‘A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN’?

Abstract

The phrase, ‘a room of one's own,’ coined by Virginia Woolf, refers not only to the physical space necessary for creating art but also to the hitherto ungranted space within the canon for women artists. In an attempt to relate to the dilemma posed by Woolf, my aim in this paper is to assess whether, as a physical site, the Spanish University (its departments and curricula) provides the intellectual space that is so necessary to the healthy development of Cultural Studies in Spain. Given the (by now) well-documented history of British-born Cultural Studies, I shall start off by offering, not a recapitulation of that history, but rather a highlighting of the mutations suffered by Cultural Studies as it eventually ‘migrated’ over to Spain. From there, and taking my cue from Foucault's Discipline and Punish (1975), I propose to argue out four points: (1) that the university is a ‘disciplinary institution’, (2) that university teachers are ‘disciplinary subjects’, (3) that interdisciplinary academic work does not alter existing subject arrangements or divisions, and (4), in line with Virginia Woolf's critique of patriarchal, university conventions, that Cultural Studies is something different and beyond the specialized concerns of academic disciplines.