Alfonsina Storni: Entre nosotras las honestas y ellas las caidas. Escritura querellante, debates y desafios de la transicion moderna

My dissertation, "Alfonsina Storni: entre nosotras las honestas y ellas las caidas. Escritura querellante, debates y desafios de la transicion moderna", explores how Alfonsina Storni (1892--1938) questioned and critically assessed economic structures, rigid legal restrictions, social imaginaries, and social conventions promoted by the prevalent ideologies that defined (1) socio-spatial gender places and (2) segregation of women within the Argentine Nation in the beginnings of the 20th Century. Storni wrote at a time when women began participating more significantly in the labor-market and became politicized and active consumers in the emerging market. Paradoxically, these advances coexisted with women's marginalization from essential civil rights, such as the right to vote, and with legal and social restrictions. Along the tensions from the clashes between women's new social places and a legal continuity of social control, my dissertation examines how the Argentine State agencies forged imaginaries intended to normalize the role of women as not only the biological reproducer of society, but also as the reproducer of social conventions. Solidified by a body of serious discourses---laws, scientific research, primary education, nationalistic narratives---these ideologies and imaginaries were channeled through the media and popular (low) culture---newspapers, popular theater, magazines, weekly romance novels (folletines), the radio, and later on, film. Storni criticizes the way these ideologies limited and blocked women's search for alternative identities and models of sociability, thus, underlining the inexorability of models of enmity and competition among women. Storni's chronicles responded to an overwhelming profusion of discourses, and vigorously defied the assumptions of the major narratives of domesticity, romance, seduction and rivalry, thus, encouraging women to envision alternative identities and ways to socialize and to befriend and take care of each other, in order to subvert the predestinated paths of separation and distance that Modernity's obsessive social policing and homogenization designed.