1º semestre

Gendered Visions of the European Past                                                                Luísa Afonso Soares

Terça-feira, 15h – 18h, sala 1.26

Over the last decade, research on Cultural Memory has been arguing that what a culture remembers and what it chooses to forget are intricately bound up with issues of power and hegemony, and thus with gender. Based on the presumption that the cultural tropes and codes through which a culture represents its past are shaped by gender, among other categories, this seminar aims to explore the heterogeneous cultural discourses and images by which the European past is being perceived, remembered and (re-)mediated. We will start with a reflection on the concepts of gender and memory, their axioms and goals, their key theoretical and methodological tools, and their intersections. This introduction will allow us, in a second step, to consider gender-specific ways of bearing witness to different historical experiences, examining different modes of preserving and performing the common past, as well as different aesthetic strategies in different media of memory such as literature, film and visual arts.