Funded by the European Research Council (ERC-StG) and directed by Carme Font, project WINK examines the neglected written production of women in early European modernity in order to modify the single-gender paradigm of intellectual value. The project is based in the English Department at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
✨ Why are women underrepresented in the history of ideas?
To understand the genesis and unfolding of this process, WINK research examines the marginalization of women’s intellectual input in the early modern period (1500-1780). Through a process we define as ‘textual misogyny’, we study ingrained cultural mechanisms of debasing women’s work that have led to a non-assimilation of its intellectual and creative value, sustaining an androcentric vision in Western thought. WINK is interested in both local and comparatist approaches, as well as theoretical aspects of early modern women’s intellectual history and socio-economic considerations to early modern textual production. We survey a large variety of texts: from manuscript poetry to political prose, letters, spiritual writing, miscellanies and novels.
WINK envisages intellectual recovery in the short and long term: a transformative and synergic action across disciplines that takes stock of the brilliant and important work of feminist theory so far and leaps forward to another level that is already changing the way we count knowledge-ordering systems and women as equal intellectual partners in what we describe as ‘epistemic equality’. The research responds to an identifiable ‘need to know and change’.
Our research provides a model for intellectual recovery in extant, neglected and lost textualities by women through a qualitative trans-genre methodology in several linguistic contexts that retrieves content, modifying androcentric and binary dynamics of representing valuable thinking which have lingered on to the present time. The research seeks the full integration of women in the systems of knowledge production and transmission.
For more information:
@ProjectWink
