Periodic Reporting for period 4 - CIRGEN (Circulating Gender in the Global Enlightenment: Ideas, Networks, Agencies)
Reporting period: 2023-07-01 to 2024-09-30
The objectives of this project have been: 1) to evidence the transnational and transatlantic dimension of discussions on gender going beyond existing national or comparative perspectives; 2) to decenter customary radial and vertical approaches by highlighting pluri-centric cultural transfers and multilateral dialogues both within Europe and beyond; 3) to challenge dichotomous visions of the Enlightenment as either intrinsically misogynistic or feminist avant la lettre by stressing its plurality and contested legacy to the modern world; 4) to understand the role played by gender in the cultural geographies of Enlightenment, with a particular emphasis on the symbolic construction of the “South”; 5) to document the practical and symbolic role of women in the making of modern reading publics; 6) and to advance current scholarship on gendered categorization of emotions by pinning down their role in defining national identities and moral standards of civilization.
Our research has proved that these developments were open-ended, full of obstacles and misunderstandings, in the past as well as in the present. Taking as viewpoint Southern Europe and the Hispanic world, areas still unsufficiently charted in current scholarship. has proved a particularly useful strategy to revise too sharp dichotomies between modernity and tradition that symbolically equate these territories with immobilism and conservatism, a commonplace whose implications are still visible today, not only in academia but in society at large. It has allowed us to better grasp the polyphony and ambivalences of Enlightenment, its global, national and local variations, its profound gender implications, entangled with those of class, race and nation, and its complex legacy today. The new historical knowledge produced contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the multiple ways to modernity and can therefore enrich current debates on gender and immigration policies and multiculturalism.
1. We have studied women’s engagement with a global world as cultural mediators in a variety of spaces and activities, from travelers (real and vicarious) and translators to members of diplomatic circles or epistolary networks, in our book Gender and Cultural Mediation in the Long Eighteenth-Century (2024)
2. Our Open Access database ‘Writing for Women’ (W4W) is the one to systematically explore women’s role in the emergence of modern reading publics. Focusing on printed and manuscript works produced in Spain, Portugal and colonial Spanish America and Portugal in the eighteenth century, it sets up a transnational and transatlantic research model to be replicated for other contexts and periods.
3. Our research has questioned dichotomies between centres and peripheries of Enlightenment and modernity. The essay-collection European Modernity and the Passionate South (2023) studies the cultural, gendered construction of the “South” in the context of nation-building processes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Italy and Spain, problematizing the single narrative of Orientalization dominant in current approaches.
4. We have demonstrated that sensibility (involving sensations, emotions, and moral and aesthetic judgement) was at the heart of Enlightenment’s controversial universalism and worked as a mechanism for naturalizing normative models while, paradoxically, it also justified transgressions. Our book Histories of Sensibilities. Visions of Gender, Race, and Emotions in the Global Enlightenment (2024) departs from too abstract perspectives by stressing how sensibilities were performed. It also probes their dark side by exploring the class, gender and racial bias embedded in standards of sexual freedom, and the ambivalences of the sentimental ideal when confronted with race and slavery.
The outcomes of the project go well beyond our initial expectations and have been widely disseminated through different means and languages to both academic and non-academic publics, achieving a considerable societal impact. Our collective publications include three essay-collections and six special issues in prestigious academic journals, as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters. The international conferences Southern Passions (2020) and Gender, Modernities and the Global Enlightenment (2022) and our seminar series have fostered discussion among leading scholars from different continents, disciplines and fields. We have also addressed teachers both at university and secondary education through teacher-training seminars and a workshop on outreach including a dramatized presentation of research materials. Finally, we have aimed at general publics via popularised publications, talks, podcasts, interviews and social media.
Focusing on mediations within Southern Europe and colonial Latin America and with the rest of Europe and the Americas has allowed us to destabilize current geographies of modernity that concentrate on Western Europe and the British-American Atlantic.
Our notion of Enlightenment, which stresses its ambivalences and its many reinterpretations by historical actors (male and female, European and non-European), has significantly contributed to renovate scholarly debate avoiding sterile polarization between its radical defenders and its more outspoken critics. It has also revised the connections between religion, more specifically Catholicism, and different forms of modernity.
We have bridged the gap between cultural, social, and political history, between public and private, and between global and local approaches by using an actor-based approach. Going beyond the usual protagonists in global and transnational histories (male explorers, merchants, missionaries, agents of empire), our stories include women crossing borders and oceans in real and symbolic ways; Creole intellectuals incorporating and discussing views from the metropolis; native Polynesians in their interactions with colonizers, making the case for a more inclusive history that connects with current societal debates.
We have contributed in novel and creative ways to the “material turn” in History and the Humanities and transcend a text-focused approach by exploring the material and sensory aspects of written sources, paying attention to visual ones and stressing the performativity of gender.