Feeling Strangely in Mid-Century Spanish and Latin American Womens Fiction

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. The early twentieth century was awash in revolutionary scientific discourse, and its uptake in the public imaginary through popular scientific writings touched every area of human experience, from politics and governance to social mores and culture. Feeling Strangely argues that these shifting scientific understandings and their integration into Hispanic and Lusophone society reshaped the experience of gender. The book analyzes gender as a felt experience and explores how that experience is shaped by popular scientific discourse by examining the strange femininity of young protagonists in four novels written by women in Spanish and Portuguese: Rosa Chacels Memorias de Leticia Valle (published in Argentina in 1945); Norah Langes Personas en la sala (Argentina, 1950); Carmen Laforets Nada (Spain, 1945); and Clarice Lispectors Perto do corao selvagem (Brazil, 1943). It pairs each novel with a broad scientific theme selected from those that captured the contemporary popular imagination to argue that the young female protagonists in these novels all put forth visions of young womanhood as an experience of strangeness. Building on Carmen Martn Gaites term chicas raras, Rankin proposes this strangeness as constitutive of a gendered experience inextricable from affective and material engagements with the world.