Gender and Catalog: How Is Latin American Literature Written by Women Transposed Into Digital Formats?

Introduction

The relative absence of women in the arts and literature is a phenomenon detected several decades ago. Undoubtedly, feminism and feminist critique played a fundamental and undeniable role raising awareness regarding women and female issues (Caballero Wangüemert, 2003: 105) in the social, economic, political, and cultural realms. In effect, the dissemination of information which seemed to be hidden gave way to a transformation resulting from the awareness grained regarding reproduction in the field of the symbolic and the culture of data in the social order (Giunta, 2018:55).

This permanently expanded the number of works by women in artistic as well as literary catalogs so, at present, it is possible to identify the “naturalized idea that the lack of representation of women in the art world is matter of the past”¹. Gender seemed to have “erased the political meaning that being classified as women mattered” (Giunta, 2018: 34 and 61). However, specific research in different Latin American countries leads to think that it is rather a “disavowal of artistic feminism” and that such process did not occur by overcoming any of the issues it posed but by a generalized decision to avoid them denying and disavowing its presumptions (Giunta 2018: 63).

In the literary field, Fariña Busto explains that “throughout history there are many female writers (...) A different matter is their presence in literary stories” (2016: 22). In that same sense, Caballero Wangüemert (2003:105) warned about the absence of women not only in the canon but also in the corpus of Spanish American literature. It was only as from the 1960s that a slow but unstoppable process began whereby women were incorporated to anthologies which eventually became a real boom of female literature. The result was a significant expansion of the corpus over the last few decades.

However, incorporating female writers to the catalog is not enough. And this is because the interest of feminism (even before being known as such in the 19th century) refers to women’s demands for equal capacity regarding males in a political and literary sense. Its goal was configuring intellectual or artistic works consistent with its vital and ideological platform (Fariña Busto, 2016: 21-22).

In Pollok’s words, it is about the express need for an inclusion strategy in that artistic corpus of the works by women creators in which the interest is not placed in “preventing the sex of the producer from being mentioned again, but in the sex of the producer not automatically penalizing female artists and celebrating male artists in the specific ways in which it currently does” (Pollok, 2013: 87)_..