The Silent Woman: Use Birth Control, Stay Attractive
I recently came across this amazing vintage video on “Family Planning,” produced by Disney in 1968, via Open Culture. Do yourself a favor and take 10 minutes to watch it. In addition to the frivolous...
View ArticleSocial History and Spanish Anarchism: Prostitution, Motherhood, and Free Love
During my dissertation research, I spent lots of time searching for several, quite obscure short novelas written throughout the 1920s by Spanish anarcho-feminist Federica Montseny. Somehow I came...
View ArticlePainting the Spanish Civil War
In my (Spanish) Introduction to Textual Analysis course, my students are currently working with two texts in which the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and the ensuing dictatorship of Francisco...
View ArticleAssassination of the Modern Woman: Hildegart and Aurora Rodríguez
This week I found an excellent short film on the murder of the 17-year-old Spanish prodigy Hildegart Rodríguez at the hands of her mother, Aurora, in Madrid in 1933. The Red Virgin (dir: Sheila Pye,...
View ArticleWhat People Think about Women: A Bilingual Edition
Translation update – Oct. 28, 2013 — Thanks to the careful attention and comment of one of my readers (Lu Cero), I learned about the “terrible mysoginic message” in the search results “Las mujeres...
View ArticleThe Roaring Twenties, Metropolitan Citizens, and… LOUD NOISES!
As early twentieth-century cities were experiencing rapid modernization, many intellectuals dedicated space in their writing to praising or critiquing not only these urban landscapes, but also the new...
View ArticleSalvador Dalí’s Christmas Cards Are Better than Yours
Over the weekend, while attempting to get into the holiday spirit by setting up my table-top fiber-optic Christmas tree, baking cookies, and watching the snow fall in sub-zero temperatures, I...
View ArticleThe Perfect Wife in the 21st century: “La perfecta casada” en el siglo XXI
Now that February is suddenly here, the Spring 2014 semester is officially underway and I am finally organized (well, for the most part!). For me, the most exciting part about this new semester is that...
View ArticleSunday Morning Medicine
rebeccambs:If you’re interested in the history of gender and medicine, check out the Nursing Clio blog. Written by several historians, the excellent articles tie historical scholarship to present-day...
View ArticleExploring Female Identities in Carmen de Burgos’“La rampa”
One of the first novels to spark my interest in early twentieth-century Spanish women’s literature was Carmen de Burgos’ La rampa (1917). As an urban novel, the narrative explores the effects of...
View ArticleThe Dalí Triangle: A Surrealist’s Take on the Catalonian Landscape
Lately I’ve been writing recommendation letters and filling out language evaluation forms for many of my students who are planning to study abroad during the upcoming academic year. Costa Rica…...
View ArticlePretty Women Use Birth Control – my guest post at Nursing Clio
I’m very excited to have written a guest post for one of my favorite blogs, Nursing Clio. For this piece, I re-visited my very first blog post in which I critiqued, with a sort of “literary analysis”...
View ArticlePicasso on Maternity and Motherhood
A few weeks ago, students in my Hispanic Women’s Literature course turned in their first paper on Carmen de Burgos’ La rampa. Part of their assignment was to include an image with their essay. One...
View ArticleThe Red Virgin: Motherhood and Power Dynamics
“I shall do as you request, and tell you everything about myself [...] You may like me, but I am not alive.” –Hildegarte, played by Ivana Baquero in The Red Virgin “I will do as you ask and tell you...
View ArticleMurderous Mothers and the Discourse of Infanticide
This post is admittedly a slightly odd compilation of images and ideas – It seems that over the past several months I’ve been researching or teaching about murderous mothers in literature, film,...
View ArticleThe Morphing Body: Salvador Dalí’s Skulls and the Female Form
I’m currently working on an article that revolves around theories of corporeality and the body, so I’ve been reading a range of feminist interpretations of the subject: Elizabeth Grosz‘s challenge to...
View ArticleLa Llorona: Incorporating Latino Studies into Hispanic Literature
If you grew up in the southwest United States, if you can claim Hispanic heritage, or if you’ve lived in a community with a distinct Hispanic population, you are likely quite familiar with the numerous...
View ArticleBicycles, typewriters, and sex!?!? Cultures of the Erotic in early 20th...
Among the many articles and books I consulted for my last article on La Venus mecánica, Maite Zubiaurre’s Cultures of the Erotic in Spain, 1898-1939 (from Vanderbilt UP, 2012) was by far my favorite....
View ArticleBreastfeeding in the Prado: Religious, Mythological, and Pagan Roots
Don’t worry! This isn’t some sort of too-much-information personal anecdote… just some observations I made regarding the very frequent and detailed depictions of breastfeeding in the artwork gracing...
View ArticlePedro Almodovar’s “La piel que habito”: Science and Technology as Postmodern...
I feel very lucky to have been able to spend the month of June in Spain, first in Madrid for nearly 3 weeks (with a day trip to Segovia), then in Santiago de Compostela for a few days during a...
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