The Politics of Love in Hispanic Literature and Cinema

Conducted in Spanish and fulfills the Post-1800 Peninsular Literature and Culture requirement for HS majors. Examines how love functions as both personal experience and political force in twentieth- and twenty-first century Hispanic literature and film. We explore how writers and filmmakers deploy romance and eros to address dictatorship, revolution, and social transformation across Spain and Latin America. Analyzing works by Garca Mrquez, Poniatowska, Almodvar, and others, we investigate how intimate relationships reflect, resist, and reframe political realities while reimagining possibilities for queer love, feminist solidarity, environmental crises, and alternative kinships. Through theoretical frameworks from affect studies and postcolonial criticism, we consider love as simultaneously private emotion and transformative political act.