WOMEN’S PARTICIPATION IN THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY LATIN AMERICAN PRESS: IMPRESSIONS, EXCHANGES, AND AESTHETICS IN TRANSIT
This symposium aims to serve as a space for analysis and critical dialogue on the multiple roles that women assumed in the development of print culture in the emerging nation-states of Latin America during the nineteenth century. The nineteenth-century press is characterized by the shift from ecclesiastical and official uses to the emergence of a cultural consumer economy, which gave rise to new material, social, and political configurations. It was during these years that newspapers directed by/for women emerged, ranging from texts seeking to consolidate the figure of the “angel of the home” to publications that challenged the confinement of women’s participation to the private sphere and the domestic realm. In their pages, women actively participated as writers, translators, editors, and cultural agents, joining intellectual circuits made up of men and women who sustained literary, political, and cultural dialogues on a (trans)national scale.
This symposium proposes to reflect on women’s participation in the nineteenth-century Latin American press, understanding newspapers and magazines as spaces of cultural production and, at the same time, of negotiation of authorship, construction of intellectual legitimacy, public intervention, and the articulation of cultural networks. We are interested in bringing together research examining the ways women were inserted into the literate public sphere, their ties with other authors, and the exchanges that contributed to the configuration of broader intellectual communities in Latin America and the Atlantic space.
We propose this symposium as a space for interdisciplinary dialogue among literary studies, cultural history, the history of the press, gender studies, and the digital humanities. Within this framework, proposals may address, among others, the following thematic lines:
– Works published by women in the press: authorship, aesthetics, serialization, and textual circulation.
– Transnational networks, legitimation practices, and technologies of citation and distribution.
– Technologies and materialities of print culture and publishing practices.
– The emergence of technical schools and (proto)feminisms in Latin America.
– Recovery of archives, publications, and forgotten trajectories.
By bringing together research from different national contexts, this symposium seeks to strengthen an expanding field of studies and contribute to a more complex understanding of the role women played in shaping nineteenth-century Latin American print culture. This space invites dialogue on the memories of the Americas based on actors, publications, and intellectual networks that have remained partially invisible in traditional historiographical accounts. From this starting point, we hope to build a network that examines the nineteenth-century print tradition through contemporary lenses that allow for the innovation of memory.
