The little work I’ve been able to do so far on this project has concerned the latter, mainly for pragmatic/practical reasons connected to time available for research. I am keen to think through these questions not just in relation to feature-length fiction film, which is what I’ve focused on in my research to date, but also to consider the ways in which these issues manifest in documentary and in television/streaming series. My working hypothesis is this: that the postfeminist emphasis on voice and speech translates productively into dynamic depictions of sound and gender in Spanish female-led creative production. (As a brief parenthesis, I am acutely aware of the problematic politics that often lie behind such movements, and the fact that not all women are called upon or offered space to articulate their experiences, and I am eager to explore this as I move the project forward – if you are interested in thinking through these questions further, I recommend reading Alison Phipps’ brilliant and incisive book Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism as a starting point). Contemporary popular movements in both Anglophone and Hispanophone contexts, such as #MeToo or #MasMujeres, impel women and other marginalised genders to speak out and vocally condemn the subjugation of women within and beyond such industries. The wider context of the project is characterised by contemporary postfeminist impulses to mobilise women to use their voices and to speak up/out about the systemic inequalities, biases, and abuses both within and beyond contemporary audiovisual production industries. My book! Addressing one of the gaps in the cinematicĬorpus of this is one of the motivations for my new project. With my subsequent project, I knew I wanted to address this imbalance in my own work to date and contribute to bringing attention to alternative creative voices within mainstream Spanish cultural production. The original motivation for this focus on female-led content is the regret I have concerning the cinematic corpus of my monograph, Subversive Spanish Cinema: The Politics of Performance (shortly available in paperback at a more affordable price point than the hardback if you’re interested – and if you’ll excuse the shameless self-promotion!). The premise of the project is to examine intersections between gender and sound in contemporary Spanish audiovisual cultures, specifically works in which female creatives hold prominent positions behind the scenes. I should also acknowledge my colleague and friend Dr Hannah Grayson who suggested this in our virtual writing session this afternoon – thanks Hannah! I outlined the project at this session and spoke with colleagues about how to develop the project – I was lucky to receive really useful advice from several of my new colleagues and wanted to take the time to document this, while it’s fresh in my mind. Part of the motivation for writing this blog is to document a short and informal presentation I gave as part of the work-in-progress research series within the Division of Literature and Languages at Stirling yesterday. Despite the application being unsuccessful, I’m eager to pursue this project, especially now I am working in academia and I’m able to officially count research as being part of my job. This project started out as the basis for a (ultimately unsuccessful) British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship application in 2020, which I developed under the guidance of the fabulous Dr Abigail Loxham at Liverpool University. I’ve already written about this project on the blog (see here and here). But I’ve also been able to spend some time thinking about another research project I’m developing currently: on intersections between gender and sound in contemporary Spanish audiovisual cultures. I’ve managed to make a start on some actual writing of my monograph on Fernando León de Aranoa (if you want to know more about this project, check out this for posts looking at some of his works read this and this). It has been such a delight to be able to dedicate more time and energy to my research. This has meant a shift back into academia full-time and the opportunity to engage more fully with my research (rather than squeezing in an hour of reading, writing, and/or thinking on the sofa in the evening, exhausted after a full day of mumming and/or working!). Last month I joined the University of Stirling as a Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies.
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