Books by Jennifer Smith
Vanderbilt University Press, 2021
Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin‑de‑Siècle Spain argues that the reinterpretation of female ... more Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin‑de‑Siècle Spain argues that the reinterpretation of female mysticism as hysteria and nymphomania in late nineteenth‑ and early twentieth‑century Spain was part of a larger project to suppress the growing female emancipation movement by sexualizing the female subject. This archival-historical work highlights the phenomenon in medical, social, and literary texts of the time, illustrating that despite many liberals' hostility toward the Church, secular doctors and intellectuals employed strikingly similar paradigms to those through which the early modern Spanish Church castigated female mysticism as demonic possession.
Author Jennifer Smith also directs modern historians to the writings of Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–1921) as a thinker whose work points out mysticism’s subversive potential in terms of the patriarchal order. The only woman author studied here, Pardo Bazán, unlike her male counterparts, rejected the hysteria diagnosis and promoted mysticism as a path for women's personal development and self‑realization.
Bucknell University Press, 2018
This volume brings together cutting-edge research on modern Spanish women as writers, activists, ... more This volume brings together cutting-edge research on modern Spanish women as writers, activists, and embodiments of cultural change, and simultaneously honors Maryellen Bieder’s invaluable scholarly contribution to the field. The essays are innovative in their consideration of lesser-known women writers, focus on women as political activists, and use of post-colonialism, queer theory, and spatial theory to examine the period from the Enlightenment until World War II. The contributors study women as agents and representations of social change in a variety of genres, including short stories, novels, plays, personal letters, and journalistic pieces. Canonical authors such as Emilia Pardo Bazán, Leopoldo Alas “Clarín,” and Carmen de Burgos are considered alongside lesser known writers and activists such as María Rosa Gálvez, Sofía Tartilán, and Caterina Albert i Paradís. The critical analyses are situated within their specific socio-historical context, and shed new light on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Spanish literature, history, and culture.
Routledge, 2017
This volume focuses on intersections of race, class, gender, and nation in the formation of the f... more This volume focuses on intersections of race, class, gender, and nation in the formation of the fin-de-siècle Spanish and Spanish colonial subject. Despite the wealth of research produced on gender, social class, race, and national identity few studies have focused on how these categories interacted, frequently operating simultaneously to reveal contexts in which dominated groups were dominating and vice versa. Such revelations call into question metanarratives about the exploitation of one group by another and bring to light interlocking systems of identity formation, and consequently oppression, that are difficult to disentangle. The authors included here study this dynamic in a variety of genres and venues, namely the essay, the novel, the short story, theater, and zarzuelas. These essays cover canonical authors such as Benito Pérez Galdós and Emilia Pardo Bazán, and understudied female authors such as Rosario de Acuña and Belén Sárraga. The volume builds on recent scholarship on race, class, and gender, and nation by focusing specifically on the intersections of these categories, and by studying this dynamic in popular culture, visual culture, and in the works of both canonical and lesser-known authors.
Reviews of Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria by Jennifer Smith
Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, 2023
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2023
Jennifer Smith's Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin-de-Siècle Spain intervenes productively in... more Jennifer Smith's Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria in Fin-de-Siècle Spain intervenes productively in ongoing scholarly conversations about the repression of, particularly, middle-class women in turn-of-the-century Spain through a Foucauldian theoretical framework. Drawing from a wide-ranging corpus of texts, Smith demonstrates how female mysticism, both past and present, was reinterpreted by nineteenth-century medical and hygienic discourses within Spain as hysteria. Smith argues that the pathologizing of mysticism forms part of a wider tendency within liberal circles to sexualize the female subject as a means to suppress and delegitimize women's claims to equality and emancipation. After analyzing hygienic discourses on hysteria and mysticism produced both in Spain and Europe throughout the nineteenth century, Smith explores how novels by Eduardo López Bago, Leopoldo Alas ("Clarín") and Emilia Pardo Bazán, despite their marked differences, dialogue with these highly gendered issues. Chapter 1 demonstrates how Spanish hygienic treatises at the fin de siècle pathologized women in order to exclude them from the universal rights purportedly offered by liberalism. Medical discourses that hystericized the female body, constructing a "completely sexualized female subject" (23), provided a diametrical complement to the desexualized feminine ideal of the ángel del hogar, which, despite their opposing visions of femininity, worked in tandem both to regulate women's behavior and naturalize their subordinate position in Spain's liberal, bourgeois society. Spanish hygienic discourses not only posit motherhood as a natural and social duty for womenpolicing the health of women thus becomes paramount to improving the health and "race" of the Spanish bourgeoisiebut also posit childbirth, rather than orgasm, as the fulfillment of female sexual desire. Smith shows how this discursive turn enables hygienists to pathologize both female celibacy and female sexual pleasure (heterosexual or otherwise). As a byproduct of both sexual celibacy and excess, hysteria can be viewed, Smith argues, "as one of the central female perversions of the time" (41). Chapter 2 builds on this foundation to demonstrate the myriad ways in which Spanish doctors from this period sexualized the mystical experience in an effort to discredit an alternate model of femininity that envisioned an emancipated role for women outside the domestic sphere. Throughout the nineteenth century, both scientists and anticlerical authors reinterpreted the mystical experiences of saintssuch as Saint Teresa of Ávilaand other female mystics as symptomatic of hysteria. A particularly original contribution of this chapter is the convincing analogy drawn between the religious persecution of mystics as heretics in Spain's early modern period and the tendency of nineteenth-century Spanish physicians to diagnose rebellious or discontented women as hysterics. The Inquisition extracted false confessionsespecially from beatas and alumbradasto discredit their mystical experiences as sexual, often satanic, deviancy. In the nineteenth century medicine replaces the confessional, but physicians continue to sexualize the mystical experience, conflating the hysterical fit and mystical rapture and connecting both, once more, to sexual deviancy. Smith convincingly shows how the "scientific gaze" (78), like the Inquisition, violently silences women who would seek an alternative lifestyle outside of patriarchal structures by interpreting
Reviews of Modern Spanish Women by Jennifer Smith
Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, 2021
La Tribuna, 2019
Concebido como homenaje a la memoria intelectual y humana de la profesora Maryellen Bieder, este ... more Concebido como homenaje a la memoria intelectual y humana de la profesora Maryellen Bieder, este volumen reúne once ensayos que la homenajeada llegó a conocer antes de irse ("She was incredibly sharp and productive until the very end", leemos en "In loving memory", Nota in exergo), dispuestos en una estructura que abarca tres grandes ejes rectores. Es precisamente esa vertebración la que organiza de modo
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2021
Revista de Literatura, 2020
Hispania, 2020
views on the Gothic genre, or on Spanish and Mexican film traditions, it has its shortcomings. Th... more views on the Gothic genre, or on Spanish and Mexican film traditions, it has its shortcomings. Those interested in analyzing film language or in looking for transatlantic cultural relationships will find it cursory and insufficient.
Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2020
Reviews of Intersections by Jennifer Smith
Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 2020
Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 2020
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjsc20 Intersections of ... more ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjsc20 Intersections of race, class, gender, and nation in fin-de-siècle Spanish literature and culture editado por Jennifer Smith y Lisa Nalbone, Nueva York, Routledge, 2017, 214 pp., £36.99 (tapa blanda) ISBN13 978-0367346614 / £125 (tapa dura), ISBN13 978-1138206472 Ismael Souto Rumbo To cite this article: Ismael Souto Rumbo (2020): Intersections of race, class, gender, and nation in fin-de-siècle Spanish literature and culture, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies,
Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2018
Anales de la Literatura Española Contemporánea, 2018
Uploads
Books by Jennifer Smith
Author Jennifer Smith also directs modern historians to the writings of Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–1921) as a thinker whose work points out mysticism’s subversive potential in terms of the patriarchal order. The only woman author studied here, Pardo Bazán, unlike her male counterparts, rejected the hysteria diagnosis and promoted mysticism as a path for women's personal development and self‑realization.
Reviews of Women, Mysticism, and Hysteria by Jennifer Smith
Reviews of Modern Spanish Women by Jennifer Smith
Reviews of Intersections by Jennifer Smith
Author Jennifer Smith also directs modern historians to the writings of Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851–1921) as a thinker whose work points out mysticism’s subversive potential in terms of the patriarchal order. The only woman author studied here, Pardo Bazán, unlike her male counterparts, rejected the hysteria diagnosis and promoted mysticism as a path for women's personal development and self‑realization.