2023-11-26 22:05:59
In the last 10 years, 494 feminist essays have been published. A figure that has been possible thanks to their rise since, above all, 2020, which represented a significant increase and ended up promoting a trend that culminated in 2021, when the record was broken with a total of 164 titles. But the upward streak ended. In 2022 it has fallen to 95. More than 60 fewer volumes.
Where are the new Irene Vallejo?
A sharper decline than the general publication of non-fiction books (leaving out textbooks), which has gone from 44,400 in 2020, to a peak of 55,600 in 2021 and a slight decrease to 52,000 in 2022, according to Statistics of the Spanish Edition of Books with ISBN. The drop in books with feminist themes goes hand in hand with the loss of presence in bookstores suffered by authors in the last year, in which they represented 38% of the works registered in the aforementioned database.
Ana Gallego Cuiñas, professor of Latin American Literature and dean of the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the University of Granada, has been in charge of carrying out this study, which is part of the Report on the State of Culture in Spain 2023 carried out by the Alternatives Foundation. The professor has based her analysis on the Database of the Spanish ISBN Agency. Her search terms have focused on the semantic field of ‘feminism’ and ‘gender’, which are what have determined the total of 494 feminist essays that have seen the light of day in the last decade.
Among them, The feminist revolution in the classrooms: Current Command of Chis Oliveira and Priscilla Retamozo, Athena’s seed by Esther Pascual Rosel and Pío García Tricio, Around the world in 15 women by Verónica Zumalacárregui, A cellar of your own by Itziar Ziga and I will smile for both by Lalo Tovar. The professor maintains before this newspaper that “the boom of female authors in the market came accompanied by independent publishers. As there was more, more was published. And as more were published, more women were published, since many of these are directed or co-directed by women.”
The study shows that there have been 236 publishers responsible for the publication of the 494 feminist essays. The Madrid label Catarata occupies first place in the ranking and accounts for nearly 6% of the total. They are followed by Cátedra, also from Madrid, with more than 3%; and the Catalan Bellaterra and the Valencian Tirant Humanidades with less than 3%.
Editorial Galaxia, Universitat de Valencia, Ediciones B and Icaria with 2% are the following. To find a large publishing conglomerate you have to reach eighth place, occupied by Planeta, which holds around 1.5%. The same percentage as the independent publishers Renacimiento, Trabe, Dykinson and Menades Editorial. Comares, Destino, Libros.com, Península, Plan B, Punto Rojo Libros and Universidad de Navarra each cover 1% of the total. The rest of the firms represent a percentage of less than 1%.
The place of the feminist essay
The study also analyzes the presence of this theme within the audiovisual field, in which the trend does continue to rise after experiencing a parallel rise in female creators. Even so, the presence of women continues to be a minority within both industries (between 15% and 20% in audiovisual and 30% in publishing).
The professor applauds the influence on the still insufficient improvement of the movement herstory launched in institutions, universities and the cultural industry, to rescue the stories of women who have been silenced. In addition to the emergence of what she describes as ‘a new batch of media with a clear feminist vocation’ in their themes and modes of production, which rethink the way of publishing thought and fiction from dissidence.
Among the publishers that she values as having enabled a feminist editorial praxis are Traficantes de Sueños, Dos mustotes, Continta Metienes, Torremozas, Amor de Madre and Gafas Moradas. And among the bookstores dedicated to gender, Libre Mujeres, Pròleg, Cómplice, Mujeres & Compañía, Berkana, Lila de Lilith and Louise Michel Buruak.
Dependence on independent publishers
Ana Gallego Cuiñas points out that the increase in women in positions of responsibility within publishing houses helped increase the number of female authors. This increase was cut short, something that the dean attributes to the outbreak of the pandemic, which led to “the disappearance of independent publishers. “Many women had to return to care and therefore wrote less.” “We will have to see what happens in 2023, there should be a rebound, at least in the number of female authors. The feminist thing will take longer, or maybe suddenly it is not as visible in the market,” she predicts.
Of the global count of 494 feminist essays, 436 have been written by female authors, representing 84% of the production, compared to 81 by men (16%), from which the text infers that “feminism continues to be an issue of greater concern.” to women than to men.”
Another aspect analyzed is the origin of these authors, with Madrid and Barcelona being the cities that monopolize the most essayists, with 22% and 18%, respectively. Valencia with 5% and A Coruña with just under 5%, far from the following, leaving half of southern Spain underrepresented.
“This fact denotes a lesser development of the publishing industry which, both in the case of large conglomerates and independent labels, are located in Madrid and Barcelona,” concludes the professor. Beyond the Spanish borders, when it comes to calibrating the impact of feminism and Spanish writers at the European level, their circulation in literary festivals and book fairs on the continent has been taken as a measure, within which the Feria del Libro de Frankfurt is the one that has had the highest quota of Spanish women.
However, those that have circulated the most have not been those who have signed the feminist essays discussed, but rather fiction writers: Rosa Montero, Almudena Grandes, Alicia Giménez Bartlett, Carmen Riera, Clara Sánchez and Cristina Morales, with the exception of Irene Vallejo, the great best seller of the Spanish essay with Infinity in a reed.
“The writers of narrative fiction, with the greatest commercial projection, are those who have been the object of demand in Germany, France and Italy. All of them have been published by large publishing conglomerates, have won relevant awards and predominantly cultivate detective and/or historical novels,” Gallego Cuiñas explains in the report. The dean points out that the only case that does not respond to this premise is Morales, whose appearance at German festivals and fairs came after having won the Herralde Prize for Novels and the National Prize for Fiction with Easy reading (2018), a “feminist, inclusive and dissident work.”
Parallelism with the audiovisual industry
The dynamics that have marked feminist audiovisual creations were similar to those related to books until 2020, a year that confirmed an ascending trend in terms of works with feminist themes. In the last 10 years, 98 films, series, and/or documentaries along this line have been released. Regarding the gender of the directors, of the 116 included, 65 are women (56%) and 51 men (44%), so in this case it is more distributed. As in the publishing market, as the decade progresses, fewer filmmakers direct feminist works and more women take the reins of these productions.
Regarding their origin, the centralization model is repeated in the capitals, with Barcelona accounting for 31% of the total and Madrid 20%. Here there are 150 production companies that have produced this feminist audiovisual material, with RTVE leading with just over 9% of the total. They are followed by Movistar Plus+ with 6%, the ICAA with 4%, Avalon PC with 3% and Atresmedia Televisión and TV3 (Televisió de Catalunya) with just under 3% each.
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