Sexual desire in Slovenian Women's Writing from a Transnational Perspective (DEWONA)

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, there is a shift in the writings of female authors towards an intense preoccupation with themes related to sexual desire. This project proposes to interpret Slovenian women writers' writings as responding to dichotomous representations of femininity that oscillate between femme fragile and femme fatale in the work of their male contemporaries, while at the same time opens the field for different articulations of female sexuality. Although the corpus of women's writings from this period is extensive, researchers have not paid much attention to the problem of sexual desire, let alone understood women's creativity in transnational perspective. DEWONA strives to reveal how Slovenian women writers contributed to the discourse on sexual desire in the period 1890-1940-

DEWONA explores a hitherto under-researched topic by adopting a comparative, transnational, and transdisciplinary perspective combining 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 in Slovenian women’s writing in the period 1890-1940, to analyze the polyphony of Slovenian female voices articulating sexual desire in the period 1890-1940, to develop new approaches to exploring sexual desire and to reveal paradigmatic shifts in representations of sexual desire in Slovenian women’s writing in the period 1890-1940.

DEWONA Dissemination Activities