Abstract
While women writers in all literary systems across space and time have faced and still face barriers to their activity because of their gender, the ways in which the gender gap manifests itself is influenced by the intersections of gender with a range of other social categories that conform their identity (race, class, sexuality, language, ethnicity, age, disability, among others). Nevertheless, in some instances, different writers in one particular context may suffer the gender gap to different extents, in ways that neither the array of available intersecting categories nor the issue of literary value seems to fully explain. To disentangle the reasons why this is the case is never a straightforward enterprise and requires a context-sensitive approach. The Galician-language literary scene provides a particularly fruitful field to study, in a context-sensitive way, how these different oppressing factors interlock with each other. Here, women novelists remained very scarce until the early twenty-first century, when some significant advances took place and led to what some refer to as a “boom” of women novelists in Galicia. However, these claims must be examined carefully. Inequalities still persist, manifested in how the increased visibility of women’s writing has benefitted some authors, but not others. In an attempt to further disentangle the forces that keep the gender gap and some women novelists excluded or less visible, I analyse in this chapter the careers and writings of three such writers: Ursula Heinze (b. 1941), Silvia Bardelás (b. 1967) and Beatriz Dacosta (b. 1967).
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Notes
- 1.
Galician, a Romance language, is spoken in the Spanish comunidad autónoma (region) of Galicia, having co-official status with Spanish. According to the latest government-organized Enquisa estrutural a fogares. Coñecemento e uso do galego (Structural survey to households on knowledge and usage of Galician, 2019), almost 90% of Galicians (population 2.4 million) can speak Galician to some extent, but only about 50% uses it solely or predominantly in their everyday life, and the decline is more marked among urban and younger populations.
- 2.
The criterio filolóxico is ultimately indebted to the national literature model that became normalized in many literatures (including Spanish literature) in the nineteenth century and that presupposes the existence of a single national language (Liñeira 2015).
- 3.
A key influence here is Itamar Even-Zohar’s polysystems theory, which expands the focus of literary studies to a range of literary and semi-literary texts which exists in connection with networks of agents (authors, publishers, readers, literary, models); together, they constitute a multiplicity of interconnected systems (Miguélez Carballeira 2013).
- 4.
In sociolinguistics, diglossia refers to two languages being spoken by the same community, leading to hierarchical relationships between them.
- 5.
Owing to centralization at the hands of the Catholic Monarchs in the late fifteenth century, the Galician language remained practically unused for literary purposes throughout the modern era. De Castro was preceded by a number of poets publishing Galician-language poems in Spanish-language newspapers from the 1840s. De Castro indeed published novels in Spanish, but never in Galician. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, other Galician-born female writers earned notoriety writing fiction and non-fiction in Spanish (Concepción Arenal, Emilia Pardo Bazán, Sofía Casanova, etc.), but they have not typically been included in genealogies of Galician-language women writers precisely because of the criterio filolóxico.
- 6.
Figures are taken from the publishing reports compiled annually by the Centro Ramón Piñeiro, a research centre in Galician literature. Multi-author anthologies are not considered.
- 7.
Prizes proliferated in Galician-language publishing from the 1980s onwards, and were seen (and still are) as a crucial mechanism to stimulate Galician-language writing and to make Galician literature and books more visible and saleable, as well as to canonize certain titles, authors or genres (Vilavedra 2000).
- 8.
During this time, other contributions to the question of women’s fiction were also being made in non-academic literary journals, such as Grial and the feminist periodical Festa da palabra silenciada.
- 9.
De Castro announced in a letter to her husband in 1881, after receiving criticism for an article criticising sexual hospitality in Galicia, that she would never write in Galician again. By then, she had published two poetry collections in Galician. She died prematurely only 4 years later.
- 10.
As is the case, for example, with the ‘feminine middlebrow novel’ in the 1920s to 1950s, written by women for women, reflecting and inspiring “shifts in middle-class opinion and ideology”, and “establishing and consolidating, but also [resisting], new class and gender identities” (Humble 2001, p. 3).
- 11.
Narradoras compiled 25 stories by Galician-language women fiction writers, most of whom were starting their literary careers at the time of publication.
- 12.
- 13.
A Sega compiled statistics for all fiction prizes awarded in 2018 and 2019 (A Sega 2020a and 2020b). There were 21 men and 16 women winners in 2018, and 32 men and 9 women winners in 2019. At a fundamental level, these statistics suggest that the gender gap has not been closed yet in the domain of prizes either. However, more research is needed to ascertain the current extent of the gender gap. A Sega’s statistics cover only 2 years, and a multi-year approach could offer more nuanced conclusions. Moreover, A Sega’s statistics do not discriminate between several types of fiction prizes: from the highly prestigious Xerais and Blanco Amor, which can have significant impact on a writer’s career, to smaller short story prizes. They also do not discriminate between prizes awarded to unpublished works (where writing is normally submitted anonymously and the gender of the author will not be known to the members of the jury) and prizes given to published novels.
- 14.
At present, the Asociación Galega de Editores (Galician Society of Publishers) has 38 members, of which 34 edit solely or partly in the Galician language. Only one of these, Baía Edicións, is headed by a woman, while the newly founded Cuarto de Inverno is co-headed by one woman and one man.
- 15.
With Galician becoming a co-official language in 1978, the need for a written standard or normativa—which did not exist thus far—was a pressing issue. Two distinct sides developed: the reintegracionistas (lit. reintegrationists) advocated for adopting spelling conventions from the Portuguese, arguing that both languages were indeed the same, whereas isolacionistas (lit. isolationists) favoured Spanish spellings, which were more familiar to the Galician population anyway because they would have learned to read and write in Spanish. Nowadays, the normativa isolacionista is the official one, endorsed by the Royal Galician Academy (Real Academia Galega) and public institutions. Most Galician-language publishers also follow isolacionismo, with only one publishing exclusively in reintegracionista (Através Editora). Moure wrote her successful novel Herba moura in the official normativa isolacionista and was for years one of the star authors of Xerais; after switching to normativa reintegracionista in the early 2010s, she moved to Através Editora and her subsequent novels have achieved considerably less visibility.
- 16.
Bardelás (who only started publishing in 2010) is not named in Hooper (2011) nor (2018). Dacosta is named very briefly in Vilavedra (2007) and (2018). Heinze, as I will discuss later, is discussed somewhat more extensively by Hooper and Vilavedra. Publications that thoroughly focus on Heinze’s work have tended to come from lesser well-known or visible scholars, and had limited impact, such as García Fontes (2011) and Sosa Rubio (2013).
- 17.
New Spanish Books is managed by ICEX (the Exports and Investments department of the Spanish Ministry for Industry, Commerce and Tourism) with the collaboration of the Spanish Publishers’ Association. The project aims at identifying and showcasing works to be promoted in the international literary translation market. While As Médulas was included in the list for Germany, its rights were not sold.
- 18.
Mariño lived in the rural area of O Courel for most of her life, with little contact with Galician literary circles, and only published one book in 1963 at the insistence of her friend, poet Uxío Novoneyra.
- 19.
Dacosta published her short story book Cascas de noz with Galaxia before moving to Francka Editora.
- 20.
Heinze admitted that she found it more difficult to publish after the 2008 economic recession now as publishers “do not have money” (Ramos 2017, p. if this is a direct quote—page number needed). At a latter date, she admitted to having received a number of rejections of her erotic novel Delirios de pracer and had finally decided to publish with Aira, a newly established publisher (Regueira 2019).
- 21.
Translations are mine.
- 22.
From the scene of the protagonist’s first sexual encounter with a male prostitute: “Sara felt very uncomfortable in that situation. She looked at the bed, looked at the bag and looked at Cristian, who was starting to take his sweater out. “Take your clothes out, miss. What are you waiting for?”. “My knickers too?”. “Well, not for the moment, wait. Actually, take it out now. It won’t do you any harm. Don’t be afraid” (Heinze 2018, p. 13–14).
- 23.
For example, “The boy-man-rubbish is used to limited-term contracts, contracts that get renewed every two weeks. (…) It’s time already. One must leave. Something to eat. He fixes the night sandwich. He goes into his car. He lets the first stars of the night enter his dreams” (Dacosta 2004, p. 196).
- 24.
For example, “What are you talking about, grandpa! It’s the times, Pomba, the times that come back. After Sir Penco das Corredoiras, they forced the women-brooms to sweep the Alameda, every day until they cracked up, weaker, sicker and more dead by the hour.” (Dacosta 2004, p. 144).
- 25.
For example, “He exits the Grand Hotel, that day, makes a summary of what he had thought about it, a grand hotel for nineteenth-century merchants. Funnily enough, it has something from the Wild West. Nonsense, air becomes him, it’s cool and revives his face, everything else is hot” (Bardelás 2011, p. 63).
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Moreda Rodríguez, E. (2021). Addressing Gender Gaps in Contemporary Galician-Language Fiction: The Cases of Ursula Heinze, Silvia Bardelás and Beatriz Dacosta. In: Fitzgerald, A. (eds) Women’s Lived Experiences of the Gender Gap. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-1174-2_6
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