The Politics of Gendered Life Stories in Spain

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1. Frontmatter

2. Chapter 1. Introduction

   Macarena Gordillo de Paz, Nicholas Manganas

   Abstract

   The introduction develops a conceptual framework for analysing how gendered life stories become sites of political significance. Drawing on feminist theory, media studies, and political philosophy, it advances four interrelated concepts: dialectical tensions reaching a critical juncture, the mediated life of public testimony, haunting as a mode of unsettlement, and the narrative technology of gendered life stories. These concepts serve as interpretive tools for examining how and why certain personal narratives gain momentum beyond the individual and intervene in public discourse. The focus is not only on what is narrated, but on how stories travel, unsettle established frameworks, and mobilise affective responses across media and institutions. By situating gendered life stories as narrative forms capable of reshaping collective imaginaries, the chapter offers a historically anchored methodology for tracing how personal experience enters public life and acquires political force. This framework underpins the case studies that follow and contributes to debates on how gendered experience pushes against the boundaries between the private and the public, reshaping the terrain of political discourse.

3. Chapter 2. “Telling the Truth to Stay Alive.” Stories of Gendered Violence and Testimonial Politics

   Macarena Gordillo de Paz, Nicholas Manganas

   Abstract

   This chapter examines the testimonial politics of gendered life stories in contemporary Spain through the narratives of Ana Orantes and Rocío Carrasco. It argues that accounts of gender-based violence operate not merely as expressions of suffering but as public interventions that reshape the conditions under which such violence is acknowledged, contested, and politicised. Framing testimony as both evidence and event, the chapter situates these cases within Spain’s cultural and institutional history, from Francoist repression to feminist media interventions and their reactionary backlash. Orantes’s 1997 television appearance and subsequent murder became a turning point in Spain’s reckoning with gender violence, prompting major legislative reform. Carrasco’s 2021 docuseries reframed intimate partner abuse through the concept of violencia vicaria (vicarious violence), introducing a new vocabulary for psychological and post-separation abuse. These narratives function as technologies of political imagination, revealing the structural logics of gendered injustice and reshaping who is recognised as a credible subject of suffering, even while remaining vulnerable to distortion and dismissal. Testimonial acts such as these are shown to be both forms of resistance and critical sites where feminist futures are imagined and contested.

4. Chapter 3. Sisterhood: On Fighting Wolfpacks and Machirulos

   Macarena Gordillo de Paz, Nicholas Manganas

   Abstract

   This chapter examines feminist listening as political action through two defining events in contemporary Spain: the 2016 La Manada gang rape case and the 2023 non-consensual kiss involving footballer Jenni Hermoso. Despite legal setbacks and media distortion, both incidents sparked sustained feminist mobilisation, showing that gendered life stories gain political force not only in their telling but through their circulation in acts of feminist sisterhood. The chapter develops the concept of a “pedagogy of listening” to describe the relational practice that enables testimony to move beyond the private realm and intervene in public discourse. Focusing on collective responses—from mass protests to digital campaigns such as #Cuéntalo and #SeAcabó, and the legal reforms they helped propel—the chapter shows how feminist listening transforms testimony from an individual act into a shared political project. In these moments, acts of sororidad (sisterhood) sustain the story’s momentum and resist the institutional and media narratives that seek to contain it. The cases demonstrate that life stories shaped by violence do not simply enter public discourse, they can reconfigure the very conditions under which women’s voices are heard and taken seriously.

5. Chapter 4. Who Owns the Narrative? Shakira and the Cultural Politics of Celebrity Storytelling

   Macarena Gordillo de Paz, Nicholas Manganas

   Abstract

   This chapter examines the celebrity self-narrative as a form of gendered life story, where women publicly reclaim personal experience in environments shaped by commodification and media spectacle. Centring on Shakira’s 2023 hit “BZRP Music Sessions #53”—a musical response to her breakup with former Spanish footballer Gerard Piqué—it analyses how autobiographical narration is used to challenge ideals of feminine propriety and maternal virtue. It asks what it means for a woman to author her story within a cultural economy that simultaneously elevates and disciplines female self-expression. The chapter argues that celebrity interventions such as Shakira’s act as testimony, generating broad engagement across news media, feminist critique, meme culture, and corporate branding, while remaining open to commercial and ideological appropriation. By tracing the media afterlife of “BZRP,” it shows how celebrity narratives negotiate the contested boundaries of female self-representation in public life.

6. Chapter 5. Conclusion

   Macarena Gordillo de Paz, Nicholas Manganas

   Abstract

   The conclusion brings the book’s core argument into focus by tracing how gendered life stories in contemporary Spain act as narrative interventions within a culture shaped by silencing, shame, and contested memory. These stories unsettle the terms of who may speak, how they are heard, and what their words are allowed to do. In a political landscape still marked by pacts of silence and the demand to “move on,” they refuse closure, shifting the burden of shame from individuals onto the systems that sustain inequality. Framed as narrative technologies, gendered life stories do more than bear witness: they reveal what institutional frameworks work to suppress, they make memory shareable, and they open spaces where violence and its afterlives can be named. In a Spanish context shaped by the legacies of authoritarianism and the political costs of remembering, these narratives resist containment, holding open questions about justice, belonging, and the futures that can be imagined when forgetting is no longer the price of peace.

7. Backmatter