My Beloved Commodity: Women Intellectuals and Artists in the Caribbean Print Culture (1868-1912)

• In Event: Beyond Nation: Feminism and Protest in Nineteenth-Century Latin American Print Culture

Abstract

By the latter half of the nineteenth century, women in Latin America had advanced the issues of women's rights in regards to civil status, family, and participation in political, economic, and cultural life. My paper points out that the emergence of women novelists, poets, teachers, journalists, and political activists who displayed feminist concerns during the fin de siècle was directly linked to the trends of international exchange of cultural goods and the development of new visual technologies. I argue that women intellectuals, such as Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda, Lola Rodríguez de Tió, Belén Sárraga, and Úrsula Coimbra de Valverde, understood the circulation of commodities, capital, and human bodies in the Caribbean as part of a strategy for self-promotion and participation in public sphere. These nineteenth-century women took advantage of new technologies in the realm of print culture to alter the dynamics of the cultural marketplace and reshape women’s participation in the public sphere. They also produced and promoted a self-image that extended well beyond their body to include poise, lifestyle, dress, manners, social relations, and material possessions to suggest that this tendency toward conscious self-fashioning was part of the struggle over the public sphere. My paper examines the relevant social, political and cultural implications of the spectacle of the female body at the turn of the twentieth century to show the emergence of new experiences regarding public and private spheres, individual and collective political participation, and national and transnational identities.

Author

• Maria Alejandra Aguilar Dornelles, University at Albany-SUNY