Narrating Otherwise: Analysing Nancy Spero’s The First Language as Historiographic Metafiction

Through a feminist reading grounded in the framework of historiographic metafiction, this article aims to analyze pioneering feminist U.S. artist Nancy Spero’s The First Language (1981). Throughout the history of Western art, women’s bodies have been predominantly represented through the male gaze, reducing women to passive objects and excluding them from consideration as full subjects in historical and artistic narratives. In response to these modes of representation, Spero constructs a unique visual language that reclaims the female body from historical silence and repositions it as a political and narrative subject. The First Language brings together women figures from different cultures and historical periods, proposing a cyclical, fragmentary, and collective narrative in contrast to linear historiography. This study situates Spero’s work within the framework of Linda Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction by examining its temporal structure, narrative form, and use of figuration. In conjunction with Hélène Cixous’s notion of l’écriture féminine and Julia Kristeva’s theory of the “semiotic,” the article investigates the visual and textual strategies through which Spero reconfigures the female body into an instrument of feminist resistance. By restoring the right to representation and expression that has been historically denied to women, The First Language intervenes in cultural and historical memory through art. In this context, the study offers a critical perspective that bridges feminist art theory and historiographic metafiction as a methodology, thereby opening up new possibilities for analysis.