Duoda Women’s Research Centre

The Duoda Women's Research Centre is an interdisciplinary research center internationally recognized for her research, her teaching and her publications.^[1]

The center is on one site, Edifici Florensa, a building in the Campus Diagonal Sur of the University of Barcelona.

Overview

Duoda is the name given to the Women’s Research Centre or Centre for Research on Women at the University of Barcelona, Spain.^[2] The name Duoda was taken from a ninth-century Barcelona countess, Dhuoda, famous for the education manual Liber Manualis she wrote for her sons, who were taken from her. Duoda began as a Centre for Historical Research on Women in 1982, founded by women lecturers and students at the University who wanted to have a women’s space within it. In 1991 it took on the name of Duoda and over time evolved from being a space made up of women historians to one encompassing a far greater interdisciplinary scope. It started to offer an MA programme in Women’s Studies in 1988 and an Online MA in the Studies of Sexual Difference as of the year 2000. These two programmes, after the changes in structure occasioned by the Bologna agreement, have now been transformed into one programme that can be followed in different forms.^[3]

Sexual difference as thought and politics

In Spain, Duoda has been central to the introduction of the thinking and politics of sexual difference undertaken by two important and inter-related Italian groups, the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective^[4] and Diotima, the Women’s Philosophical Community at the University of Verona.^[5] The work and evolution of these two groups has been very well explained in their book, No credere di avere dei diriti, translated into English as,^[6] now out of print but available through the Milan Women’s Bookstore Collective.^[7] Duoda established significant relationships with women of these two groups and has for many years now been part of a fertile exchange and creation of ideas and political work. The thinking and politics of sexual difference came into being in the late sixties, in part triggered off by the challenged offered to women, feminists or otherwise, by Luce Irigaray. Her thesis, Speculum, posed a critique of western cultural and philosophical structures and beliefs, and the project or awareness of the need to think beyond the paradigm of equality towards wider horizons of freedom was born. The Italian groups and Duoda are significant in their commitment to exploring what a politics rooted in sexual difference might be. They have worked on such figures as affidamento, the politics of desire, female authority (as opposed to power), and the politics of setting out from the self. Pivotal to the challenge to our way of thinking is the seminal work by Luisa Muraro, The Symbolic Order of the Mother. Most of the material of this political work shares its roots with an important part of the feminism of the sixties and seventies in many countries: the emphasis on the relationships between women, on giving them significance, the work with language on many levels. Where it differs perhaps is in its theoretical trajectory; the fact of being grounded clearly in the need to think through sexual difference, and freely starting out from that position, has enabled a different kind of perception of the political to take shape amongst those women who find the sense in it.

Projects

Duoda has fairly recently embarked on the project of the creation of a virtual library,^[8] where it is hoped that texts and documents will be available in various languages. Now the texts are only available mostly in Spanish and Catalan.

References