Necrofeminismo y redes de indignación en Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda y Emilia Pardo Bazán

Abstract

ABSTRACT:In this essay, I explore how Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda and Emilia Pardo Bazán process their traumatic encounters with sexual and gender discrimination within the intimate space of correspondence. Though the two never met in person, they shared the experience of being rejected by the Real Academia Española—Gómez de Avellaneda in 1853, and Pardo Bazán in 1889, 1891 and 1912. Writing to an already dead Gómez de Avellaneda, Pardo Bazán creates what I refer to as a necro-feminist bond: a political alliance between embodied and disembodied subjects fighting against patriarchal biopolitics. By focusing on the affective contours of each woman’s correspondences, I trace the ways in which they respond to the cultural imperative to repress their anger at social injustice while devising oblique forms of communicating their rage through sarcasm and irony. Finally, I argue that these epistolary corpuses act as a counterpoint to the Academia’s misogyny and serve as a productive site for considering non-normative modes of expressing and forming collectivities around traumatic experiences.