then compare the pace and extent of modernization in Spain and England to show how Spain lacked the material conditions that would allow most Spanish men to embody modern masculinity in the late nineteenth century. For the remaining chapters, I turn my attention to Los Pazos de Ulloa, La Madre Naturaleza, and Memorias de un solterón. Each of these novels shows, in different ways, how the modern masculine ideal coexists and conflicts with other pre-Enlightenment models of manliness--based on aristocratic leisure, military prowess, or brute force. I argue that the problems faced by the male characters in these novels are a direct result of this clash of masculinities, which in turn reflects Spain's economic stagnation in the nineteenth century. In Chapter II, I show how the refusal of the rural, Galician aristocracy to embrace certain hallmarks of the modern masculine ideal, such as hard work and Enlightenment thought, leads to a destabilization of feudal hierarchies in Los Pazos de Ulloa. I then argue that this destabilization results in the pervasiveness of violence in the novel. Chapter III focuses on La Madre Naturaleza. I contend that its narrator recognizes that change must come to rural Galicia and, thus, makes a gesture toward reconciling traditional and modern values, as well as pre-Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment models of masculinity. I then show how this reconciliation ultimately fails because the narrator condemns the social mobility upon which modernization and modern masculinity depend. In Chapter IV, I discuss the importance of marriage and fatherhood to the enactment of modern masculinity in Memorias de un solterón. I then illustrate how, in the Galician provincial capital in which the novel is set, social and economic conditions make life as a bourgeois husband and father undesirable at best, and ruinous at worst.

This dissertation, “Urban Borderlands: African Writers in Precarious Spain, 1985-2008,” analyzes the literature of four African-born authors who publish for a Spanish audience: the Beninese writer Agnès Agboton; Najat El Hachmi and Rachid Nini who migrated from Morocco; as well as exiled Equatorial Guinean novelist Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo. Because they come from such diverse backgrounds, literary critics have typically only read their work in unison under the label “migrant narrative.” However, rather than treat these authors and their depictions of migrancy as somehow foreign, I ask what they can tell us about Spain’s dependency on undocumented African workers in its quest to become a developed, European nation. Starting with the promulgation of the first immigration law in 1985 this project charts Spain’s subsequent transformation from a country of émigrés into a cosmopolitan destination for workers the world over.Sociological and anthropological approaches to Spanish/African relations center on Spain’s frontier zone with Morocco or in the true interior, between agricultural workers, whereas these creative works offer rare testimonies to the simultaneous bordering of Spanish cities. Through their collective storytelling effort, I reframe the concept of bordering—not just as geographical lines or physical boundaries—but as practices of racialization and gender discrimination that undergird labor market segmentation, thereby exerting serious controls over the day-to-day of migrant life in a new host country. Each chapter addresses one of these forms of border making and how it contributed to Spain’s ability to claim its place among the ranks of the European Union. On the whole, the project considers these bordering efforts as iterations of precarious life and labor conditions that predate the financial crisis of 2008.

Abstract

The album phenomenon developed in France and Spain and lasted throughout the entire nineteenth century. Albums were books with blank pages in which the owner collected contributions in the form of poetry, drawings, and music scores. These works were created for album owners by friends, acquaintances, and sometimes even suitors, and were meant to pay tribute to them. It is possible to imagine the album as a space of intense social and economic rivalry, in which owners of the books competed with one another to obtain the most luxurious books, and to fill them with the greatest number of entries from renowned artists. Similarly, contributors implicitly competed with one another to create the highest quality entries and contribute to albums that advanced their status as artists. However, established writers did not need further publicity, and many complained about the hassle of the constant request for contributions. To highlight the scope of the album phenomenon, and the frustration it caused writers and artists, José Zorrilla denounced album entry requests, stating that he had been solicited for album contributions a total of 188,000 times in his life. Honoré de Balzac condemned the album fashion even more fervently, declaring: "To hell with all albums."

I study the album as a practice that provides important information regarding gender, economic, and artistic exchanges in the milieus in which it flourished. My approach is based on the study of different types of texts. First, I analyze three essays on social customs that present the album from a perspective that mixes journalism and satire: Victor-Joseph Etienne de Jouy's 1811 essays "Des Album" and "Recherches sur l'Album et sur le chiffonier sentimental," and Mariano José de Larra's 1835 essay "El album." I use these essays to formulate a contextual theory on the album. I also examine nineteenth-century albums that I consulted in archives in France and Spain. Studying both the material construction of the albums and the contributions included in them, I try to understand the social and economic determinants of this social custom. Through the album entries, I explore the artistic networks established through, and exploited by, the album phenomenon, which were essential for successfully collecting contributions. Finally, I analyze fictional texts in which the album serves as a pivotal plot element used to shape the development of the stories and the roles of the protagonists. In my analysis of literary texts that portray the album, I focus on the establishment of gender and economic exchanges in this practice. I explore the imposition of traditional gender roles in the album phenomenon, according to which women were exclusively album owners and men were contributors. In my analysis of fictional texts, I also examine the economic aspect of this practice, reflecting upon the social class of the fictional characters involved in it. The literary texts that I study are: Honoré de Balzac's La Muse du département (1837), Manuel Bretón de los Herreros' El poeta y la beneficiada. Comedia en dos actos (1838) and El cuarto de hora. Comedia en cinco actos (1848), Juan de Ariza's "Historia de un album" (1847), Henri de Meilhac's L'autographe. Comédie en un acte (1858), Antonio Flores' "Cuadro cincuenta y uno. Placeres de sobremesa" (1863), José María de Pereda's Pedro Sánchez (1883), Juan López Valdemoro's "El álbum" (1886), and Leopoldo Alas `Clarín''s "Album-abanico" (1898).

The nineteenth century saw the rise of consumer culture and the proliferation of objects, such as cardholders, parasols, fans, pocket watches, and other trinkets. The album is at once part of this plethora of nineteenth-century objects and yet it is also distinct, in that it was a special piece of material culture that promoted a particular type of personal communication and required the creation of textual production. The album was established as a unique cultural manifestation, the study of which allows for a reconstruction of different types of social dynamics in its milieu.

Due to the complexity and richness of this object-centered practice, and the ways in which it developed, the album offers multiple analytical possibilities, as a social, historical, and literary phenomenon. One of the most significant contributions of this project lies in its transnational perspective and in its comparative analysis of different types of texts: essays on social customs, literary texts, and personal collections that survive in archival albums. The study of the exchanges that were fostered, and capitalized upon, through the album fashion is essential for understanding notions of private and public and collection as a practice. My analysis of the album yields invaluable insights into gender and class dynamics, ideas of art, and visual and material culture in nineteenth-century France and Spain.