Seen and Unseen: Women, Spirituality and the Gaze on the Spanish Stage and Screen

Abstract

Drawing from Jean-Luc Marion’s discussion of the ‘crossing of gazes’ in religious art, this article explores the complex relationship between the spectacle of the religious experience and its spectators, as well as that spectacle’s highly gendered nature. In contrast to earlier representations of religious women on stage and screen, the performances of feminine spirituality in Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo’s 2013 musical La llamada and Chema Tena’s 2017 production of Argentine playwright María Marull’s La Pilarcita centre female spiritual experience and further the self-actualization of the characters, confounding the scopic regimes that governed earlier productions.