Associate Professor, Spanish Centre, School of Languages, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
Volume 2, Number 1, features a range of interviews and articles in English and Spanish that address contemporary issues of gender. First, there is an interview with Nora Domínguez, one of Argentina’s most influential feminist literary critics, whose work has transformed our understanding of gender, maternity, and corporeality in national literature. In conversation with Lucía Caminada Rossetti, she considers the political imperative of feminist historiography and the silences surrounding maternal figures. This issue also features an interview with Dr Daniela Alaattinoglu, the 2025 Nils Klim Laureate, whose award represents a turning point in Nordic feminist legal studies. Alaattinoglu, who has been recognised for her innovative work in socio-legal studies, gender and law, and human rights, discusses her intellectual journey, from her early experiences in corporate law to her groundbreaking studies on femicide, involuntary sterilisation, and Indigenous rights. In conversation with Pragati Das, she discusses her concept of law as a contested space in which feminist activism and critique can redefine justice, as well as her prize-winning monograph and joint projects.
The research article “Gender-Based Violence During and Post-Apartheid: Rewriting a Gendered History in War Zones” by Claudia Zucca reclaims women’s voices from the periphery of South African history and highlights the structural nature of violence ingrained in both daily life and state repression. Zucca’s piece questions prevailing narratives and draws attention to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s silences, as its framework frequently neglected to account for gendered injustices. In “Unwritten Power: Reimagining Female Leadership in Italian Literature,” Barbara Gabriella Renzi explores how female characters, rather than traditional positions or rhetoric, embody alternative forms of leadership through resilience, care, cultural memory, and intellectual identity. Renzi shows how female protagonists in the works of Manzoni, Morante, Ginzburg, and Maraini challenge patriarchal systems by developing moral fortitude and interpersonal strength, drawing on feminist theory.
The aticle “La Haka de Protesta: un análisis feminista en tres niveles” by Diana Karina Mantilla Gálvez and Anel Martínez Aquino explores the haka as a feminist act of cultural reclamation and resistance in New Zealand. The authors show how indigenous traditions are viewed differently across contexts, genders, and power relations by contrasting them with the renowned performances of the All Blacks rugby team. They contend that the haka represents a decolonial feminist language of protest that opposes colonial institutions and global hegemonies through a three-level analysis: personal, state, and systemic. The article “Entre lo profano y lo sagrado, la irrupción femenina en el psicoanálisis: Melanie Klein y Karen Horney” by Juan Manuel Rivera Ramírez examines how these two trailblazing intellectuals challenged Freud’s phallocentric framework and redefined psychoanalysis from feminist perspectives. Klein and Horney created new avenues for the integration of psychoanalysis with gender studies by emphasising the maternal figure, reinterpreting the Oedipus complex, and challenging Freud’s theory of female psychology.
The article “Beyond Tokenism and Exoticism: British Women in the Native Literature (1858–1947)” by Ritushree Rudra explores how British women were portrayed in colonial-era Indian texts as complex characters who represent social, political, and cultural tensions rather than just as exotic outsiders or symbolic figures. By going beyond crude stereotypes to expose nuanced interactions with colonial power and reformist goals, the study reframes the presence of British women in native literature as a site of negotiation and critique.
I hope the topics explored in this issue will spark intellectual curiosity and advance equality and gender issues.
