Sexualidad femenina en la cultura y novela española, 1900-1936
Beatriz Celaya Carrillo

“Sexualidad femenina en la cultura y novela española, 1900-1936” explores the role played by modern sexuality in organizing private and social relationships during the first decades of the twentieth century in Spain. The analysis of cultural discourses —medical, political and philosophical— in relation to the fiction written at the time has shown that the creation and implementation of the modern paradigm of sexuality was in part a reaction by masculine authority to counteract the process of women’s emancipation. The purpose was to ensure that possible changes in female gender roles caused by the relative increase in women’s autonomy did not nullify the hierarchical relationship between men and women. It is likely, as historians of Spain sustain, that motherhood, and not sexual desire, was the most pervasive social imposition upon Spanish women, but this does not exclude the decisive importance of a regulatory model based upon erotic desire. The study of the cultural discourse related to sexuality of the period is crucial to an understanding of how these discourses have developed more recently in contemporary Spanish society.

ISBN: 978-1-58871-097-0 (PB) 273 pp. $22.95