Feminist Modernist Studies

In light of decades of Anglophone modernist scholarship on female-authored life writing (e.g., Hall’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness), conversation about Spain’s “las modernas,” women writers whose works queerness intersects, is relatively scant. However, during the first decades of the twentieth century, modern Spanish women found queer and feminist ideas through Anglophone readings and intellectual contacts (often in translation) passed within their intellectual circles. Victorina Durán would read The Well of Loneliness while Madrid was being bombed during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939). Carmen Conde’s Letters to Katherine Mansfield (1935) takes up Mansfield’s sapphic literary codes, which Conde later would extend to her own network of Spanish women writers and through her personal and creative partnership with translator Amanda Junquera. Given the relative dearth of scholarship exploring sapphic modernism in Spain, Europe, and spaces of Spanish exile in the Americas after 1939, this special issue of Feminist Modernist Studies invites papers detailing new ways of thinking about feminist and sapphic modernisms, with a goal of situating Spanish agents and productions within wider modernist spaces of queer and feminist collaborations, conviviality, and coalition building.

For this special issue, we welcome contributions that offer points of entry into Spanish sapphic modernist literature and culture, and bring Spanish and Anglophone writers and performers (“modernas”) such as Mercedes de Acosta, Carmen Conde, H.D., Victorina Durán, Elena Fortún, Amanda Junquera, Katherine Mansfield, Ana María Martínez Sagi, Gabriela Mistral, Victoria Ocampo, Vita Sackville-West, Gertrude Stein, Carmen Tórtola Valencia, Ángeles Vicente, Virginia Woolf, Margarita Xirgu, and others into conversation within feminist modernist studies today.

For a timeframe of roughly 1890-1950, papers may approach Spanish and Spanish-related sapphic modernity by exploring topics including but not limited to:

• Friendships (collaborations, readings, tributes, correspondences, travels, etc.)
• Exile and self-exile
• Spaces of commonality and survival (writers’ homes and intellectual institutions, the Bloomsbury Group, Las Sinsombrero, Surrealism, periodical columns, translations, literary magazines, fanzines, radio and phonograph listening, cinema viewing, photography, public and private personae re: outing)
• Sapphic readership and literary codes (pseudonymous publications, queerness as coded in the text, reading circles and book recommendations)
• Performance spaces (vaudeville, variety, género sicalíptico, cabaret, drag, burlesque, tonadilla, cuplé, radio, film and theatrical production and reception)
• Genres and conventions (life-writing, juvenile/children’s, didactic, true crime/detective, happy endings, un/expected life paths)

All articles need to be written in English and contributors should provide translations of quotations from Spanish texts.

Please submit article proposals of 250-300 words along with a short bio (50-75 words) to both editors: Angela Acosta, [email protected] and Rebecca Haidt, [email protected]. Finished article drafts will be due by February 1, 2024. Final edited article manuscripts of 5000-7000 words will appear in the Summer 2024 issue of Feminist Modernist Studies.

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