Mission Statement
GEMELA strives to unite scholars across traditional disciplinary boundaries through its focus on women's cultural production in medieval and early modern Spain and colonial Latin America through 1800. Our purpose is to distribute information and knowledge about women and their role as cultural producers. Our conferences and publications encourage teaching and research based on all approaches related to our principal field of inquiry.
News
2012-03-25: You can now read here the most recent issue of the GEMELA Newsletter. For older ones, go the newsletter page.
2011-11-14: Call for Papers for the GEMELA 2012 Conference: "Building Bridges." The 2012 GEMELA Conference will be hosted at the University of Portland, Oregon, on September 13-15, 2012. The conference will focus on women’s cultural production in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America. Papers or sessions that focus on the conference theme of "building bridges" between geographical spaces or between disciplines are highly encouraged. We also welcome suggestions for discussion papers and/or workshops on theory, pedagogy, and other related topics. Papers may be delivered in Spanish, English, or Portuguese. Submit a 250-word abstract through our Acteva page: http://a3.acteva.com/orderbooking/go/gemela2012. A copy of the call for papers in PDF format is available here, please distribute widely. For more information, see the conferences page and follow our mailing list.
2011-08-14: Abstracts for the 2012 MLA GEMELA session, 'Untold Sisters Today: New Approaches to Iberian and Latin American Women's Writing (pre-1800)' January 6, 1:45-3:00 pm. Chair: Stacey Schlau, West Chester University.
- When Beauty is not Truth: Word, Image and Gender in Sor
Juana’s “‘Este que ves’ sonnet” Sonia Velázquez, Princeton University.
Ekphrasis, or the vivid representation in language of visual phenomena such as paintings is one of the most venerable forms of articulating the relationship of words to images. W. J. T. Mitchell’s influential account of ekphrasis from Homer to Wallace Stevens stands among the most pessimistic. In Picture Theory he writes that, “the central goal of ekphrastic hope might be called the overcoming of otherness.” In other words, the verbal arts seem to both crave the presence of the visual object as a distinct other and to stake poetry’s dominion in its capacity to incorporate images, to grant them life. Mitchell then shows how this agonistic account of otherness maps onto gendered projections of images as silent passive objects of beauty to which the poet (and viewer) grants a voice and bestows meaning. This feminization of the image allows verbal arts to project themselves as the opposite of the visual as the active, speaking, thinking subject.
Almost as an after-thought, towards the end of the essay, Mitchell notes that his examples are all taken from male poets and that “all this would look quite different, of course, if my emphasis had been on ekphrastic poetry by women.” I conceive this paper as an experiment in response to Mitchell’s hypothesis by reading one of Sor Juana’s most famous yet enigmatic sonnets “Este que ves, engaño colorido,” where she verbalizes to a listener/viewer her response to viewing a portrait of herself. I shall place the sonnet in the context of Sor Juana’s other female portrait poems as well as early modern discussions of female portraiture (taking as paradigmatic example the Italian painter Sofonisba Anguisola) where the female (beautiful) image is often asked to stand for artistic truth. I intend to show that the Mexican nun’s poem represents an ethical attempt to respond to an image--a visual or textual retrato--by respecting its difference, refusing to speak for it or even reproduce it in her poetry. In so doing, I argue, she dislodges beauty from truth and aligns poetry’s power with echo and voice rather than image-making.
- “Autobiography, Mystical Doctrine, Sickness and Social Sensure: Studying and Teaching Teresa de Avila’s Libro de la vida;” Encarnación Juárez-Almendros, University of Notre Dame.
The purpose of my paper is to present new approaches for reading and teaching Libro de la vida by Teresa de Avila. I propose an interpretation of the text from the point of view of Teresa’s sicknesses and neurological impairments. Recent medical research has suggested that the nun was affected by a condition called ecstatic epilepsy. The assumption that Teresa’s visions were symptoms of an unknown disease in the sixteenth-century raises a number of questions in relation to the autobiographical explanations of her body experiences. In her book, Teresa both confronts and accepts the contemporary discourses that interpret those symptoms as provoked by the devil and by the weak female imagination. Ultimately, the mystical doctrine that Teresa develops as well as her work funding new convents would be her particular way of elucidating somatic experiences and proposing alternative ways of living for people that do not fit social expectations. Reading the text from this perspective can also raise questions such as the causative effect of certain bodily conditions in the human experience of spirituality.
Suggesting this approach in conjunctions with more traditional interpretations has proved to be a pedagogically stimulating and an effective way of reading Libro de la vida in the classroom. Students become critical readers and are forced to consider diverse ways of studying this complex text.
- “Re-Thinking Women’s Authorship in the Early Republic of Letters” Esther Villegas de la Torre, University of Nottingham.
Questions of gender, feminism, and écriture feminine in individual cases continue to be given priority in studies of women’s writing in Baroque Spain, to the exclusion of study of the wealth of original sources that show women participating freely and equally in all aspects of the Republic of Letters, as contemporaries called the literary profession. That is, women writers are, more often than not, viewed in terms of their sex, not their craft.
This inadvertent overriding emphasis on a writer’s sexual identity has proved highly detrimental, for the status and image of early women as authors remain problematic, despite the important efforts made in this direction. In truth, the considerable rise in the number of women publishing and their consolidation in the public sphere by the first half of the seventeenth century, the period now recognized as having seen the beginnings of the literary profession as we know it, continue to be overlooked by historians of the book.
Thus, drawing on my doctoral thesis, this paper shall attempt to provide a new theoretical framework through which to study women’s literary production, without jeopardizing their pertinent place in general studies of the book trade and the literary profession, right from its infancy.
- “Sixteenth-Century Women Who Record their Voices: Land, Power and Writing in Early Colonial Perú” Rocío Quispe-Agnoli, Michigan State University.
This paper approaches the production and impact of written texts produced by Spanish and Inca elite women who acted as settlers and/or land grant owners in early sixteenth century Perú. Spanish and Inca elite women learned to display their social, economic and political power by means of the patriarchal authority invested in the "masculine rhetoric" that framed the production of legal documents (letters or accounts of Indies, proofs of services or merits, and wills. In this way, these women took control of their voices not only to satisfy immediate domestic needs for themselves or their families, but also for their personal gain. Then, this paper studies the distinct ways in which Spanish and Inca elite women related to the act of writing as a means to record their voices in their time and what resources they used to build the textual authority that would back up their claims.
The Spanish women I refer to were for the most part commoners who accompanied their husbands in the journey to the New World, and became powerful agents because their services in the conquest of Peru was meritorious enough to the Spanish crown to grant them all sort of privileges (Inés de Múnoz, María de Escobar, Jordana Mexía). These women could have been peasants or simple workers in Spain, but they soon became members of a colonial elite in sixteenth-century Perú. In contrast, the Inca elite women (Inés Huaylas, Angelina Yupanqui, Beatriz Coya) based their power and authority on their ethnic pride. They stated and were able to prove that they were direct descendants of the Inca rulers, and therefore legitimate owners of their lands and Indian labor. Inca elite women may have been objectified as victims and/or objects of sexual conquest by a scholarly paradigm that fixed Indigenous women of the Americas in the role of victim or whore, as Karen Vieira Powers has explained. However, if we consider Irene Silverblatt’s study of pre-colonial Andean gender roles, we can understand how Inca women used the tools of both Spanish genealogies and Andean practices of succession to keep or recover their privileges and wealth. My thesis is that while early colonial Spanish women based their power in their services to the Spanish crown, Inca elite women used the Inca logic of succession and the Spanish principles of genealogy to display their noble origins as a matter of ethnic pride and source of power.
2010-10-15: GEMELA now has a Facebook group. Search for us on Facebook or go directly to http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=157841467577776, join the group and keep in touch with news an information.
2010-09-07: Please visit the website for Unruly mujeres, the play that will close the 2010 GEMELA conference!