top of page

Maps

 

Essay

 

Bibliography

 

Resources

Project Leader:  Marta Sierra, Kenyon College

Transnational Women: Mapping Mexican Feminist Thought, Ideology, and Cultural Production

Project overview

 

For the past seven years I have been working on two projects that perfectly fit into the overall goals of the “Mapping Megalopolis" project.  One relates to my book, Gendered Spaces in Argentine Women’s Literature, and my work on feminist geographies and feminist conceptions of space. For this book, I developed a theoretical framework based on three areas: literary studies, feminism, and cultural geography. One of the main goals is understand how space can be translated into a cultural representation—in this particular case, literary works. I also engage into a critique of the role mapping—as both a spatial, visual, and ideological and semiotic construct—define literary genealogies and attributes value to gender categories and literary production. I also edited an anthology on the intersection of space and cultural production, Geografías Imaginarias: Espacios de reistencia y crisis en América Latina. This compilation centers on different methodological approaches to understand space. From the disciplines of Geography, History, Literary Studies, Art, Sociology, Women and Gender Studies, the authors in this volume study space as a concrete materiality but also a source of political and cultural negotiations.

 

Another area of my current research deals with the issue of transnational feminisms, or a broader way to understand the genealogies and theoretical ideas of feminism within the frame of political and social issues across the world. I am particularly interested in the early feminisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as this is a time when women acquire a transnational conscience at a large scale for the first time. Feminists in Europe and the Americas were able to establish a transnational dialogue on issues ranging from the right to vote to civil liberties.

 

Given my expertise on the areas of mapping and transnational feminisms, I look forward to collaborating with Prof. María André and Patrick O’Connor in creating a City of Mexico map of feminisms and women intellectuals during the first part of the twentieth century. I foresee this map as both a spatial itinerary of the places where women intellectual met, gather or where allowed to circulate during this period. As the City of Mexico has always been both a transnational megalopolis, I would also like to add the transnational influences in the creation of these women’s locations. As maps also describe relationships of power and privilege, it would be important to find ways of showing such categories.  

bottom of page