In this course we will examine the significant role of women in society, politics, history, and culture from the Middle Ages to the 21st century in Spain. Through films, political speeches, manuscripts, short stories, novels, newspaper articles, memoirs, and visual art, we’ll study women’s history, voices, and experiences in Spain, and we will often put them in dialogue with women who lived at the same time on the American side of the Atlantic. We will examine medieval beguines, witches, healers, and the Inquisition; heroines, queens, adventurers, and explorers in the Spanish empire; depictions of women at war; the relevance of age, maternity, body, and education for women; suffragettes, women politicians, and feminist movements; the “visible invisibility” of women during the early dictatorship; women in the works of male authors such as Federico García Lorca and Pedro Almodóvar; women painters, imagined, and imaged in Spain and Latin America; the concept of “third gender”; and the feminization of immigration in the twenty-first century; among other topics.
SPANSH 88