Farnsworth Speaks at Ohio State
12 March 2012 Farnsworth Speaks at Ohio State
Assistant Professor of Spanish and Hispanic Studies May Farnsworth recently served as a guest scholar at an academic symposium titled The Brothel and the Factory: Staging Immigration and Womens Labor.
Held last month at Ohio State University (OSU), the symposium was organized in conjunction with the performances of two plays about womens experiences with immigration: Real Women Have Curves byJosefina Lpez, which is about Latinasand factory work in the U.S.; andLa casamentera (Matchmaker)by Patricia Surez, which tells the story of young Polish womenon their way to Argentina.
By participating in the symposium, I wasable to connect these contemporary plays withfirst-wave feminist theatre in Latin America, adding a relevant historical dimension to the conversation, explains Farnsworth, whose research looks at the connections between feminism, theatre and national identity at the turn of the 20th century in Latin America.
More specifically, I contextualized Matchmaker and discussed how Surezs work upholds a tradition of feminist theatre in Argentina that began in the early 20th century. I described feminist theatre conventions in the 1910s and 1920s anddiscussed how Matchmaker s portrayal of the domestic sphereand female characters compared withthe melodramatic plays of her predecessors.
Other guest scholars included Paola S. Hernndez, an assistant professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Isabel Molina-Guzmn, an associate professor of media and cinema studies and Latino/a studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and Mary Romero, a sociology professor of justice studies and social inquiry at Arizona State University.
Farnsworth joined the HWS faculty in 2007. She teaches subjects related to gender construction, nation-building, and performance in Latin American literary culture. The author of several publications, including La Eva mexicana: Feminism in Post-Revolutionary Mexican Theater, she studied in Buenos Aires, Argentina, as a Fulbright Scholar. Affiliated with Latin American Theater Today and the Spanish Honor Society, she has also worked as a medical interpreter, a translator and a language consultant. She received a bachelors degree in Spanish and Latin American studies from The Evergreen State College, and a masters and Ph.D. in Spanish American literature from UNC-Chapel Hill.
The event was hosted by the OSU departments of theatre, Spanish and Portuguese, the Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee Theatre Research Institute, the Thompson Library, the Theatre Graduate Syndicate, and the Latino and Latin American Space for Enrichment and Research.
In the photo above, pictured are female immigrantsatthe turn of the twentieth century in Argentina.