A reflective look: Critical awareness and enunciation split in Spanish contemporary poetry written by women

Abstract

This paper explores the Spanish contemporary poetry written by women. It begins with a consideration on how this writing relates to conventional poetic language and to the patriarchal social discourses that have constructed gender models and identities. Then, it looks at how poems attest to different stages in the learning and acquisition of such imposed ways of being female, by including in the texts different voices and discourses interacting with the enunciating voice. By referring to the idea of image- or reflection-woman and the concepts of bitextuality and reflective perception, it examines how poems challenge the inherited models through a kind of split enunciation, which enables the criticism, distancing and subsequent abandonment of these models and therefore allows for the expression of new approaches to what is feminine that result in a wide range of poetic voices and persons.