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Shaping the Francoist female body politic : female right-wing life-writing

War-focused life-writing and the study of the female subject in a period where war had the potential to destabilise traditional women's roles and identities remains an under researched topic. This thesis focuses on how the self-representation of the lives of right wing women were discursively constructed and reflexively represented in relation to large scale political, social and economic contexts. It supports Passmore's view that by deconstructing the traditional binary position in which right-wing women found themselves, they 'are no longer seen simply as such as victims or victimisers, but as both simultaneously. This thesis draws upon the life-writing of four women who belonged to Franco's elite regime: Maria Rosa Urraca Pastor, Regina García, Pilar Millán Astray and Pilar Primo de Rivera and explores the (re)construction and reflexive representations of the self. It shows how they not only struggled to identify with one collective group, but adopted and shifted between different collective identities. It demonstrates how womanhood and motherhood were created, recreated, redefined and modified to become a politicised and patriotic idea of woman. It shows how these four women reconstructed a new (female) identity by adapting their femaleness and their expected role as women in order to achieve acceptance within the Francoist movement. This thesis shows the need to rethink the right-wing meaning of womanhood, motherhood, and female agency in contemporary scholarship.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:715453
Date January 2016
CreatorsMarqués-Martin, Claudia
PublisherUniversity of Aberdeen
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://digitool.abdn.ac.uk:80/webclient/DeliveryManager?pid=231868

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