carcerality, corporeality, and subjectivity in the life narratives by Franco's female prisoners
.PUBLICATION, DISTRIBUTION, ETC
Name of Publisher, Distributor, etc.
University of Birmingham
Date of Publication, Distribution, etc.
2015
DISSERTATION (THESIS) NOTE
Dissertation or thesis details and type of degree
Ph.D.
Body granting the degree
University of Birmingham
Text preceding or following the note
2015
SUMMARY OR ABSTRACT
Text of Note
This thesis examines female political imprisonment during the early part of Spain's Franco regime through the life narratives by Carlota O'Neill, Tomasa Cuevas, Juana Doña, and Soledad Real published during the transition. It proposes the foregrounding notion of the 'No/Body' to describe the literary, social, and historical eradication and exemplification of the female prisoner as deviant. Using critical theories of genre, gender and sexuality, sociology and philosophy, and human geography, it discusses the concepts of subject, abject, spatiality, habitus, and the mirror to analyse the intersecting, influential factors in the (re)production of dominant discourses within Francoist and post-Francoist society that are interrogated throughout the corpus. In coining the concept of the 'No/Body' as a methodological approach, a narrative form, and a socio-political subject position, this thesis repositions the marginal and the (in)visible as an essential aspect of female carcerality. Read through this concept, the narratives begin to dismantle and rewrite dominant narratives of gender and genre for the female prisoner in such a way that the texts foreground the 'No/Body'. This thesis thus presents the narrative corpus of lost testimonies as a form of radical textual and political practice within contemporary Spanish historiography.