The Politics of Gendered Life Stories in Spain

This book examines how gendered life stories act as interventions that unsettle the boundaries between private experience and public life. From the testimonies of women whose accounts of gender violence have forced a reckoning with institutional silence, to the kiss-gate scandal in women’s football that reframed debates on consent and national identity, to Shakira’s widely circulated song about her public breakup, where questions of female authorship unfolded within the tightly managed economies of global pop celebrity, these stories reveal the shifting conditions under which lived experience acquires political force.

Set against Spain’s volatile political landscape—marked by feminist mobilisation, reactionary backlash, and struggles over the meaning of public testimony—this book offers a framework for understanding how personal narratives travel, gather force, and become sites where political and cultural boundaries are redrawn. It speaks to readers concerned with the mediated life of testimony and the historical conditions under which private lives come to matter publicly, in Spain and beyond.