Adrian Kane, professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages, recently published a review of “The Space of Latin American Women Modernists” by Camilla Sutherland in the journal Gender Studies.
Sutherland’s study opens dialogue across disciplinary boundaries by analyzing the literary and artistic production of eight women from Latin America: Argentinian printmaker Norah Borges and Argentinian writers Victoria Ocampo and Norah Lange; Mexican painter Frida Kahlo; Bolivian sculptor Marina Núñez del Prado; Chilean writers Gabriela Mistral and María Luisa Bombal; and Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo.
Specifically, Sutherland argues that “modernist women’s artistic careers involved overcoming spatial boundaries and that their thematic treatments of space contributed to a reframing of gendered spaces and identity” (xviii). She thus examines how cultural shifts provoked by modernity—such as the rapid development of urban centers and the invention of new modes of transportation—impacted the coding of gendered spaces, and how Latin American women writers and artists responded to these new spatial configurations by constructing their identities as artists through distinctly spatial strategies. Sutherland’s analysis of these multi-modal works presents a compelling narrative about the ways in which Latin American women modernists used space as means of remapping female subjectivity during an era of vertiginous change in Latin American societies.