The Formation of Neoliberal Spanish Womanhood in Lucia Etxebarría’s Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes

Abstract

This article frames Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes within the context of Spanish neoliberalism as revealed by class distinction, urban spatial cleavages, and neoliberal feminism. Based primarily on a dual theoretical framework of neoliberal feminism and Mimi Schippers’ dichotimization of hegemonic and pariah femininities, with tangential theoretical references to bisexuality and urban policy in Madrid, I revisit Etxebarría’s relationship to feminism and interrogate her subscription to a neoliberalist world view. This conceptual basis provides a new prism for assessing Etxebarría’s feminist credentials, while also exploring her interrelated neoliberal conformity. My analysis is tripartite, consisting of an initial scrutiny of her textual encoding of a neoliberal feminism which produces a hegemonic femininity that creates stigmatized ‘pariah femininities’. In the second part of this article, I examine her representation of class and spatial striation in the urban milieu of Madrid. The final section deconstructs Etxebarría’s narrative representation of lesbianism and bisexuality. Criticism to date has tended to pivot exclusively around the figure of Beatriz, and by according critical primacy to the novel’s secondary female characters, such as Mónica, her mother Charo, Beatriz’s mother, Herminia and Cat, I aim to uncover this much-studied novel’s unexplored inferences concerning female subjectivity, urban space, and class in contemporary Spain.

KEYWORDS:

• Lucía Etxebarría
• Contemporary Spanish women’s writing
• Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes
• gender in Spain
• Contemporary Spanish literature

Notes

¹ A recent article in El Mundo’s women’s magazine, YoDona, offers a perfect exemplar of Spanish neoliberal feminism. Successful women, such as actress Paula Etxebarría, author María Dueñas, along with some businesswomen, were asked about contemporary feminism, which they seemed to equate with a dereliction of caring duties, and generally unfeminine behaviour, such as indifference to normative female preferences, for example flattering clothes. One woman was described as caring for her terminally ill father in Galicia, despite the fact that this supposedly goes against the grain of ‘el feminismo más rancio’. All 10 interviewees affirmed the conciliation of motherhood and professional success, with not one single mention of hired help (Ugidos).

² I wish to clarify that my reference to male homosexuality does not conflate it with lesbianism, a tendency bemoaned by Adrienne Rich in her classic essay ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’. She affirms: ‘lesbian sexuality is usually and incorrectly included under male homosexuality’ (1980, 637).