Research and Teaching Interests:

Dr Morcillo's research focuses on sexual politics under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. She is particularly interested in how the concept of culture is bound up with those of modernity and national identity under authoritarian regimes. Her second book, "The Seduction of Francoist Spain. The Female Body at the center of Sexual Politics," is about the symbolic relationship between the Spanish body politic and the allegorical female body of the nation. It is also about the metaphorical use of gender imagery in political discourse. With this study she intends to shed light on our understanding of gender relations by utilizing the somatic metaphors present in the Francoist political discourse and the counter imagery produced by the popular media in the 1950s and 1960s.

Professor Morcillo is currently working on a manuscript entitled “Historical Memory: Women’s Narratives In Franco Spain. ”This study will produce a book length manuscript of the life-stories of women in the context in the 1950s and 1960s. It is a feminist analysis of the transition of the Francoist regime from autarchy to consumerism and the inevitable modernization of Spain in the 1970s. In order to examine women’s life experiences I apply Michel de Certeau’s conception of the practice of everyday life, of consumption, and the dynamics of resistance to a highly uniform and conformist society such as Francoist Spain’s.

The book will tell the stories of 20 women I began interviewing in the late 1980s until the early 2000s. These interviews of Spanish women under Francoism include stories by both the middle class, well educated women who attended college in the 1950s and 1960s and those women with no more than a third grade level education or no schooling at all.

Curriculum Vitae

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