Language Attitudes, National Identity and Migration in Catalonia

This book examines language, nation, and identity from a gendered perspective and investigates to what extent women use Catalan in their everyday social practices to construct gendered and national identities. Drawing on a unique body of oral history interviews, the focus of the study is three female 'generations', covering 50 years of historical change from the 1960s to the present. Mandie Iveson analyzes the preservation of the Catalan language during Franco's regime; how the emergence of a feminist movement and discourse, and changing patterns of migration, have transformed the relationship between gender and national identity in Catalonia; and the role that Catalan plays today in defining women's identities. Additional analysis of a corpus of social media data explores the online Catalan discourses of nationalism and its gendered dimensions.