Elia Romera-Figueroa, a Duke University Ph.D., is a postdoctoral researcher at Autonomous University of Madrid. She studies 20th and 21st century Iberian cultural studies, with expertise in female singer-songwriters, gender and sexuality, social movements, (post)memory, global LatinX studies, music, and performance.
Host University: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Host research group or department: Departamento de Filología Española (Facultad de Filosofía y Letras)
Co-host University: University of Glasgow, UK
Secondment institution: International Council of Museums (ICOM)
Advisor: Dr. David Becerra Mayor
Co-advisor: Prof. Maud Bracke
Secondment mentor: To be defined
My research
Gendering AntiFranco - Gendering Anti-Francoism: Female Singer-Songwriters in Spain (1952-1986)
Focusing on culture and society in Spain, Gendering Anti-Francoism reinterprets Spain’s tradition of protest music, offering the first monographic study of Iberian female singer-songwriters (cantautoras). Using a cultural-historical perspective, it demonstrates that cantautoras played a major role both in the anti-Franco struggle, and in the second-wave feminist movement, a period spanning from 1952 until 1986. Existing scholarship has mainly examined the lives and work of white heterosexual male singer-songwriters, from Paco Ibañez’s first recordings (1956) until Franco’s death in 1975. My own periodization includes pioneering women such as Teresa Rebull, who performed in Paris since the early ‘50s, and it examines one decade of feminist activism previously overlooked. Through an interdisciplinary methodology—based on the combination of textual and sonic close readings, oral history interviews, criminal records, and extensive archival research—this project presents a new-found group of over 60 female performers across Spain. In doing so, it offers a new Iberian multilingual and multicultural approach, unlike previous research that grouped together cantautores from each of Spain’s territories, e.g. studying all Catalan singers together. Moreover, this approach takes account of minoritized languages, and other interconnected identity struggles involving gender, race, sexuality, and class. Cantautoras collaborated with one another across a spectrum of languages and socio-political commitments, to protest against the ultra-Catholic, sexist, and nationalist ideology of Francoism and its long-lasting effects. Cantautoras endured state repression and music censorship, and yet they used their performances to question the sexist traditions, social conventions, and gender-based hierarchies of Francoism. Furthermore, unlike other cultural media, songs performed at political meetings could be later played at home (on radios or in record players), allowing listeners to repeat the lyrics and make them their own. Thus, songs were crucial for community-building, for bearing witness to different forms of violence, and for crushing stereotypes and steering feminist progress, making them instrumental in individual and collective consciousness-raising. Through their songs, performers put forward a feminist way of thinking that also challenged the priorities of left-wing political parties during the clandestine years, and later, in Spain’s Transition to democracy.
Date started – Date End
01.01.2024 - 31.12.2025
