Female writers in the bicentennial: gender and nation in “200 años, 200 libros. Un recorrido por la cultura argentina”

Abstract

Discussions regarding the place attributed to female writers in the histories of literature or in the many established canons are not recent and can be traced back to the beginning of the 20th century. We propose to observe how a national literary corpus is built in relation to this problem, focusing on the analysis of the curatorial text of the exhibition “200 años, 200 Libros. Un recorrido por la cultura argentina ”organized by the National Library and held at the Centro Cultural de la Memoria Haroldo Conti (former Escuela de Mecánica de la Armada (ESMA). This article starts from the premise that the exhibition, the selected works and their arrangement can be read as a reconstruction of national literature in which it is possible to observe the places assigned to women writers in the Argentine literary canon in 2011. The questions that guide this work are: What places do the female writers occupy in the exhibition? What is the basis for the distribution of women writers in the selection? What do these places tell us about the space that female writers occupy in the national literary culture? And also, what constructions of the nation in relation to gender can be observed in this sample? To answer these questions, we will appeal both to classic texts from feminist studies and to texts by authors from postcolonial studies.