Amparo Alpañés (Washington & Jefferson College)
Illness is rarely a purely private experience, yet for women it has historically been rendered invisible: sequestered within domestic walls, dismissed by medical institutions, and silenced in the cultural record. This session examines how film and literature in Spanish and Portuguese bring female sickness out of the shadows, transforming what is often hidden and isolated into a site of testimony, intimacy, and meaning.
The texts and films that will be presented refuse to look away. Whether through the confined spaces of a sickroom, the fragmented rhythms of a body in pain, or the tender networks of care that form around ailing women, these texts and films bear witness to experiences that dominant narratives have long rendered marginal. In doing so, they offer something rare and necessary: a window into the interior lives of women whose suffering has too often gone unacknowledged.
Spanning a range of national contexts, historical periods, and genres, the presentations in this session collectively ask what it means to make female illness visible: aesthetically, politically, and ethically. How do Hispanic and Lusophone writers and filmmakers represent the sick female body without reducing it to symbol or spectacle? What narrative and cinematic strategies allow women's pain to speak on its own terms? And what does visibility itself cost, or confer?
Together, these papers propose that illness, far from being a marginal subject, sits at the very heart of women's experience as rendered in Ibero-American cultural production, and that attending to it carefully is an act of both critical and human urgency.