Gender and Genre Bias: Women Writers & Networks in Latin America

It is well known that the literary history of Latin America and its canon has been/is written by a patriarchal Eurocentric society that controls what constitutes national literature. It is also established that (colonial/contemporary) Latin American subjects in the periphery of the urban republic of letters are not included due to their gender (women), race and ethnic origin (Indigenous, mestizo, African-descent) or the expectation that women write within the boundaries of certain textual genres. I want to learn about digital tools and resources to address the production and networking of female communities and make visible their work, efforts, writings, and publishing paths in the two following contexts: (i) women's voices dispersed in the colonial archives of Latin America (1500-1799), and (ii) contemporary Latin American women who write speculative fiction (sci-fi, horror literature, dark fantasy), a genre expected to be written, published and controlled by men. Could we assign a gender to the writer of a text? My project considers two major areas of research using digital tools and resources: (a) building maps of women's networks such as those in BIESES (networks early modern Spanish women authors, visualization created with VISONE and GELPHI): https://www.bieses.net (b) To analyze and compare texts written by male and female writers using visualization tools (such as VOYANT: https://voyant-tools.org/) This step intends to work with extensive texts (10,000+ words) within the same genre or topic.