| Popis: |
The poetry of Concha Zardoya (1914-2004) and Juana Castro (b. 1945), two Spanish women poets, is read from the perspective of citizenship, understood as a performative act and marked by the intersection of time and space. Special attention is given to how these two poets conjure up the past in order to exorcize the present. Zardoya, whose life and work were indelibly marked by the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), presents a textured conceptualization of the term 'citizenship.' She invokes landscapes laden with history in order to bring forward values based on community and patriotism, but is careful to distance those concepts from the values imposed by Francoism. Juana Castro exhibits a more openly feminist stance, given the cultural and political transformation of Spain from dictatorship to democracy in the post-Franco years. She criticizes the patriarchy and its hierarchical structures that deny women their basic rights. She draws upon Homer's Odyssey in order to reflect upon the present and to contemplate and evaluate the roles of women, immigrants, and members of other marginalized groups who aspire to authentic citizenship within Spanish national borders as well from a global perspective.With the hope of conqueringa sorrowful citizenship thatsome would deny meConcha Zardoya, Corral of the Living and the DeadCitizenship, as a legal, political or civic concept, implies other basic realities, such as time, space, history and geography. In his Postmodern Geographies, Edward J. Soja comments that the concept of space is a social product that is not imposed from without in an independent manner, and in addition, never is inert or immutable. Moreover, according to Soja, the production of space as a concept, in conjunction with the act of producing history, can be described as the means as well as the result, the presupposition as well as the conclusion, social action and social relation (127). If one accepts Soja's proposition, that space is simultaneously both the means as well as the result, then logic posits that this time-space structure determines not only social action but social relations as well. Moreover, concrete space-geography manipulated by human intervention-is a competitive site within which many conflicts occur having to do with production and reproduction (129-130). Thus, one easily may discern the relationship among space, knowledge, and power.Given that citizenship may be viewed within the parameters of both time and space and consequently within those of knowledge and power as well, the next step would be to ponder the ramifications of citizenship in relation to gender, not merely in its biological manifestation but in its perfor- mative aspect as well. In her very well-known text, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, Judith Butler proposes thatacts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence of identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. (136)Further, she holds thatthe action of gender requires a performance that is repeated. This repetition is at once a reenactment and reexperiencing of a set of meanings already socially established; and it is the mundane and ritualized form of their legitimation. (140)Thus, Butler's performative citizenship leads to the idea that feminine gender is a product of repeated and superficial acts that have been defined by the context outside the biologically defined body. In the commentaries that follow concerning the poetry of Concha Zardoya and Juana Castro, citizenship will be explored utilizing the two axes of time and space in order to frame its representation. … |
