Call for Contributions. Special Issue #33 2026 (Call for Papers: October 31, 2026)
- OpenASRI · No. 33.
Deadline: October 31, 2026.
Editors: Jesica Domínguez (jesicadm@ugr.es), Susana Gámez (susana.gamez@urjc.es), Laura Soto (laura.soto@urjc.es), and Carmen Sousa (carmen.sousa@ulpgc.es).
Feminist Reinterpretations of Artistic Narratives. Genealogies, Memory, and Experiences of Confinement in the 20th and 21st Centuries
This special issue offers a multidisciplinary analysis of the relationship between women artists, memory, and experiences of marginalization—whether physical, symbolic, or social—in 20th- and 21st-century art. In a historical context marked by wars, dictatorships, exile, censorship, profound social transformations, and ecological crises, art has served both as a space for resistance and as a terrain of silences, exclusions, and disputes over memory.
Throughout the 20th century, numerous artists developed their work under conditions of isolation, confinement, or exclusion. Far from being merely a limitation, these experiences also generated new forms of formal experimentation, strategies of memory, and critical practices capable of challenging the official frameworks of art history. At the same time, the art world has reproduced structural dynamics of invisibilization that particularly affected women artists. Since the 1970s, feminist art in Spain has promoted practices linked to radical feminism that challenged the canon, the male gaze, and the myth of artistic genius, placing the body, the domestic sphere, sexuality, and power relations at the center of the artistic debate.
This issue is structured around the coordination of two complementary lines of research: one focused on the study of experiences of confinement and isolation in the 20th and 21st centuries, and the other centered on genealogies, memory, and the critical rewriting of the artistic narrative from feminist perspectives, linked to the research project *Un problema de raíz* (Institute for Women). Who constructs memory? What is left out? How is art history rewritten? What do female artists have to say about all this? From where have their works been produced? How have they confronted the logics of patriarchal domination that isolate, confine, or imprison them? These questions run through the volume and serve as a common thread linking the various contributions.
The first section of the volume, which also opens up to the international sphere, addresses spaces of confinement, liminality, and creation, analyzing how isolation—physical, symbolic, or emotional—has shaped the artistic experience and generated practices of resistance, strategies of memory, and alternative forms of representation. This section examines different contexts of confinement and marginalization—internment camps, prisons, exile, clandestinity, censorship, or social exclusion—focusing on how these extreme experiences influenced artistic production in the 20th and 21st centuries. Far from viewing confinement solely as a restriction, this study aims to examine how certain contexts of isolation also served as spaces for aesthetic experimentation, symbolic resistance, and the redefinition of subjectivity.
The second strand of the monograph is part of the research project *A Problem at the Root: Feminist Art and Memory* (funded by the Women’s Institute), which focuses on constructing genealogies of feminist art in Spain, critically reviewing art history, and examining contemporary strategies for rewriting the artistic narrative from a critical feminist perspective. This section addresses the various forms of structural exclusion that have permeated art history and analyzes how feminist artists and practices have articulated processes of recovery, re-signification, and transformation of the dominant narrative. Special attention will be given to issues related to the construction of genealogies, criticism of the canon and the male gaze, the politicization of the body and the domestic sphere, feminist archives and practices of memory recovery, inequalities in the art system, and contemporary forms of resistance and creation linked to feminism and ecofeminism.
Taken as a whole, the volume invites reflection on how art emerges, resists, and re-inscribes itself in history from the margins, understanding marginality not as a space of lack, but as a territory of critical production, active memory, and symbolic contestation.
Track 1. Enclosed Spaces, Open Worlds
1- Confinement (concentration camps, sanatoriums, and other places of confinement)
This track aims to gather research on creative work produced by women in contexts of forced confinement, such as concentration camps, prisons, sanatoriums, or other institutions of confinement.
2- A Room of One’s Own (Solitude and Isolation Sought for Creativity)
Many women have needed—and still need—to free themselves from the domestic burdens and family care obligations imposed by patriarchal society, which left little space or time for their artistic production. Therefore, this line of inquiry aims to explore the various proposals for emancipation and strategies implemented by women to free themselves from the diverse oppressive mechanisms that prevented them from fully developing as artists and/or intellectuals.
3- Internal Exile
Based on the concept of “internal exile,” this line of inquiry proposes to examine studies on the different ways in which women artists have been symbolically or spiritually confined. Many artists refer in their personal writings and works to a sense of isolation and loneliness experienced within social contexts, including family, romantic partners, their surroundings, artistic collectives, cultural institutions or centers, as well as state forces. In response, many of them have used art as an act of protest and resistance.
4- Art as Therapy
Building on the experiments conducted by experimental psychology in the 1960s and 1970s, many centers have used drawing, painting, or other forms of amateur artistic creation—particularly for women—as a preferred means of expression and connection with those in confinement. Therefore, this final section proposes to include contributions that explore the use of art as a healing therapy and a tool for research in institutions associated with confinement—prisons, sanatoriums, reform schools, etc.
Line 2. Genealogies, Memory, and Critique of the Artistic Narrative
Proposals must be situated within a critical feminist perspective, addressing the relationships between patriarchy, power, the body, sexuality, memory, and cultural production. Particular value will be placed on contributions that engage with historiographical rewriting and the political dimension of artistic practice, as well as research that applies feminist theoretical frameworks to different historical periods and contemporary contexts, fostering dialogue between past and present in the construction of critical genealogies.
1. Constructing Genealogies and Historiographical Rewriting
Studies on the formation, interruption, or recovery of genealogies of feminist art from the 1970s to the present. Research on intergenerational transmission, the rediscovery of female artists and marginalized practices, critical reevaluations of the canon, and proposals that contribute to the rewriting of art history from feminist perspectives will be encouraged.
2. Body, representation, and the patriarchal visual regime
Critical analyses of the body as a space of symbolic contestation in artistic creation. Studies on the historical construction of the nude, the male gaze, sexuality, violence, motherhood, and power relations, as well as artistic practices that subvert the canon and dismantle the patriarchal visual regime.
3. Cultural androcentrism, structural exclusion, and politics of legitimation
Research on mechanisms of structural exclusion and gender inequality in museums, the art market, collections, and cultural policies, with a special focus on the Spanish context. Analysis of mechanisms of invisibilization and contemporary strategies of institutional critique, correction, and re-signification of systems of artistic legitimation.
4. Memory, Archiving, and Critical Rewriting
Reflections on personal and collective archives, projects of historiographical recovery, feminist curation, and artistic practices that—within the Spanish context or in dialogue with other international contexts—activate memory as a political tool, generating alternative narratives and mechanisms of resistance against hegemonic narratives.
5. Community, Domesticity, and the Politicization of the Personal
Analysis of feminist artistic practices that challenge the division between the public and the private, address the domestic sphere, care work, and territory, and propose forms of collective creation that subvert the myth of the individual genius and the logic of creative isolation.
