Abstract:
Spain’s efforts to ‘pacify’ its northern Moroccan zone, an official Protectorate from 1913. Then, as now, Spain’s liminal position between Europe and Africa produced anxieties of identity. Such anxieties manifest through exclusionary discourses that seek to shore up boundaries of gender, class and race and establish superiority over allegedly inferior Others. Each of the texts encounters stigmatisation as a ‘low,’ ‘feminine’ cultural product and engages with ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultural constructions through figures such as the aristocratic volunteer nurse and the Moroccan Other. The texts demonstrate the transgressive potential of the war zone by exploiting or even subverting gender codes as they develop distinct narratives. Consequently, they indicate the ambivalence of the gendered, hierarchised dichotomies that underlie notions of ‘value’ and ‘worth’ and lead to the rejection or omission of cultural actors and works. Consuelo González Ramos and Teresa de Escoriaza, the authors of La mujer española en la campaña del Kert (1912) and Del dolor de la guerra: Crónicas de la campaña de Marruecos (1921) respectively, were obliged to negotiate the complications of production and reception resulting from their unconventional role as women writers treading on ‘masculine’ territory. The television series Tiempos de guerra (2017) and the novel 1921: Diario de una enfermera (2017) re-signify the nation’s early twentieth-century anxieties to address pertinent issues in present-day Spain, such as gender inequality, undocumented immigration and threats to national unity. The comparison in this study of the historical and contemporary works conveys the continued importance of challenging divisive ideologies. Furthermore, it insists on the current relevance and worth of feminised, traditionally devalued historiographical representations of Spain’s past.