Designing Motherhood (2021): Reapropiar la fetichización

Katryn Evinson is a scholar of modern and contemporary Iberian visual culture and literature. Her research charts cultural practices and histories of creative resistance in the Iberian context. Her work integrates insights from political theory, cultural theory, and political economy to illuminate Spain's relationship to issues of a global scale, such as the trend to promote contemporary art infrastructures in order to force changes in the political economy. She is currently at work on her first book, Sabotage: The Destructive Making of the Creative Economy in Neoliberal Spain which traces the cultural resurgence of sabotage, spanning Spain’s transition to democracy through the decade-long aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis. Sabotage is a form of resistance that emerges from within capitalism to create spaces of autonomy through disruption. This cultural study contends that, just as fin-de-siècle industrial workers used sabotage to protest the reorganization of labor, contemporary artists, writers, activists, and critics, incorporated strategies of sabotage in their production to protest Spain’s neoliberal economic restructuring—specifically, the use of culture itself to promote and perpetuate neoliberalism.

Katryn has published on Spanish cultural and political history, feminism, and environmental issues. Her writing has appeared in boundary 2, the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, the Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies,  Revista Forma, Chasqui, LA Review of Books, Encrucijadas. Revista Crítica de Ciencias Sociales,  Revista Re-Visiones, and is forthcoming in Hispanófila. She serves on the board of the Asociación de Literatura y Cine Español Siglo XXI (ALCESXXI), is a research member of the Spanish government-funded project Rhythms of Feminized Labor in Spanish Visual Culture (1936-2022), and is on the advisory board of Revista Re-visiones.

Before joining the Department of Romance Studies at Duke, Katryn was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for the Core Curriculum at Columbia University, where she taught a course on Contemporary Civilization. Her research has been supported by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Public Humanities Grant, Cornell’s Society for the Humanities Research Grant, and a fellowship at the Fisher Center for Gender and Justice at Hobart & William Smith Colleges. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American and Iberian Studies and in Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University.