Giving Birth

Bodies, Care, and Motherhood in Contemporary Hispanic Literature

Elisa Chaim

Childbirth is one of the most intense experiences of human life. It is the origin of our existence and yet has occupied a surprisingly marginal place in literary tradition. The event that makes all other stories possible has barely been narrated.

This absence invites us to question the patriarchal structures that have historically silenced women’s experiences — from the persecution of midwives and the dismissal of their knowledge to the many forms of physical, symbolic, epistemic, institutional, and obstetric violence that continue to undermine bodily autonomy and women’s ability to narrate their own experiences.

Today, the need to tell stories of childbirth is undeniable. The proliferation of online testimonies and collective and community spaces for sharing experiences shows a growing need to find words for an experience that, for a long time, has been confined to the private, the medical, or the unspeakable. And yet, even at a time when motherhood has become the subject of a growing body of literature, childbirth itself rarely occupies a central place in these narratives. Why?

This research project examines a selection of contemporary Hispanic literary texts in order to investigate this absence and analyse existing representations of childbirth. What is narrated? From where is it narrated? Which bodies are made visible? What remains untold?

The texts that make up the corpus move away from socially normative representations of motherhood and, through embodied experience, articulate unresolved tensions between rejection and love, tenderness and despair, what belongs to the self and what has been taken away, what can be narrated and what remains unspeakable. By foregrounding maternal ambivalence and resisting ideals of self-sacrificing motherhood, these writings challenge a historical, religious, and cultural legacy that has linked motherhood to sacrifice, self-denial, and permanent availability.

Contemporary Hispanic literature thus brings into focus the colonial and patriarchal structures that have produced and naturalised an unequal distribution of care and placed responsibility for sustaining life on women. This burden has operated largely in silence: it is presented as a natural inclination, an emotional obligation, or a biological destiny, turning maternal giving into an obligation that is difficult to name precisely because it is so easily confused with love, identity, or belonging.

For centuries, women’s experiences have been silenced, interpreted, and narrated by others. This project shifts the focus towards literature that narrates bodily experience from within. It asks not only what literature has said about childbirth and care, but also what has yet to find a form in which it can be narrated.

Analysing the existing literary corpus will make visible the forms of violence and dispossession experienced by maternal bodies and allow childbirth and care to be understood not only as bodily experiences, but also as spaces of epistemic resistance.

Objectives

1. Questioning and understanding the absence: Why has childbirth been so rarely narrated?

The first objective is to address this central question by examining the historical, political, and religious contexts that have shaped how childbirth has been understood and narrated. The project traces how the displacement of midwives’ knowledge, the medicalisation of childbirth, and patriarchal and colonial constructions of the female body have contributed to silencing its representation. This analysis provides the basis for understanding why, even today, childbirth remains at the margins of literary narratives.

2. Analysing existing narratives: What does literature show? What remains untold?

The second objective is to examine existing childbirth scenes and narratives in contemporary Hispanic literature, asking what they reveal, what they omit, and what this scarcity tells us. A central hypothesis of the project is that, although recent decades have produced a significant body of literature on motherhood, childbirth itself — as a bodily, sensory, and liminal experience — continues to occupy a marginal place within this corpus, overshadowed by other dimensions of maternal experience.

3. Expanding the corpus: inviting new narratives of childbirth

The third objective is to address this gap by inviting contemporary authors to write about childbirth, whether through fiction or autobiographical essay. In a second stage, the call will also extend to narratives by those who witness or accompany childbirth, reclaiming an outside perspective that does not silence the experience but complements it. The result will be a collective corpus devoted specifically to childbirth, bringing together different experiences, perspectives, and forms of writing, and contributing, through literature, to expanding the ways in which this event can be represented.

La polémica teológica y literaria de Abraham Gómez Silveira: edición y estudio de las "Disertaciones sobre el Mesías", "Libro Mudo", "Diálogos teológicos jocoserios" y otros textos

ABGESCHLOSSEN

Harm den Boer y Carsten Wilke (CEU, Viena).

Mapping the Scriptures in Western Sephardi Literature: presence and function of the Bible. A partir de 2022 iniciado como proyecto SNF

ABGESCHLOSSEN

1. Summary of the research plan

The project seeks to carry out an extensive study on the role and the use of the Bible for the Spanish and Portuguese Jews with a Christian background in newly founded communities of the so-called Western Sephardic Diaspora (1550-1800).

A unique feature of these Iberian Jews with a Christian background was the central place occupied by the Bible in their educational, religious and cultural lives, far beyond what was common in the European Jewry of the Early Modern Age. For the first time in history, Jews extensively read and referred to their Bible in (Spanish) translation, opening up a broader audience, engaging more frequently and differently with Christians.

Although the importance of the vernacular (above all Spanish) Bible translations is always mentioned in scholarship, no comprehensive study has been realized of the considerable output and content of these translations. Also, no comprehensive study on the particular reception and use of the (Spanish) Bible translations in Western Sephardic literature has been realized, although editions and manuscripts are nowadays largely available in digital collections.

A ground-breaking feature of the project is the incorporation of resources and instruments provided by the Digital Humanities. The project aims to “map” the role and presence of the Bible in the Western Sephardi Diaspora in two ways:

1) through an online OA textual database containing a transcription of over 50 different editions of the Spanish Bible translations, as a big data corpus enabling types of distant reading, statistics and visualizations only possible with the help of Digital Humanities;

2) through a series of in-depth studies on the Bible in the Spanish and Portuguese Sephardic literature, such as:

i. the presence and role of the Psalms for the fashioning of individual and collective Converso religiosity/religious identity;

ii. the use of the Bible in Spanish and Portuguese preaching of the Western Sephardic Diaspora;

iii. the use of the Bible in Spanish/Portuguese polemical anti-Christian or apologetic literature;

iv. the presence and relevance of the Bible in both religious and secular Spanish and Portuguese literature produced in the Western Sephardic Diaspora.

The studies of the second part benefit from the insights into the use of the Bible gathered with the database made in 1, allowing for finding special “hot spots” of biblical quotations, frequently quoted passages (in translation), the versions of the Bible used (e.g. the Spanish Jewish translation, a Spanish protestant translation, the Vulgata) etc. Other forms of data analysis will also become possible, as for instance, the correlation of biblical quotations with text sorts, targeted readers, authors, etc.

The results will be:

• the online OA textual database (part 1) as a consultable platform and a Virtual Research Environment (VRE);

• a series of c. 300 transcriptions/editions as base and product for part 2; also available in OA digital format, contributing to the VRE;

• an international, multidisciplinary conference on the role of the Bible in the Western Sephardic Diaspora in a comparative confessional context;

• a series of monographic studies (dissertations) and articles.

Harm den Boer