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Aquest article analitza la figura de Maria Fortesa / Maria de Fortalesa des d'una doble perspectiva. En primer terme, històrica. Maria és successora i representant dels xuetes mallorquins ajusticiats al segle xvii que, amb el canvi de continent i de posició social, mostra els contrastos entre les dues illes (Mallorca i Cuba) i el progrés del segle xix basat en l'assimilació del discurs colonial. En segon lloc, a través de Maria, Carme Riera descriu la figura de la "literata"; mostra les contradiccions i restriccions de la primera generació d'escriptores modernes de la qual se sent deutora. D'altra banda, tot i la distància autoral que proporcionen les tècniques narratives de la ironia, la paròdia i l'ús del pastitx, no s'amaga l'escriptura com una passió irrefrenable —a través de l'escriptura epistolar— tot i que es manté allunyada dels models literaris reconeguts a l'època.

Aquest text recull uns papers de treball al voltant de la in/visibilitat, amb el propòsit de revisar una categoria que ha creuat la trajectòria d’existència lèsbica, gai, queer, així com la teorització i el pensament a propòsit d’aquestes subjectivitats (i de la seva pròpia subjecció). L’associació de la visibilitat amb l’existència ha constituit un axioma. No obstant, la visibilitat no és sempre necessàriament la millor manera de fer-se visible o, immediatament, la millor estratègia política per a l’afirmació de la nostra existència. En aquests papers de treball parteixo de la formulació d’unes hipòtesis/propostes de reflexió, per continuar dialogant amb el volum Manifiestos gays, lesbianos, queer. Testimonios de una lucha (1969-1994), editat per Rafael M. Mérida, i acabo amb un breu testimoni de l’escriptora catalana Maria Mercè Marçal.

This paper is one of the first attempts to reconstruct the story of Afia Begum, wife —and later widow— of Abdul Hamid (a Bangladeshi immigrant in Thatcherite London), whose entry was cleared by the British Home Office in 1982, months before her husband died tragically in a fire in East London. Upon her arrival in the United Kingdom, Afia was told that her grant to stay in the country was no longer valid owing to the death of her husband; that she was now an illegal immigrant in Britain. In the process of the reconstruction, I also revisit the untold story of the Sari Squad, a group of Asian women who fought valiantly, though peacefully, to stop Afia’s deportation. Although Afia was deported on May 8, 1984, her case was heard in the European Court of Human Rights and debated in the European Parliament; in both forums, the highhandedness of the British Home Office was fiercely critiqued. By way of conclusion, I lay out a hermeneutic in which to read Afia’s story, in a literary sense, offering a skeptical stance to reading it in binary terms of success-defeat/victimization-survival of a female foreigner battling a racist state. In doing so, I draw upon Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “connection between nationalism and reproductive heteronormativity”, to argue that the case of Afia’s deportation suggests that her nationality can only be —tragically— established by determining the citizenship of her husband; this ends up doubly othering and transcendentalizing her nationality, reducing her to her sociobiological reproductive heteronormativity, impregnated with the cryptic trace of her husband’s ghost which practically became the summum bonum of her deprived statehood.

This paper analyses the representations of the body present in contemporary science-fiction literature and film. Using theoretical concepts by Althusser, Foucault and Haraway, the text establishes first a typology of cybernetic organisms in contemporary culture and reviews its presence and ideological implications in films like Robocop (1987), Johny Mnemonic (1995) or Matrix (1999). The paper argues for a self-conscience as political and historical subjects in order to avoid falling into a fallacious cyberandroginy that reinfornces phallogocentric power structures.

This paper aims to establish a critical view of the anthologies of women poetry edited in Catalonia from 1975 till 2001. Its main objective is the analysis of the textual configuration of some of the anthologies which vertebrate around the gender criteria. The paper makes visible the main guidelines of the anthologic act for women poetry in Catalan. Its description permits to show the degree of implication and, eventually, the degree of divergence that guided the editors in the process of construction of poetic identities alternative to the hegemonic literary models.

This paper reflects on the significance of the discussions that took place during the First Cyberfeminist International (Kassel, Germany, September 20-28, 1997) and their implications both for the attempts to define, and the arguments against defining, cyberfeminism. The text tackles the question of how to define (or avoid to define) "cyberfeminism" in the context of its relationship with the history of past feminist thinking and practices. The paper calls for a closer contact with the history of feminism in order both to avoid past mistakes and also appeal to wider groups of women in the technological circuit. The anti-theoretical attitude of movements like Cybergrrl-ism or different kinds of net utopianism actually undermines its potential to challenge the patriarchal status quo. A conscious attitude of selfdefinition can help the forming cyberfeminism to establish a crucial solidarity with transnational feminist and postcolonial initiatives in order to be able to exert an effective political action.

Established as colonial hill stations in Indian's Doon Valley, in the 1820s, Mussoorie and Landour emerged in Victorian literary imagination with the journals of Emily Eden, Fanny Parks, and the Wallace-Dunlop sisters. This paper argues that the Doon's female imperial architextures invented new prospects of grafting Anglo-Saxon aesthetics on the Himalayan terra nullius, diminishing, miniaturizing, and depopulating aspects of the hazardous, the alien, and the local. A thread of archetypes —jhampauns (Himalayan loco-armchairs) and Himalayan vistas— link the aesthetic arcs in the journals of Eden, Parks, and the Wallace-Dunlops. Although the architexture was ostensibly apolitical, it imbued the Doon's representational spaces with a reproducible English character, rendering its terra incognita into terra familiaris in imperial psyche, while carving a distinct imperial subjectivity for Memsahibs.

Among the various indigenous rights movements across different times in Taiwan, the presence of indigenous women often goes obscure. Although in recent years there has been a great deal of publications on Taiwanese indigenous movements, some of the literature —constructed under the structure of the indigenous knowledge system—, while insisting on the status and value of indigenous autonomy, tend to overlook the historical context in Taiwanese society of indigenous women who participated in social movements. What are the issues of concern? This paper primarily serves to reveal the “silent crusades” and to bring forward the directions of interests of the indigenous women’s movements by analyzing related reports, autobiographies, interview transcripts, texts, etc. spanning over two decades and published in the weekly newspaper of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT), Taiwan Church News, in addition to in-depth interviews with the leaders of indigenous women’s social movements.

Women’s participation in Cervantine criticism at the beginning of the twentieth century (1905-1906) has barely received recognition. This paper analyses the different perspectives women authors used to approach both Cervantes and his work. Strict literary criticism coexists with the exploration of Don Quixote’s main characters in the philosophical and literary essays of María Lejárraga, Matilde Ras, Concha Espina and Carmen de Burgos. The authors studied include intheirs texts their social concerns and feminist ideology and give their opinion about key political and intellectual debates affecting society at the beginning of the twentieth century.

This paper discusses the relationship between the use of religious iconography related to eroticism by Spanish punk artists, and the gender stereotyping that the appropriation of these symbols aims to destabilize. The desire to shock and disturb the audience places these artists in a position where they have to challenge established values, such as religious and identity ones. There are many examples of male punk bands that openly rebel against organized religion, but the critique of these bands is direct, whereas women use eroticism to expose the patriarchal strategies of the church, as well as to project an image of themselves that breaks all expectations. Religious iconography becomes the tool for the ironic reevaluation and eventual destruction of cultural and gender structures as part of their artistic program.

Among the various indigenous rights movements across different times in Taiwan, the presence of indigenous women often goes obscure. Although in recent years there has been a great deal of publications on Taiwanese indigenous movements, some of the literature —constructed under the structure of the indigenous knowledge system—, while insisting on the status and value of indigenous autonomy, tend to overlook the historical context in Taiwanese society of indigenous women who participated in social movements. What are the issues of concern? This paper primarily serves to reveal the “silent crusades” and to bring forward the directions of interests of the indigenous women’s movements by analyzing related reports, autobiographies, interview transcripts, texts, etc. spanning over two decades and published in the weekly newspaper of the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT), Taiwan Church News, in addition to in-depth interviews with the leaders of indigenous women’s social movements.

This paper maps a cartography of struggle to document the dynamic, living legacy of Menominee leader Ingrid Washinawatok El-Issa and her contribution to the decolonial possibilities of transnational Indigenous feminism. I propose that mapping a cartography of struggle is a useful way for movements to consider how the past informs the present and future possibilities of resistance and decoloniality.

L'article proposa una anàlisi, com a eix vertebrador de la literatura de Carme Riera, dels elements que, a l'interior de la diègesi, giren l'atenció cap a la mateixa condició literària del text i cap als mecanismes de construcció i de funcionament que li són propis; és a dir, d'aquells elements que posen de manifest el caràcter ficcional de l’obra i mitjançant els quals s'hi planteja un pacte metaficcional. L'autoconsciència i l'autoreferencialitat del text metaficcional trenquen amb la il·lusió mimètica pròpia del pacte realista per a plantejar una reflexió sobre l'artifici dels sistemes de captació del real per part de la literatura, deixant al descobert els límits i els codis que regeixen les relacions entre literatura i realitat. La denúncia de la ficcionalitat del text, l'atenció al procés d'escriptura, la presència dels referents de la tradició literària i el paper actiu en la interpretació del text són els principals mecanismes metaficcionals que podem trobar en la literatura de Carme Riera. La percepció de la dimensió metaficcional de la literatura de Carme Riera es presenta amb la voluntat de contribuir a la comprensió de la poètica de l’autora.

In this paper, Rosa Rius thinks about feminine identity and its history, based on the expressions of freedom of two authors living four centuries apart: the Venetian humanist Moderata Fonte (1555-1592) and the Malagan philosopher María Zambrano (1904-1991). The fact that these women’s freedom is taken as one of their main identifying elements, and straining the historical action of this freedom, unforeseen by the establishment, does not at all imply that the undeniable discrimination inflicted upon women throughout centuries is forgotten or goes on without protest.

The aim of this paper is to underline the fact that, in most contemporary philosophical debates (and somehow, issues in feminist theory are not an exception), a well-known term is playing an important role: experience. We need a cartography of the uses ofexperience, if we want to know what we are talking about and also if we intend to analyze and to rethink the last 25 years of “women studies”, “gender studies” or “subaltern studies”.

This paper explores the movement of feminism into academic life in general and the study of popular culture in particular. Assumptioms about the effects of popular culture on women had been a commonsense of second-wave feminism; however, by the mid-1970’s, questions about how gendered identities were culturally produced and reproduced became the topic of much more in-depth feminist research and discussion. This essay examines two main ways in which feminist research into popular culture entered academic life: first, it examines the “images of women” debate, and second, it examines the Cultural Studies tradition and the feminist cultural analysis.

This paper presents the narratives that run through the American TV series Crime Scene Investigation and locates the role of the dead body in that text. In a distinctive rewriting of the forensic tradition, dead bodies form a readable text destined to those people who possess a particular knowledge and who can contribute to unveil truth, restore order and, in a panoptical mode, dissuade possible offenders and promise justice for the victims.

This paper analyzes Wes Craven’s horror trilogy Scream; the trilogy, like all popular texts, is riddled with contradictions about women’s representation that beg a careful analysis based on an informed understanding of media culture and representation, of history, and of the issues that matter to young women today. My reading of the film draws up the connections between Third Wave feminism and popular culture in order to show how these films provide a rich opportunity to study the contradictions and possibilities of feminism in a postmodern age. The purpose here is not to mount an unconditional defense of popular culture, but to argue that women who care about the next generation of girls need to learn more about the popular texts they're drawn to. If a productive conversation is going to happen among women of all ages about the future of the feminist movement, it will have to take place on the terrain of popular culture where young women today are refashioning feminism toward their own ends.

One of HBO’s television series Sex in the City’s major attractions is its obvert defence of women’s independence in a context in which thirtysomething single white (or otherwise) females are regarded as a social anomaly and are still judged and, above all, valued according to their capacity to find a partner and become wives and mothers. Like other examples of post-feminist or chick-lit fiction, however, Sex and the City’s defence of female independence stops short of fully embracing spinsterhood has a fulfilling option for women. This paper focuses on the limitations of postfeminist fiction to escape the patriarchal conventions that still regulate social interaction in both the public and the private spheres.

This paper discusses Le Guin's classic novel as an example of the creative use of popular fiction codes and motifs to deal with gender issues. The use of androginy in the text is read as a thematization of the bisexualist bias in dealing with gendered bodies in our culture.Through the experiences of the main character, the novel reworks the classic science-fiction motif of the "alien encounter" in order to tackle the importance of otherness in the cultural understanding of gender. Far from offering an escapist utopia of unified androginy, the text sets free the multiplicity of identity options that exist behind the naturalized bisexual model.

This paper examines body-building as a result of the corporal technologies of early XXI th century, and also as a popular practice that erases social borders between the walls of the gym. My purpose is to interrogate the bodybuilding magazines, and particularly, the publicity dedicated to products for instructors, in order to investigate the bond between body and popular culture in a post-Hiroshima and post-clonation World.

The article discusses the figure of the British scientist Robert Boyle as the construction of the modern image of scientific authority and objectivity through social and literary technologies that systematically exclude nonhegemonic groups (women, colored people). The paper argues that the figure of the self-invisible modest witness in technoscientific discourse should be queered in order to enable a more corporeal and situated form of knowledge.

The appearence and popularization of the Internet has created new forms of writing, that compel us to think anew about identity and subjectivity. Webjournals or blogs are specially interesting because they are a massive phenomenon that uses autobiographical writing in a peculiar way. These forms of writing stress a traditional paradox of the genre: the coexistence between a purpose of private, confessional and spontaneous writing and a public image, carefully built, as a result of its writing. The technology is new, but, in fact, the paradox is old. This paper tries to explore this old paradox, our eternal condition of cyborgs, our use of technologies in order to construct a public, unique and recognizable identity. In order to do so, I will try to show the virtual condition of any written individual "this issue has already been dealt with by autobiographical studies", focusing on blogs, and especially on concrete example (Lord Whimsy's Journal). I will pay attention to gender as a technology that constructs identity and, at the same time, is deconstructed by the autobiographical narratives analyzed. In short, I attempt to show that virtual and autobiographical discourse do not bring forth a new kind of subject but the permanence of an old phenomenon "clearly developed by dandyism, for instance": the use of technologies to re-invent, re-formulate and re-construct us as multiple, hybrid and mixed subjects.

The text reviews different approaches to the analysis of the discursive construction of the body by power practices. From the late Michel Foucault‚s "technologies of the self" to Judith Butler's performativity, the paper describes the dynamic relationship between the hegemonic and subversive discourses that act upon the body, both as object of regulation and as subject of resistance. The ideological implications of technological practices such as plastic surgery are discussed in the context of inter-sex identities and the medical responses to "sexual dimorfism".

Cyberfeminism has provided us with a new point of view about technology and new political images related to it. These images work as "foundational myths" for all the people engaged in cyberfeminism. This paper, depicting the "grounding of foundational myths" as something crucial, describes a few female characters performing in different contemporary new media projects and embeds them in their theoretical and literary contexts. The focus lies on the content and meaning of the figurations rather than on technological and medial aspects of the art work. Given the fact that the term cyberfeminism is a highly speculative and mythic term with a vague and blurry meaning and an infectious circulation, the examination of aspects of pleasure of the cyborg is conducted within contexts which are not always directly acknowledged by the various protagonists (authors, theorists, artists, programmers, netizens) as strictly cyberfeminist.

Given as a conference paper, this article deals with time, with the passage of time, aspect which punctuates, accurates and times the whole of Yourcenar's production. It appears in many titles of her books, she talks about it in many novels and prose writings of hers, and it is one of the fundamental settings she chooses for her work. She mentions her own years and days, her own vital time, to set books and obsessions, immaturities and fulfillments, she makes it move forward and backwards in the notes and warnings which are always included in her literature. She explains the relativeness, as well as the different tones and textures which past, present and future can adopt.

This text focuses on the issue of human mutation within the frame of contemporary feminist aesthetics through the analysis of Cindy Sherman‚s photographic series Disastres (1986-1989) and Sex Pictures (1992). This work denounces harshly the gradual de-humanization of industrial society and questions obsolete socially established identity patterns. The theoretical discussion of Sherman‚s pieces is based on Judith Butler‚s concept of "perfomativity" and Donna Haraway's idea of the cyborg. The paper seeks a reformulation, within the context of the new technological media used in contemporary artistic practices, of the waning borders between real and virtual bodies of women and men, gays and lesbians, transvestites and transexuals. In other words, the text seeks to explain the deep transformation that affects the very concept of human.

This article works as a riddle, offering several interpretations not only about what the Graal is, but also to whom it serves. Some specialists on Arthurian matters describe the image of a woman touching the Graal. Could it be that the Graal was a originally pre-christian object? Why is it that this symbolic image of masculine theological, sexual, military and political discourse is guarded by women? To answer these questions, the paper discusses Celtic narratives to explain the extermination of Catarism and Occitan culture (where women had a defining role), touching on the Mediterrarean and Indo-iranian origins of the myth. The riddle can only be solved weaving the above mentioned concepts with the symbolic and archetypal dimension of human existence. The narrative shows the thorough task of the Roman Creed to exclude systematically any traces of the feminine in the configuration of explicative models about the spiritual, emotional and social aspects of the individual.

The authors reflect on the equation formulated in Maria-Antònia Oiver's work Tallats de lluna between AIDS and male character+illness, stigmatising it morally with an association to "desviation". The paper discusses several excerpts from the novel to show how its positioning towards AIDS and the implicit aspects of guilt include the historical construct of "corrupt and guilty desviation" that has been the brandmark of Western sexual identity.

This text examines the character of the cat-woman in Jacques Tourneur's Cat People (1942) and Paul Schrader's remake of the same title (1981), within the frame of the contemporary evolution of the sinister and its body representations, like David Cronenberg's "New Flesh". The paper analyses both the difference between both versions of the film as well as the ideological implication of its plot and characters, arguing that Schrader's version is actually more conservative in its gender representations than the 1942 movie.