Research papers by Visiting PGRs Sofía Rodríguez Palomar and María Llinares Galustian

Part of the CHIA seminar programme, 2025-2026

Please note: all seminars are online via Teams and the link will be circulated beforehand. If outside the University of Leeds, please email the Director of CHIA, Richard Cleminson, for more details. Booking details will be circulated online beforehand and can be obtained from r.m.cleminson@leeds.ac.uk.

María Llinares Galustian, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid: "Producing the Prostitute: Medicine, Power, and the Making of the Female Boundary in Early Twentieth-Century Spain"

This presentation examines how medical and hygienist discourses in early twentieth-century Spain contributed to the historical construction of “the prostitute” as a boundary figure within the moral and sexual order. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of dispositif and Judith Butler’s theory of abjection, it argues that medicine operated as a biopolitical technology that did not merely describe prostitution but actively produced it as a category of intelligibility—one that defined the limits of respectable womanhood. Through the analysis of medical journals, hygiene manuals, and social pathology treatises from 1900 to 1936, the paper shows how the prostitute’s body was materialized as both pathological and morally dangerous, serving as the negative image through which femininity was normalized. Far from being excluded from the social order, the prostitute occupied a central position within it: her abject body functioned as a necessary outside, sustaining the very norms that repudiated her.

Sofía Rodríguez Palomar, Universidad de Salamanca: "Studying the Nation through Preaching and Sermons: A Theoretical and Methodological Proposal"

This paper approaches the nation as a malleable category whose meaning is contingent on how historical actors imagine it across time, circumstances, political culture, and lived experience. I argue that its public articulation is shaped to a significant degree by the situations in which it is voiced, particularly in Catholic sermons. Accordingly, I propose analyzing sermons on their own terms and as elements of larger ritual complexes: for example, understanding a funeral sermon requires attention to the setting of the funeral rites, the audience, and the material conditions of delivery. Drawing on discourse analysis, conceptual history, and the performative turn, the paper advances a framework for tracing how these factors shape the nation as it is articulated in public. I illustrate the approach with Spanish sermons from the age of the liberal revolutions, outlining methodological steps relevant to the study of nationalism and religion.