No / bodies: carcerality, corporeality, and subjectivity in the life narratives by franco’s female prisoners

Pike, Holly Jane (2015). No / bodies: carcerality, corporeality, and subjectivity in the life narratives by franco’s female prisoners. University of Birmingham. Ph.D.

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Abstract

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.

Type of Work:

Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.)

Award Type:

Doctorates > Ph.D.

Supervisor(s):