Knowledge Bank

Tània Balló's "Las sinsombrero" documentary series (2015-2021) about modern Spanish women led to the creation of multimedia projects and online spaces for paying homage to forgotten women throughout history. However, such crowdsourced and scholarly recuperation efforts are at odds with the prevailing canonization of the Spanish avant-garde artistic group known as the "Generation of 1927". Women's legacies have been excluded through a deliberately constructed practice of homage that has granted nearly exclusive claim to cultural support for ten male poets considered the originators of the Generation of 1927. Modern women writers like María Teresa León and Concha Méndez construct personae in their life writing by placing themselves outside the sphere of influence of the Generation of 1927 despite their successful literary careers. This creative piece brings together persona studies and homage to study how performances of prestige by writers and literary historians bring forth the gendered, classed, and sexualized ways that the literary history of the Generation of 1927 has been constructed. My proposed theory of homage uncovers the closeted and undocumented sapphic and sororal relationships between women and imagines queer feminist futures where women's work is central to understanding cultural milieux of the Generation of 1927. These poetic tributes are what I call "lifemaking homages" that celebrate and grant prestige to recuperated knowledge of writers' queer, undocumented lives. The paper and accompanying poems demonstrate how, through lifemaking homages, scholars can propose alternate paradigms for tracing the development of the Generation of 1927 as part of Spain's cultural heritage.