Lindsey Reuben

My research dialogues with current debates in Peninsular Studies but casts Spanish cultural production, politics, and intellectual history in the larger frame of capitalist expansion and globalization. While traditional Peninsular scholarship has historically been produced on an insular level, my research heightens awareness of Spain’s wider global and disciplinary imprint. My manuscript, Oikos del deseo: domesticidad y género en la modernidad española, which is under contract with Guillermo Escolar press, attends to the role of the home in the construction of the modern Spanish city, and intersects explicitly with urban studies, gender studies, and psychoanalysis as well as with political theory. Oikos del deseo examines cultural production in Spain from the early twentieth century to the present day that illuminates the home as both the exception to the realm of politics and labor and the condition of the production of these same categories. This study argues that figures such as the mother, the prostitute, the unemployed hetero-normative male, the housekeeper, the cook, the migrant laborer, and the illegal immigrant bring to bear the invisible functions of capitalist production and national construction that permit and maintain the bourgeois home and the production of material culture in modern Spain. In doing so, my book project also aims at reconstructing the role of the oikos (the home but also the way that it constitutes our habits and situates what we understand as inhabiting). It does this in the wake of Spanish modernity, spanning iterations of the “ángel del hogar” in the long nineteenth century through Spain’s more recent entrance into capitalism as a “belated nation.”