Embodying the Spanish Avant-Garde: Disability and Gender in Ramón Gómez de la Serna

This article will propose a reading of some of Gómez de la Serna’s most relevant avant-garde texts to articulate a bodily literature; that is, a literature where the body is emphasized. The growing importance of the human body is one of the defining characteristics of the international avant-gardes at large, and of Gómez de la Serna in particular. In that regard, the main interest of this essay will be the embodiment of death and disease in Los muertos, las muertas y otras fantasmagorías (1935) and Senos (1917), as well as the fluidity of gender roles, as seen in “La mujer vestida de hombre” (1927).