Gender and Violence in Spanish Culture

Gender and Violence
in Spanish Culture

From Vulnerability
to Accountability

Edited by
María José Gámez Fuentes
and Rebeca Maseda García

PETER LANG

New York • Bern • Frankfurt • Berlin

Brussels • Vienna • Oxford • Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gámez Fuentes, María José, editor. | Maseda García, Rebeca, editor.

Title: Gender and violence in Spanish culture: from vulnerability to accountability /

edited by María José Gámez Fuentes and Rebeca Maseda García.

Description: New York: Peter Lang, 2018.

Series: Violence studies; vol. 3 | ISSN 2161-2668

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017026092 | ISBN 978-1-4331-3998-7 (hardback: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4331-3999-4 (epdf) | ISBN 978-1-4331-4000-6 (epub) ISBN 978-1-4331-4001-3 (mobi)

Subjects: LCSH: Women—Violence against—Spain—History.

Classification: LCC HV6250.4.W65 G4625 | DDC 362.88082/0946—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026092

DOI 10.3726/978-1-4331-3999-4

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

© 2018 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York

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www.peterlang.com

All rights reserved.

Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm,

xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

About the editors

María José Gámez Fuentes is Associate Professor at the Universitat Jaume I (Castellón, Spain). She has published extensively on the representation on gender violence and its transformation, has been the principal investigator for several research projects, and has acted as a consultant for private and public organisations regarding gender equality.

Rebeca Maseda García is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She is the author of Ensayo sobre la contracicción: Virginia Woolf en la pantalla, and she has published numerous articles on film and gender, representations of trauma, and historical memory.

About the book

For the true exercise of citizenship to occur, gender violence must be eradicated, as it is not an interpersonal problem, but an attack on the very concept of democracy. Despite increasing social awareness and legal measures taken to fight gender violence, it is still prevalent worldwide. Even in a country such as Spain, praised in the UN Handbook for Legislation on Violence Against Women (2010) for its advanced approach on gender violence, the legal framework has proved insufficient and deeper sociocultural changes are needed. This book presents, in this respect, groundbreaking investigations in the realm of politics, activism, and cultural production that offer both a complex picture of the agents involved in its transformation and a nuanced panorama of initiatives that subvert the normative framework of recognition of victims of gender violence. As a result, the book chapters articulate a construction of the victim as a subject that reflects and acts upon her/his experience and vulnerability, and also adopt perspectives that frame accountability within the representational tradition, the community, and the state.

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Advance Praise for

Gender and Violence in Spanish Culture

“This multivocal collection offers a nuanced account of the social rituals of normalization that set the conditions of gender violence and make it possible, ‘ordinary,’ and ultimately silenced. In delving into the intricacies of normative gender violence, the book interrogates the discursive matrices of gender and violence, as well as of the entrenched construction of gender-and-violence, including female victimhood and the paternalistic snares of recognition. Locally grounded and self-consciously situated, it powerfully reconsiders the current critical field of gender violence/power and its epistemological premises by suggesting new feminist conceptions (at once theoretical and political) of transformative critique and responsibility.”

—Athena Athanasiou, Professor of Social Anthropology and Gender Studies,

Panteion University, Greece; Co-author with Judith Butler

of Dispossession: The Performative in the Political

“This collection builds an arresting account of the configuration of gender violence in modern Spanish contexts, but it also proposes a conceptual reconfiguration. Gender violence and reactions to it are opened up from a series of disciplinary perspectives, acutely drawn together by the editors in an exemplary introduction. Activism, creativity, genuinely critical theory, and a progressive, often queered feminist politics traverse the collection. With the majority of the research originally conducted through the medium of Spanish and focusing on crucial case studies and sites of resistance in Spain, the collection brings to the English-speaking scholarly world new and exceptionally significant material that would otherwise be less well known.”

—Chris Perriam, Professor of Hispanic Studies, University of Manchester, United Kingdom;

Member of the Editorial Collective of the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and

of the Editorial Boards of the Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, Studies in Spanish &

Latin American Cinemas and Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

The Configuration of Gender Violence: A Matrix to Be Reloaded

María José Gámez Fuentes and Rebeca Maseda García

Part One: Theory and Politics

Chapter One: To Conceptualize Is to Politicize: Why Spain Has Acted as a Pioneer Regarding Gender Violence

Ana de Miguel Álvarez

Chapter Two: In the Wake of Ana Orantes: For an Ethical Representation of Violence Against Women

Juana Gallego Ayala

Chapter Three: Silenced Voices: Prostitutes, Lesbians, and “Bad Women” in Spanish Public Policies on Gender Violence

Emma Gómez Nicolau

Part Two: Activism and Associations

Chapter Four: Tactical Media and Activism Against Gender-Based Violence: Fetishization and Counterhegemonic Frameworks of Recognition

Sonia Núñez Puente

Chapter Five: Feminist Activism and the Role of Memory in Revisiting the Discourse on Gender Violence in Spain

Laura Castillo Mateu

Chapter Six: Dialogues Among Diverse Women: Transforming Established Hegemonic Narratives in Associative Initiatives

Lídia Puigvert and Cristina Pulido←vii | viii→

Part Three: Cultural Production

Chapter Seven: Narrative Representations of Gendered Violence and Women’s Resistance in Francoist Spain: Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida (2002) and Almudena Grandes’s Inés y la alegría (2010)

Sarah Leggott

Chapter Eight: From The Rape of Europa to Art Against Gender Violence in Spanish Culture

Marián López Fernández Cao and Juan Carlos Gauli

Chapter Nine: Homophobia, Ethical Witnessing, and the Matrix of Gendered Violence: Issues of Intersectionality in Luppi/Hornos’s Pasos

Alfredo Martínez-Expósito

Chapter Ten: Ella(s): Resisting Victimhood, Unveiling Institutional Violence in Docufiction

Vera Burgos-Hernández

Chapter Eleven: Carmina o revienta and Carmina y amén: Female Transgressions of Victimhood in Spanish Popular Cinema

María Castejón Leorza and Rebeca Maseda García

Chapter Twelve: No More Victims: Changing the Script

Rebeca Maseda García and María José Gámez Fuentes

Contributors

Index ←viii | ix→

Illustrations

Figure 4.1: Poses, Yolanda Dominguez

Figure 11.1: Carmina and her domain