Women, religion and culture in Spain and Latin America, 1900-2000

This volume offers a close reading of cultural objects produced in the Spanish speaking world during the twentieth century to show how women, working across continents, countries, and traditions, make manifest the complex and multiple ways religion continues to be relevant in their lives. Contributors look beyond the sociology of religion to literary and art history. In each chapter, a story is told of the many crossings made between religion and cultural practices: their acts of creation on the borders of tradition—religious, literary, artistic, societal—create spaces where new constellations of spiritual identity can be formed away from the watchful gaze of institutions prone to restricting religious expression that deviates from established doctrine. A key feature is the focus on varying modes of cultural production. Essays cover literary and visual art, philosophical thought, music, and cinema, offering insight into the power and pervasiveness of religiosity in works created by women in Spain and Latin America. This volume shows that any attempt to characterise broad trends in religion across the twentieth century should include an account of the ways in which the performance of religious devotion metamorphosed outside the dominant paradigm, even as its place at the centre of society was diminishing.