From maternal instinct to material girl: the doll in postwar Spain (1940s - 50s)

In The Value of Things, Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska state that, in a consumer culture, 'it is not objects that people really desire, but their lush coating of images and dreams' (2000: 76). What dreams and images are being desired when the longed for object is a child's plaything, such as a doll? The doll is popularly understood as a tool to aid in the formatting of gender, and, as such, primarily given to female children to awaken their maternal instinct. Miriam Formanek-Brunell notes that the study of dolls as cultural objects is overlooked precisely because 'dolls continue to be typically misunderstood as trivial artefacts of a commercialized girl's culture, static representations of femininity and maternity, generators only of maternal feelings and domestic concerns' (1993: 1). Formanek-Brunell proposes that 'dolls, like any other objects of ordinary life, can be seen as "texts"' (1993: 2). Dolls are cultural texts that, once analysed, can shed light on a variety of aspects of culture

Death and the adorable orphan: Marcelino pan y vino (1954; 1991; 2000)

The Spanish journalist and writer José María Sánchez-Silva, unaware that he was adapting a folk tale about religious devotion rewarded, produced a complex narrative about the mother-son dyad: Marcelino pan y vino (1952). This was the basis of a popular Spanish film adaptation directed by Ladislao Vajda, released in 1954. It was then remade in 1991 as an Italian/Spanish/French co-production, directed by Luigi Comencini, and, recently, it has been translated into animation for television, the result of Spanish/Japanese/French collaboration in 2000. This article analyses how each version reveals shifting perceptions of childhood by focusing on the ideological function of the orphan child and the spectacle of the 'adorable boy'

Miniature bride or little girl religious: first communion clothing in post-war Spanish culture and society

The tradition of religious clothing for children is relatively unexplored: this article develops the premise that debates about the links between the sacred and the market go deeper than concern about consumption, and bring to the surface issues of identity. Through exploring the historical development of the First Communion, not as religious ritual but as Catholic consumer culture, the article turns to analyse girls' communicant dress in Spain between the 1940s and 1960s which were the early decades of a dictatorial Regime (1939 to 1975) marked by an ideology of National-Catholicism. General Francisco Franco y Bahamonde, leader of the military rebellion against the elected government in 1936, ruled Spain until his death. One of my aims is to correct a tendency to make the little girl dressed in bridal wear the most visible sign because to do so disregards the cultural practice of wearing clothing to perform piety, signal a vocation or express gratitude for religious intercession

Tropes of freedom: spectacular eroticism and the Spanish new woman on-screen

Book synopsis: Intended for both undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as general readers interested in the study of gender and culture within the area of peninsular Hispanism, this volume aims to present an overview of the issues and critical debates in the field of Women's Studies, including original essays by pioneering scholars as well as by younger specialists from Spain, Latin-America, Britain and the United States. New pathfinding models of theoretical analysis are balanced with a careful revisiting of the historical foundations of women's studies. The volume is divided into two sections: the first up to and including the early modern period and the second from the eighteenth century to the present, covering literature, the visual arts, cinema, and social and cultural history. Each chapter explores a concept/ approach/ aspect within feminist theory (identity and representation, masquerade, cultural agency, strategies of resistance, discipline and the body, poetics of domesticity, motherhood, everyday life etc.) while discussing either the work of women or the representation of women and each essay is followed by suggestions for further reading

Holy girl power locally and globally: the Marian visions of Garabandal (Spain)

Book synopsis: Girlhood, interdisciplinary and global in source, scope, and methodology, examines the centrality of girlhood in shaping women’s lives. Scholars study how age and gender, along with a multitude of other identities, work together to influence the historical experience. Spanning a broad time frame from 1750 to the present, essays illuminate the various continuities and differences in girls’ lives across culture and region—girls on all continents except Antarctica are represented. Case studies and essays are arranged thematically to encourage comparisons between girls’ experiences in diverse locales, and to assess how girls were affected by historical developments such as colonialism, political repression, war, modernization, shifts in labor markets, migrations, and the rise of consumer culture

Moving beyond identification: Carmen Martín Gaite, from passionate reader to co-scriptwriter on RTVE's Celia (1993)

Book synopsis: This collection of essays examines current trends in scholarly research on Spanish author Carmen Martín Gaite (1925-2000). It concentrates on the least explored areas of Martín Gaite's oeuvre, such as her collage artwork, the relationship between image and text in her work, and her close relationship with themes such as genre writing, the fairy tale, and textual/physical notions of space, as well as her personal theories on orality and narration. As we pass the tenth anniversary of her death, Martín Gaite continues to be an increasing focus of study, as scholars start to identify and comprehend the breadth and scope of her work. The essays in the volume complement previous studies of Martín Gaite's major works from the 1960s and 1970s by focusing largely on her later novels, together with in-depth analysis of the manuscripts and artistic materials that have been made available since her death

The pleasures and perils of bringing Celia into the classroom: teaching the television adaptation on a course in childhood and youth culture

Book synopsis: The career of Spain’s celebrated author Carmen Martín Gaite spanned the Spanish Civil War, Franco’s dictatorship, and the nation’s transition to democracy. She wrote fiction, poetry, drama, screenplays for television and film, and books of literary and cultural analysis. The only person to win Spain’s National Prize for Literature (Premio Nacional de las Letras) twice, Martín Gaite explored and blended a range of genres, from social realism to the fantastic, as she took up issues of gender, class, economics, and aesthetics in a time of political upheaval. Part 1 (“Materials”) of this volume provides resources for instructors and a literary-historical chronology. The essays in part 2 (“Approaches”) consider Martín Gaite’s best-known novel, The Back Room (El cuarto de atrás), and other works from various perspectives: narratological, feminist, sociocultural, stylistic. In an appendix, the volume editor, who was a friend of the author, provides a new translation of Martín Gaite’s only autobiographical sketch, alongside the original Spanish

Domestic queens and warrior wives: imperial role-models for Spanish schoolgirls during the early Francoist regime (1940s-50s)

This article focuses on heroic images of Spanish women in schoolbooks for girls published during the dictatorial regime of General Franco (1939-75). Alongside the female members of Spain's royal ranks and the holy women of the Catholic Church's canon, who were domesticated by association with the needle, some schoolbooks also recovered a small number of women warriors

Exorcising the past through the Catholic horror film genre: Elia Quiroga's "No-Do" (2009)

In this paper I analyze the special role of some linguistic resources to activate certain presuppositions in newspaper headlines Hispanic. The analysis of some focal particles (up to even one) will find that can highlight certain components of the holder, highlight certain information and to activate others that do not appear explicitly (for reasons of economy or because it is convenient not manifest). Similarly, we will give attention to some verbal forms and their role in referring expressions of presuppositional actuators. This work is part of the research project "The Spanish headlines Hispanic media: language standard, pragmatics, discourse