This original collection of essays explores the work and life choices of Spanish women who, through their writings and social activism, addressed social justice, religious dogmatism, the educational system, gender inequality, and tensions in female subjectivity. It brings together writers who are not commonly associated with each other, but whose voices overlap, allowing us to foreground their unconventionality, their relationships to each other, and their relation to modernity. The objective of this volume is to explore how the idea of "queerness" played an important role in the personal lives and social activism of these writers, as well as in the unconventional and nonconformist characters they created in their work. Together, the essays demonstrate that the concept of "queer women" is useful for investigating the evolution of women's writing and sexual identity during the period of Spain's fitful transition to modernity in the nineteenth century. The concept of queerness in its many meanings points to the idea of non-normativity and gender dissidence that encompasses how women intellectuals experienced friendship, religion, sex, sexuality, and gender. The works examined include autobiography, poetry, memoir, salon chronicles, short and long fiction, pedagogical essays, newspaper articles, theater, and letters. In addition to exploring the significant presence of queer women in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spanish literature and culture, the essays examine the reasons why the voices of Spanish women authors have been culturally silenced. One thrust in this collection explores generational transitions of Spanish writers from the romantics and their "hermandad lirica" ("lyrical sisterhood") through to "las Sinsombrero" ("Women Without Hats"), and finally, current Spanish writers linked to the LGBTQ+ community.

How was the female body perceived in the popular culture of late nineteenth-century Spain? Using a wide array of images from popular magazines of the day, Lou Charnon-Deutsch finds that women were typically presented in ways that were reassuring to the emerging bourgeois culture.

Charnon-Deutsch organizes the 190 images reproduced in this book into six broad categories, or "fictions of the feminine" she reads women's bodies as a romantic symbol of beauty or evil, as a privileged link with the natural order, as a font of male inspiration, as a mouthpiece of bourgeois mores, as a focalized point of male fear and desire, and as an eroticized expression of Spanish exoticism and political ambitions. These imaginary visions of femininity, Charnon-Deutsch argues, were a response to, and also helped to create, gendered stereotypes by suggesting ideal feminine behavior and poses. Further, they comprised a reassuring "between-male" cultural medium that provided graphic validation of women's docile body for a culture enthralled with femininity.

Integrating the fields of literature and cultural studies, Charnon-Deutsch's approach to this subject is unique. Many of the images collected here are available for the first time, and they represent only a fraction of the two thousand images Charnon-Deutsch collected during her research. This book will appeal to students of Spanish cultural studies and gender studies, as well as to art historians.

Hold That Pose explores the role of visual images in Spain's transition to a fully modern illustrated press by the first decade of the twentieth century. It examines both the ideological impact and the technological transformation of image production in Spanish magazines during the Restoration. In the brief period of forty years, 1870 to 1910, technological and manufacturing advances revolutionized Spain's illustrated press and consequently Europeanized the tastes and the expectations of its elite urban readership. By 1900, once subscription prices fell and magazines began to apply modern photojournalistic techniques, the middle classes became inured to illustrated magazines. Advancements in photomechanical reproduction allowed periodicals to focus more extensively on the vicissitudes and pleasures of everyday life in urban Spain along with world events in increasingly remote locales. Hold That Pose explores this period of transition through an analysis of the images that spoke for and to the burgeoning numbers of subscribers who purchased the most popular weeklies of the period.

Culture and Gender in Nineteenth-Century Spain is a wide-ranging study of women's writing and representations of gender in Spanish literature and culture of the period. Leading scholars from the UK and USA discuss issues including women's writing and the representation of women in canonical texts from the 1830s to the 1860s, the construction of masculinity, race and region, and popular fiction, journalism, and the visual arts. Quotations are given in Spanish and in English translation.