Law, Literature, and Gender in the Hispa

This interdisciplinary course explores the intersections between law, literature, and gender within the Hispanic world, examining how literary and legal texts shape and reflect cultural norms, identities, and power dynamics. The course will analyze key works of literature and legal texts from Spain and Latin America, paying special attention to how gender is constructed, represented, expressed, problematized or instrumentalized in legal texts and literary narratives.

Both literature and legal texts use language as their primary tool to construct meaning, navigate ambiguity, and shape social realities: style, rhetoric,  implicit and explicit narratives, form and character construction are essential in the writing of the law. Legal language, like literary language, can be ambiguous and open to interpretation. By examining how laws and legal texts are written, interpreted, used and argued, students will explore how language in both realms functions to maintain or challenge power structures related to gender.

In the last decades, Latin American and Spain have seen a wide variety of radical transformations along with striking immobilism in legal and literary treatments of gender.  A clear-cut path to  "liberation", "recognition" or "inclusion" has been problematized  not only by political, ideological and social resistance but also by  political and rhetorical uses of gender discourse as  strategies of "pink-washing" or a convenient mask to hide different sets of conflicts. "Progressive" gender discourses imported from the north have been sometimes the condition of possibility for transformation but also a problematic imposition on local social, political and symbolic structures with very different genealogies.

Through texts that address issues such as gender violence, sexual identities, family law, and women's rights, students will explore how legal and literary narratives intersect in their portrayal of gender norms. Authors from Latin America and Spain will be studied alongside legal reforms. Through these analyses, students will develop a deeper understanding of how literature and law both reflect and shape gender relations in the Hispanic world, offering nuanced perspectives on cultural and political representation, justice, identity, and power.