The malaise of women in Spain (1956-1968)

Abstract

The malaise of women in Spain in the 1960s, echoing Betty Friedan, is the melancholy emotion that diagnoses the lack of meaning they suffered due to the unfulfilled promise of romantic love. The thesis is that feminine sadness in the late francoist developmentalism was induced within a temporal structure of a vitalist character, defined by the acceleration of time in the realisation of individual desire for the loved object. Women's bodies went from a desiring drive, through the experience of subjectivation produced by romantic love, to a strangeness of the love object. Based on the emotional episteme in which I situate the analysis of subjectivity, malaise as emotional suffering had a cognitive content that gave rise to new body practices of estrangement towards men, that years later made intelligible the feminist narrative of "personal is political".