Space, Time and Gender in Venezuelan Female Migrant's Narrative Literature in Latin America in the 21st Century

• Applicants: Dr. Laura Febres de Ayala; Professorin Dr. Miriam Lay Brander
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 543013749

The project aims to shed light on the literary representation of migration in the context of one of the biggest current migration crises from a gender perspective. It examines narrative texts by Venezuelan women writers who have emigrated to other Latin American countries, including their personal, economic, cultural and literary networks. Through the representation of migration in novels and short stories from the 21st century, it aims to show what role the gender variable plays in the decision to migrate, the experience of crossing the border and integration into the host society, as well as in terms of migrant women's options for action. In addition, it explores the extent to which the works examined narratively expose and/or compensate for the experience of a spatio-temporal in-between characterized by a permanent provisionality. Although the focus is on migrant women (including transgender women where applicable), masculinities in the Venezuelan migration context will also be included. Methodologically, the project combines literary and narratological approaches with approaches from social science migration and gender research. While the focus of previous migration research has primarily been on the spatial dimensions of gender-specific mobilities, the project aims to expand the corresponding findings to include the variable of time and examine how the views of the past determine migrant women's visions of the future and how these relate to the (nation-state) time horizons of their host country. In this way, the project not only draws attention to a literary corpus of Venezuelan women writers that has had little visibility to date, but also to the diverse aspects of the migration experiences of Venezuelan women that can be expected to find expression in literary narrative texts and which would be ignored by purely social-scientific methods of investigation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants