Hispanic sapphic circles and lesbian cosmopolitanism in modernist literature of the 1930s: the case of Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of Madrid's Sapphic circles in the transatlantic circulation of lesbian feminist authors and texts between Latin America and Europe, as well as within Latin America itself in the early 1930s. The exchanges made possible by the Residencia de Señoritas, the main meeting place for modernist lesbian intellectuals in Madrid founded by María de Maeztu during the Second Spanish Republic, interwove professional protonetworks, literary influences and sex-affective ties. This essay will examine the case of the relationship between Gabriela Mistral and Victoria Ocampo, which was nurtured by the Residencia de Señoritas. The Residencia's institutional activism for women's intellectual and affective exchanges, and the relationships strengthened by such exchanges, reveal that feminist desires put 1930's modernist cultural politics under pressure by renewing the question of cosmopolitanism. The aim of this essay is to show that the circulation of lesbian desire at the time was the primary trigger for the emergence of an alternative enunciation scene that took place both within and on the margins of institutional spaces. Sapphic eroticism between women authors—which has often been relegated to the rank of an insignificant anecdote—contributed to the feminist structural transformation of the literary field of that time.