Sexual desire in Slovenian Women's Writing (1890-1940) in a Transnational Perspective (DEWONA)

At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, the writings of female authors increasingly turned toward themes of sexual desire. This project proposes to read the work of Slovene women writers as a response to dichotomous representations of femininity in the work of their male contemporaries — representations oscillating between the femme fragile and the femme fatale — while also showing how these writers opened up a space for alternative articulations of female sexuality. Although the corpus of women’s writing from this period is extensive, scholars have paid little attention to the question of sexual desire, and even less to women’s writing from a transnational perspective. DEWONA seeks to reveal how Slovene women writers contributed to discourses on sexual desire between 1890 and 1940.

DEWONA addresses this under-researched topic through a comparative, transnational, and transdisciplinary perspective that combines feminist theory, literary criticism, philosophy, cultural history, cultural theory, intellectual history, and digital humanities. DEWONA’s  main objectives are to collect and map articulations and representations of sexual desire in literary texts, journal articles, and life writing by Slovene women writers between 1890 and 1940; to analyze the polyphony of Slovene women’s voices articulating sexual desire during this period; to develop new approaches to the study of sexual desire; and to identify paradigmatic shifts in representations of sexual desire in Slovene women’s writing between 1890 and 1940.

Dissemination activities