The Insides of the Outsider: Women and the Poetics of Space and Place

“The Insides of the Outsider” offers a lucid, transnational map of how women transform space: unhousing the Gothic home, queering the city, and deterritorializing borders. A timely and compelling volume for scholars of literature, space, and feminist theory.

Dr. Carmen Araujo

Hispanic Literatures & Cultures

University of California, Santa Barbara

The volume “The Insides of the Outsider: Women and the Poetics of Space and Place” explores the significance of the encounter between subject and object, relying on the ideas of Deleuze and Guattari as a central point of reference. The contributors aim to deterritorialize ideological assemblages by focusing on the unresolved movements of voices marked by the chiaroscuros of concealment and ambush, the horror and novelty of technology, suffocating and rarefied homes, and the struggle between self-perception and the gaze of others. The reader will find articles seeking to uncover the revolutionary potential of the eros in literature, cinema, and artistic expression, aiming to make space speak and even reach the unknown territories of the cosmic. The authors navigate a wide range of aesthetics, moving from the Baroque, Gothic, and Naturalism to the Neo-avant garde, alongside the most recent theoretical currents contributed by colonial studies, queer theory, affect theory, posthumanism, black studies, and migration studies. The volume maintains the historical rigor demanded by putting into dialogue the varied linguistic and cultural zones of authors from the Hispanic, Lusophone, Francophone, and Anglophone worlds, and the connections required for a global appreciation of poetics that exceed and question the scale of the intimate in the redefinition of space.

Alexis Hernando

University of Pennsylvania

The articles in “The Insides of the Outsider: Women and the Poetics of Space and Place” by Mariangela Ugarelli (ed.) move through the in-between spaces where feminine subjectivities navigate homes, institutions, diaspora, the limits of life and death, and desire—challenging borders both visible and unseen. This stunning work powerfully explores the role of female and queer subjects in creating alternative spaces and how their movement through becomes an act of transgression and self-assertion. This book offers a bold, intimate portrait of feminine experience in flux across diverse traditions, periods, and literary movements.

Dr. Rocío del Águila Gracey

College of William and Mary