Representations of Women in Postwar Spain: Gender and Performance in Recent Novels and Films

This study explores how women’s lives in postwar Spain are represented in recent (largely from the 21st century, with a few notable exceptions) novels and films. With almost all of the featured narratives here centering on women’s lives in the decades immediately following the Spanish civil war (mostly the 1940s, during the time of the most oppressive reprisals), special attention is given to Francoist social policies as they related specifically to women. By viewing gender as both a social construct as well as a performance, the reader will note how more recent fictional versions of Spanish women’s postwar experiences manage to create an opportunity for contestation, for agency, for pushing back against the social norms that strove to restrict women in their tightly scripted gendered roles in Franco’s New Spain.