Forms, Fragments and Fractures in Contemporary Women’s Life Writing: Spain, Portugal, and Italy

Minorities, Minorization and Autobiography

Maria Àngels Francés-Díez (University of Alicante): ‘Women’s Life Writing as a Reflective Surface: The Case of Four 20th-Century Catalan Women Writers’
Iker González-Allende (University of Nebraska-Lincoln): ‘Men’s Violence, Heteropatriarchal Vampirism and Feminist Community in the Memoirs of Itziar Ziga’
María Xesús Lama (Universitat de Barcelona): ‘Rosalía de Castro in Revolutionary Road. Lives that are Exploding’

Maria Àngels Francés-Díez (University of Alicante), ‘Women’s Life Writing as a Reflective Surface: The Case of Four 20th-Century Catalan Women Writers’
As a space for self-construction, diaries serve as a reflective surface for women, embodying both senses of the term. They provide a site where one’s image is mirrored—both the outward persona that the external world interprets (often shrouded behind a mask, yielding hypotheses rather than certainties) and the inward self, often harbouring inner demons that are difficult to articulate or verbalise. The tension between these two dimensions encapsulates the fundamental contradiction faced by contemporary women. This polarity between the self and the world illuminates not only the writer’s private trajectories but also the context in which she is embedded: introspection entails an analysis of her time, her self-in-the-world. Thus, this paper seeks to examine the reflective construction of identity in a selected corpus of four 20th-century Catalan women writers. Specifically, diarists such as Olga Xirinachs (Barcelona, 1936) and M. Aurèlia Capmany (Barcelona, 1918–1991) strive to define their identities and vocations in autobiographical writings that often come across as discordant and unsettling. The intimate diary of Rosa Leveroni (Barcelona, 1910 – Cadaqués, 1985), with its nuanced double voice, delicately balances her gender role (oriented towards the gaze of the other) and her vocation for writing (veiled behind a markedly feminine modesty). Finally, Carme Riera’s (Palma, 1948) work presents an exceptional case in the Catalan 20th-century autobiographical landscape: although focused on a single intimate experience—her pregnancy—it leads to a broader reflection on motherhood and the female condition. Already in the 21st century, proposals such as those of Lourdes Toledo (València, 1970) or Gemma Gorga (Barcelona, 1968) will be a sign of the renewed vitality of women’s life writing.

Iker González-Allende (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), ‘Men’s Violence, Heteropatriarchal Vampirism and Feminist Community in the Memoirs of Itziar Ziga’
This presentation analyses La feliz y violenta vida de Maribel Ziga (2020), the memoirs that feminist activist and writer Itziar Ziga wrote about her mother, remembering her youth, marriage with a violent man and definitive separation from him. In the book, the author reveals how during her childhood and youth his father’s violence against her mother marked their lives, but argues that being a victim or survivor of male family violence should not stigmatize women because the union between mother and daughters and the friendship with other women allowed them to enjoy happy moments. Ziga argues that male violence in families is enabled by heteropatriarchy, which has built a world where, through heteronuclear families in alliance with capitalism, women have given in their own interests in favour of those of men. Ziga’s father is described as a violent ogre, but positive aspects about him are also presented, and his loneliness and violence are explained as consequences of the traditional masculinity model. Ziga proposes feminism as the solution to male violence because it offers alternative types of masculinity to men, as well as sorority and understanding to women, placing them in a genealogy of women who have fought against heteropatriarchy throughout history.

María Xesús Lama (Universitat de Barcelona), ‘Rosalía de Castro in Revolutionary Road. Lives that are Exploding’
“A woman should be without facts and without biography, because there is always something in her that should not be touched” (1885). This phrase belongs to the historian Manuel Murguía, husband of writer Rosalía de Castro. Contrary to what happened to Mary Shelley, Rosalía de Castro died before her husband, and he edited her work and managed her authorial image. Married from the age of 21, Rosalía wrote all her work within the limits set by a permanent negotiation with a husband, who took over the management of her professional activity from the very beginning. It is therefore difficult to know who this woman really was, because she could hardly express herself without “surveillance”. However, the force of a rebellious subjectivity explodes between the lines of her verses, the characters of her novels and some prologues and articles. As Pura Fernandez (2016) remarked, these are lives that were neither narrated nor narratable, silenced and hidden. Rosalía’s work, without a biography, would also be undervalued or read according to the ideological interests of those who set themselves up as interpreters of her intentions or interests. Through the lens of Rosalía de Castro’s own writings, this paper attempts to decipher aspects of her life, her character, and her thought. It explores the image of the writer that was shaped and sustained by critics for decades and the importance of feminist criticism in the late twentieth century in a renewed reading of her works.

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