Fifty shades of sentimental novels

Basándome en el estudio que Eva Illouz propone de "Cincuenta sombras de Grey", el best-seller de E.L. James, me propongo analizar las características del género del soft-porn o narrativa sentimental pornoerótica a partir de cuatro novelas españolas: "El arte de perder" y "Mientras no digas te quiero", ambas de Lola Beccaria, "De rodillas" de Malenka Ramos y "El primer caso de Cate Maynes" de Clara Asunción García. El objetivo de mi reflexión es mostrar cómo, bajo el pretexto de la emancipación femenina a través de una sexualidad “liberada”, este tipo de literatura refuerza los estereotipos de la dominación masculina, a veces hasta los extremos de la violencia de género.The aim of this paper is to show soft-porn literature is as conservative as sentimental narrative from the 21st century about emancipation of women. As Eva Illouz explains about "Fifty Shades of Grey", the sexual dimension –based upon BDSM- is a pretext to promote the emancipation of women, through the culture of self-help. In the case of spanish narrative I assume that this literature is all the more regressive that in some successful novels it can be considered as a legitimation of gender violence

Madagascar: A pacemaker for the Agulhas Current system?

[1] Western boundary currents are driven by zonally integrated wind-stress curl over the width of subtropical basins. This cross-basin integration is interrupted in the South Indian Ocean where Madagascar presents a formidable barrier. Nevertheless, a western boundary current has been thought to exist in the Mozambique Channel, the Mozambique Current. Recent observations have however shown that no such current exists and that the flow in the channel instead consists of a train of eddies. Is this western boundary anomaly due to the presence of Madagascar? We have used a primitive equations model to investigate the flow in the South West Indian Ocean as if there were no Madagascar. We show that a normal, continuous western boundary current is then formed that constitutes a continuum with the Agulhas Current. The presence of Madagascar is shown to affect the frequency of inter-ocean exchange events south of Africa

Veinte años de la blogosfera

Guest editor for a special monograph published at journal Letral celebrating the 20th anniversary of the blogosphere

Interannual variability of the Tropical Atlantic independent of and associated with ENSO: Part II. The South Tropical Atlantic

Two dominant ocean-atmosphere modes of variability on interannual timescales were defined in Part I of this work, namely, the North Tropical Atlantic (NTA) and South Tropical Atlantic (STA) modes. In this paper we focus on the STA mode that covers the equatorial and sub-tropical South Atlantic. We show that STA events occurring in conjunction with ENSO have a preference for the southern summer season and seem to be forced by an atmospheric wave train emanating from the central tropical Pacific and travelling via South America, in addition to the more direct ENSO-induced change in the Walker circulation. They are lagged by one season from the peak of ENSO. These events show little evidence for other-than-localised coupled ocean-atmosphere interaction. In contrast, STA events occurring in the absence of ENSO favour the southern winter season. They appear to be triggered by a Southern Hemisphere wave train emanating from the Pacific sector, and then exhibit features of a self-sustaining climate mode in the tropical Atlantic. The southward shift of the inter tropical convergence zone that occurs during the warm phase of such an event triggers an extra tropical wave train that propagates downstream in the Southern Hemisphere. We present a unified view of the NTA and STA modes through our observational analysis of the interannnual tropical Atlantic variability

On the Inconsistent Relationship between Pacific and Atlantic Niños

The tropical Atlantic wind response to El Niño forcing is robust, with weakened northeast trade winds north of the equator and strengthened southeast trade winds along and south of the equator. However, the relationship between sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the eastern equatorial Pacific and Atlantic is inconsistent, with El Niño events followed sometimes by warm and other times by cold boreal summer anomalies in the Atlantic cold tongue region. Using observational data and a hindcast simulation of the Nucleus for European Modeling of the Ocean (NEMO) global model at 0.5° resolution (NEMO-ORCA05), this inconsistent SST relationship is shown to be at least partly attributable to a delayed negative feedback in the tropical Atlantic that is active in years with a warm or neutral response in the eastern equatorial Atlantic. In these years, the boreal spring warming in the northern tropical Atlantic that is a typical response to El Niño is pronounced, setting up a strong meridional SST gradient. This leads to a negative wind stress curl anomaly to the north of the equator that generates downwelling Rossby waves. When these waves reach the western boundary, they are reflected into downwelling equatorial Kelvin waves that reach the cold tongue region in late boreal summer to counteract the initial cooling that is due to the boreal winter wind stress response to El Niño. In contrast, this initial cooling persists or is amplified in years in which the boreal spring northern tropical Atlantic warming is weak or absent either because of a positive North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) phase or an early termination of the Pacific El Niño event

On the Tropical Atlantic SST warm bias in the Kiel Climate Model

Most of the current coupled general circulation models show a strong warm bias in the eastern Tropical Atlantic. In this paper, various sensitivity experiments with the Kiel Climate Model (KCM) are described. A largely reduced warm bias and an improved seasonal cycle in the eastern Tropical Atlantic are simulated in one particular version of KCM. By comparing the stable and well-tested standard version with the sensitivity experiments and the modified version, mechanisms contributing to the reduction of the eastern Atlantic warm bias are identified and compared to what has been proposed in literature. The error in the spring and early summer zonal winds associated with erroneous zonal precipitation seems to be the key mechanism, and large-scale coupled ocean-atmosphere feedbacks play an important role in reducing the warm bias. Improved winds in boreal spring cause the summer cooling in the eastern Tropical Atlantic (ETA) via shoaling of the thermocline and increased upwelling, and hence reduced sea surface temperature (SST). Reduced SSTs in the summer suppress convection and favor the development of low-level cloud cover in the ETA region. Subsurface ocean structure is shown to be improved, and potentially influences the development of the bias. The strong warm bias along the southeastern coastline is related to underestimation of low-level cloud cover and the associated overestimation of surface shortwave radiation in the same region. Therefore, in addition to the primarily wind forced response at the equator both changes in surface shortwave radiation and outgoing longwave radiation contribute significantly to reduction of the warm bias from summer to fall