The 'Boom Femenino'

RESEARCH PROJECT

The Centre for Mexican Studies is currently involved in a collaborative project with the School of Languages, University of Southampton, on the so-called boom femenino or the dramatic increase in publishing by women in Mexico since the early 1970s. Mexican cultural output is characterised during this period by the dramatic emergence of women’s voices in the cultural sphere in Mexico and is due, in part, to a globalised, modernised, cultural environment that has seen rapid change in all areas of women’s lives. These sweeping changes have been widely documented and have had social, cultural and political ramifications throughout Mexican society. This book employs the term boom femenino as a way of describing the entirety of this cultural output and argues that in so far as it relates to cultural production, it constitutes an integral part of this wider process of change. This study of the boom femenino offers an opportunity to think critically about the texts produced during this period and the ways in which they have impacted on the Mexican and international cultural arena. In its exploration of the boom femenino phenomenon, the book historically situates the term and investigates the implications of its use in the context of contemporary women’s writing. Moreover, it examines a range of aesthetic and thematic preoccupations in relation to concepts of nation, space, gender, feminism, form and other issues.

The project is composed of various strands including a and a volume of essays on the subject entitled The Boom Femenino in Mexico: Reading Contemporary Women’s Writing which focuses on literary production by women in Mexico over the last three decades. The volume of essays is forthcoming in 2010 from Cambridge Scholars Publishing and is edited by and Jane Lavery.

The contributors to this volume raise a series of important questions concerning the role of the critic in the construction of the boom femenino and they highlight diverging ways of continuing the task of interpretation. Many signal ways in which production by women writers might be analysed within different interpretative frameworks or indeed located within different literary traditions. This sense of breaking beyond categories is one, it is hoped, that this collection might be seen to achieve in spite of its retention of an explicitly gendered focus, a problematic concept for many. Key to the project has been the inclusion of critics from Mexico, the US and Europe in a transnational forum. The collection as a whole aims to stimulate further enquiry, research and critical reflection into the riches of women-authored Mexican literary texts and traditions.

Contributors include Sarah Bowskill, Debra Castillo, Ana Cruz García, Inés Ferrero Cándenas, Luzelena Gutiérrez de Velasco, Emily Hinds, Beth Jörgensen, Lorraine Kelly, Irma López, María Teresa Medeiros-Lichem, Tiffany Miller, Olwen Rowe, Linda Saborio, Claudia Schaefer, Claire Taylor, Niamh Thornton.

http://www.lang.soton.ac.uk/boomfemenino/portada.html