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Patricia García

Patricia García

NIAS Individual Fellow

Project title

The Urban Fantastic –Feminist and Queer Perspectives

Research question

How can we read the city from a gender-conscious perspective? What does it change when we do so? And, paraphrasing Dolores Hayden, what would a non-sexist city read like?

Project description

This project addresses these research questions by demonstrating the importance of non-mimetic literary genres in our understanding of the urban fabric. The analyzed corpus draws particularly from the many narratives of the fantastic set in identifiable Hispanic megalopolis written by authors self-identified as female.

I do not seek to examine spaces typically associated with female characters or feminine qualities (such as the domestic sphere). Instead, I am interested in showing how a decolonial feminist and queer framework, combined with the category of the “female fantastic”, can destabilize classic aspects related to human spatiality, including:

  • the space-place binomial as universal/masculine and local/feminine attributes,
  • the critical appraisal of maps of morality and vice,
  • the generation of geographies of fear,
  • the analysis of spatial segregation and gendered mobility,
  • and the design and distribution of our spaces at the service of the production of capital and not the reproduction of life (human and non-human).

With these themes in mind, this project hopes to contribute to the feminist turn in Literary Urban Studies by generating an approach that establishes a dialogue between the fantastic, urban history, subaltern urbanism and feminist geography.

Selected publications

Monograph: García, P. The Urban Fantastic in Nineteenth-Century European Literature: City Fissures. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. 237pp.

Monograph: García, P. Space and the Postmodern Fantastic in Contemporary Literature: the Architectural Void. Routledge, 2015. 187pp.

Book chapter: García, P. “Urban Outcasts: Perspectives from the Hispanic Female Fantastic” in Ameel, L. (ed.). Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies. New York; Oxon: Routledge, 2022, pp. 421-435.

Article: García, P. “The Dionysian and the Aesthetics of the Impossible: Contributions of the Young Nietzsche to the Modern Fantastic”, Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, Vol 48.3, 2021, pp. 319-336.

Book chapter: García, P. “The Literary Motif of the Devil Architect: Where Built Space Meets the Fantastic” in Punter, D.; Mancini, B. (eds.). Space(s) of the Fantastic. New York; Oxon: Routledge, 2021, pp. 38-53.

More about myself

I am a senior researcher in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at the Universidad de Alcalá (Spain), where I currently lead a Ramón y Cajal project (Ministerio de Universidades, Spain + European Social Fund) on urban peripheries in contemporary literature. I have previously served as an Associate Professor in Hispanic and Comparative Literature at the University of Nottingham, UK.  My research focuses on narrative spaces at their intersections with urban studies, feminisms and with representations of the supernatural. I am the chair of the research network Fringe Urban Narratives and have been the PI of the British-Academy project Gender and the Hispanic Fantastic. I have held research fellowships at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies (EURIAS/Marie-Curie co-fund) and at the Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris. I am the Vice-President of ALUS: Association for Literary Urban Studies, member of the Executive Committee of the European Society of Comparative Literature, and co-editor of the Palgrave Series in Literary Urban Studies and of BRUMAL: Research Journal on the Fantastic.