Researching Cultures: Latin American Women Travelers

3 units

When we talk about adventurers, explorers, or travelers, we tend to imagine them embodied in a masculine figure. In this course, we will focus on the limits of this idea of travel, analyzing travel as a gendered and racialized experience. Throughout the semester, we will study different types of mobility, travel, and travel literature created by Latin American women from the 19th century to the present, debunking the stereotypes of female immobility and immanence. From the Peruvian rabonas to the Mexican Revolution's soldaderas, from pleasure trips to forced exiles, we will read and examine the writings of Flora Tristan, Clorinda Matto de Turner, Victoria Ocampo, Clarice Lispector, Circe Maia, Cristina Peri Rossi, Samanta Schweblin, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Valeria Luiselli, among others. These different travelogues will serve as the basis for discussing the complexities of gender, race and social class in relation to travel, nation and literature. We will also discuss different theoretical approaches, seeking to deepen and enrich our academic writing in the Spanish language. In this course, students will write two short compositions and a final research composition on the topic of their choice related to the course content. This course will have a strong, mandatory and graded written communications component, and it is taught in Spanish. It also fulfills the Writing Intensive (WI) requirement for Arts & Sciences students. Students who have taken more than four Spanish culture or literature classes are not allowed in this course and must proceed to a Major Seminar.