The 'new' female subject and the commodification of gender in the works of lucía etxebarria

The problem of gender identity, in its multiple versions, has been a central preoccupation of many women writers of the post-Franco period. Jo Labanyi has suggested that recent Spanish women's writings can be divided into two basic tendencies, which she denominates 'essentialism' and 'postmodernism'. While writers of the first group seek to posit alternative 'feminine' identities to those defined by the dominant discourses of androcentrism and compulsory heterosexuality, those of the second group engage in a postmodernist questioning of any stable or totalizing notion of identity by denaturalizing gender roles and exposing their fundamental constructedness. Both attitudes toward identity coexist in an uneasy relationship in the works of Lucía Etxebarria, one among the newest crop of Spanish women writers who emerged on the literary scene since 1990. Her female protagonists typically exist on the peripheries of society, perpetually in search of alternative gender (or sexual) identities that defy existing social norms and categories. On the one hand, Etxebarria's novels claim to deconstruct socially normative conceptualizations of gender and sexuality, thus opening the possibility of alternative constructions of identity. At the same time, the way in which her works consciously commodify peripheral subjectivities in order to appeal to a fundamentally conservative mass market often ends up by reaffirming those very structures, categories and ideologies that she purportedly questions; that is, in spite of her professed 'feminism' and her purportedly critical stance toward late-capitalist consumer society. The essay will explore these contradictions in relation to the place of women writers in the literary market of the Spain of the 1990s. My analysis will focus on the process by which the author exploits the market through a self-conscious commodification of peripheral subjectivities as 'temas de moda', thus leading to the creation a 'new' readership from which the publishing industry can profit in turn. Hence, ideological critique and conformity stand in an uneasy relationship in her works, reflecting the author's own ambivalent relationship to the market.