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Elvira Lindo's novel Una palabra tuya (2005) explores the ways in which shifting familial roles affect the identity of individual family members, highlighted by Encarnacion and Rosario's changing mother/daughter relationship, which is impacted by dementia. This debilitating illness converts the roles of parent and child to those of patient and caregiver, testing and refining both women's senses of identity and place within the family. As the sociological theory of narrative inheritance suggests, Rosario finds herself indelibly marked by her mother's past and present life. The demands placed upon Rosario by her mother's dementia alter power dynamics between the two, often infantilizing Encarnacion while empowering Rosario, whose increased agency is complicated by feelings of guilt and entrapment. Mother and daughter's experience of the life/death cycle compels Rosario to seek out a deeper understanding of her sexuality and desire to procreate. Una palabra tuya reveals how the intricacies of a mother/daughter relationship is affected by dementia, reiterating the family's ability to either ensnare or empower its members.

This essay examines two contrasting models of motherhood in Paloma Díaz-Mas’s short story "La niña sin alas" (1996). In this futuristic story, human beings have evolved wings, and those who are born without them or lose them are considered mutilated humans. The story appears to be divided in two parts. In the first, the protagonist gives birth to a handicapped (wingless) daughter, then opts to give up her own perfectly functional wings in order to nurture the child, compromising her marriage, giving up her job and abandoning any hope of social connections. When the child begins to grow wings around the age of two, the mother first tries to inhibit their growth by tightly bandaging the child’s back, then bites them, supposedly so as to keep her daughter exclusively dependent on her. After reviewing mother archetypes and stereotypes in modern and contemporary Spanish literature, this essay examines the story’s ambivalence towards what appear to be two extreme types of motherhood: the mother who is willing to sacrifice her wellbeing, her independence and her place in the community in order to protect her handicapped child, and the castrating mother willing to mutilate her daughter to keep the girl from any chance of an independent future. The essay engages Kristeva’s theorization of the mother-child relationship as well as Adrienne Rich’s evocative reflections on the mother-daughter bond.

In El juego del mentiroso and El mal frances, Catalan author Lluis Maria Todo creates a dialogue about the physical and symbolic spaces that his homosexual male protagonists inhabit during the years of Franco's dictatorship and the subsequent Transition. The main characters in Todo's aforementioned novels are gay men who seek to understand their identities and their place in relation to—or in rebellion against—heteronormative society through a literary and physical exploration of the spaces they inhabit. With reference to spacial theory by Fredric Jameson and Michel de Certeau, as well as Johan Huzinga's play theory, this paper proposes an exploration of how the author's textual games (including metafiction, intertextuality, and gay autobiography) and the games played out by the protagonists attempt to create a subversive space for homosexual culture and identity within the larger patriarchal social context. Todo examines the ways in which his protagonists navigate various spaces, presenting those spaces ...