FEMALE FANTASTIC IN ANTHOLOGIES: GENDERING THE GENRE AND ITS DISCOURSE

In the last four decades, the fantastic literature written by women has been the subject of various critical and theoretical studies, which, from different standpoints, have tried to investigate the characteristics of the female fantastic. Indeed, these studies faced an extremely difficult task, if we take into account the wide range of concepts included in the heterogeneous notions of feminine they explore, and in particular the ambiguous notion of female writing, whose theoretical survey has to be prior to any exploration of the female fantastic. In this essay, after a critical review of some of the most prominent theories about the so-called feminine fantastic (among them: Richter 1977; Farnetti 2007) and female writing (among them: Cixous 1976), I’ll focus on the discourse and on the narrative strategies of the female fantastic. Through the close reading of the anthologies Tra due specchi. 18 racconti di scrittrici latinoamericane, by M.C. Graña, ed., and Insólitas. Narradoras de lo fantástico en Latinoamérica y España, by R. Ruiz Garzón, T. López-Pellisa, eds., I’ll try to draw a cartography of the Hispanic Fantastic short stories written by women. My goal is to verify if it is possible to identify in the female fantastic any recurrent linguistic and rhetoric solution or any particular stylistic feature, or if, on the contrary, the peculiarities of the female fantastic, more than in a specific aesthetic, lie in its political and ideological use of fiction and in its constant subversion of literary themes and imaginaries (that is, at the semantic level) so as to undermine the masculine symbolic order and the patriarchal dominant discourse.