“Virilitat del país”: Gender, Immigration, and Power in Jaume Vicens Vives’s Notícia de Catalunya

Abstract

This essay offers an analysis of Jaume Vicens Vives’s influential essay Notícia de Catalunya. Starting from a significant textual detail (the title of a section of the book’s first chapter), it considers the gender inflection in Vicens Vives’s argumentation, which articulates a series of binary oppositions that show a strong ambivalence with regards to the construction of Catalan identity, the role of immigration in Catalan society and history, Catalonia’s relationship with Spain, and the exercise of power. The author argues that Vicens Vives’s discourse on power is predicated on the masculine/feminine binary, through associations that link both a subordinated position and hybridity with femininity, frivolity, unruliness, and hysteria; these associations are essentialized in Vicens’s rhetoric by reference to the body. At the core of the Vicens Vives’s argumentation, the author claims, is a blind spot in his discourse on power: the opposition between voluntat de poder (will to power) and voluntat d’ésser (will to be), which betrays Vicens’s ambivalence with regards to Catalonia’s structural subordinated position vis-a-vis Spain.