Post-Francoist Feminisms: Interrogating female subjectivity from Fernández-Cubas to Etxebarria

Abstract

Contemporary Spanish women writers have simultaneously excited and disturbed feminist scholars and cultural critics for their uncompromising refusal to conform to any particular notion of feminism.  At the same time, they have created new narrative worlds populated with provocative and transgressive female characters who range from modern-day warriors to “Generation X” drug addicts and workaholics, bearing nothing in common with one another aside from the desire to know and “to be woman”. Taking as a point of departure theories of the fantastic along with a feminist re-reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s post-structural psychoanalysis, with its emphasis on the politics of desire, this paper will examine through narratives of Cristina Fernández-Cubas and Lucía Etxebarria the “becoming woman” of the contemporary Spanish female subject, situating her as an anti-Oedipal force. The agency of the female subjects in Fernández-Cubas’  “Los altillos de Brumal” and Etxebarria’s Amor, curiosidad, prozac y dudas, is acquired not through the discovery of truth but in the search for knowledge and the interrogation of the very construction of female identity and subjectivity.