Women’s Fluid Spaces and Gendered Spatial Orientations in Victorian Literature and Culture

  1. Rosario Arias 1
  2. Laura Monrós-Gaspar 2
  3. Miriam Borham-Puyal 3
  4. Lin Pettersson 1
  1. 1 Universidad de Málaga
    info

    Universidad de Málaga

    Málaga, España

    ROR https://ror.org/036b2ww28

  2. 2 Universitat de València
    info

    Universitat de València

    Valencia, España

    ROR https://ror.org/043nxc105

  3. 3 Universidad de Salamanca
    info

    Universidad de Salamanca

    Salamanca, España

    ROR https://ror.org/02f40zc51

Book:
Moving beyond the pandemic: English and American studies in Spain
  1. Francisco Gallardo-del-Puerto (coord.)
  2. Mª del Carmen Camus-Camus (coord.)
  3. Jesús Ángel González-López (coord.)

Publisher: Editorial de la Universidad de Cantabria ; Universidad de Cantabria

ISBN: 978-84-19024-15-2

Year of publication: 2022

Pages: 238-241

Congress: Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos. Congreso (44. 2021. Santander)

Type: Conference paper

Abstract

In this roundtable we focused on the spatial significance of ‘orientation’, implying movement, and process, for Victorian women, engaging with the mobility turn, or “the mobility paradigm” in the study of women’s liminal spaces in the Victorian period. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006), and other critics, we explored Victorian fluid spaces where the private and the public divide is negotiated, which, coupled with the break-up of temporal boundaries in some instances, underlines how embodied subjectivities benefit from being oriented towards other bodies and spaces. Finally, this roundtable considered the interaction of temporal and spatial dimensions in the analysis of women’s fluid positions in Victorian times, and in relation to the dynamic interstitial spaces inhabited by women in the nineteenth century. This led us to examine the meanings generated in re-positioning ourselves in relation to the past as regards women and mobility in the Victorian period.