Thursday, March 26, 2026 (5:00-6:30 pm Boston) in the Observatorio of Instituto Cervantes at Harvard
1100 Massachusetts Ave · 2nd floor · Cambridge, MA 02138 · USA
RSVP: https://forms.gle/bLU7WsYMesmEzaQZ7 or info-observatory@fas.harvard.edu
The Observatorio del Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University in collaboration with the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights (EMR) invites you to attend a roundtable discussion about the volume ¿Invisibles? Trans-identidades en la España contemporánea (Vernon, 2026), edited by Ana Corbalán, which offers a critical reflection on the cultural representation of trans identities in Spain from the Transition to the present day.
Participants will structure the conversation around four main themes: historical and political context, the ethics of looking, the analysis of specific case studies, and future challenges. Antonio Francisco Pedrós-Gascón will examine the films Cambio de sexo and El transexual as allegories of Spain’s political Transition, while Raquel Vega-Durán will revisit Mi querida señorita through a reading centered on the aesthetics of liminal space and the ways of seeing it produces.
Moderated by Raquel Vega-Durán, the discussion will question the tension between legal advances and cultural deficiencies, the use of metaphor in historical analysis, and the persistence of binary logics in audiovisual narratives. The conversation will conclude by inviting us to reflect not only on visibility, but also on our responsibility as viewers in relation to the images and imaginaries we construct.
Ana Corbalán is Professor of Spanish at the University of Alabama. She is the author of El cuerpo transgresor en la narrativa española contemporánea (Libertarias, 2009), Memorias fragmentadas: Una mirada transatlántica a la resistencia femenina contra las dictaduras (Iberoamericana, 2016) and Cuestionando el Iberocentrismo: Voces periféricas en la España contemporánea (University of North Carolina Press, 2025). She has also co-edited five collective volumes: Toward a Multicultural Configuration of Spain: Local Cities, Global Spaces (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014); Hacia una redefinición del feminismo y de los estudios de género en el siglo XXI (Letras Femeninas 41.1, 2015); The Dynamics of Masculinity in Contemporary Spanish Culture (Routledge, 2017); European Cinema: Crisis Narratives and Narratives in Crisis (Routledge, 2018); and Todos a movilizarse: Protesta y activismo social en la España del siglo XXI (Anthropos, 2019).
Antonio Francisco Pedrós-Gascón is Professor of Spanish Literature at Colorado State University (Fort Collins). His research spans Spanish literature from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, transatlantic studies (with a particular focus on contact with Mexico), contemporary Galician literature and gender studies. He is the author of José Manuel Caballero Bonald: regresos a Argónida en 33 entrevistas (PUZ, 2011) and Conversas con Suso de Toro: como saba de liño (Xerais, 2005), as well as more than thirty scholarly articles and specialized publications. His most recent project, currently in press, is the complete works of feminist writer Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer (8 volumes), for whom he also edited a facsimile edition of Una Eva moderna (IET, 2019).
Raquel Vega-Durán is Professor of Peninsular and Transatlantic Studies in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, where she also serves as Chair of the Ethnicity, Migration and Rights program. She is the author of Emigrant Dreams, Immigrant Borders: Migration, Transnational Encounters, and Identity in Spain (Bucknell University Press, 2016). She has published extensively on migration, borders, identity and gender within cultural and visual studies, with particular attention to the transatlantic and Mediterranean spaces. She is currently developing two new research projects. The first, Vanishing Europe: Abandoned Villages and the Repopulation of Europe in the Twenty-First Century, offers a comparative dialogue between narratives of depopulation and repopulation across different European countries. The second, Post-Migration Spain: Artists and New Cultural Geographies, explores the global connections shaping contemporary Spanish urban culture.