Akiko Tsuchiya’s current book project, “Subjects on the Margins: Gender and Deviance in Nineteenth-Century Spain,” centers on the representations of gender deviance in late nineteenth-century Spain (the Restoration period), a critical moment of social, economic, and political transformations that led Spain on a path to an uneven and uneasy transition to modernity. Faced with extreme domestic instability, and the gradual loss of its empire in the New World and Africa, the Spanish nation was plagued by widespread political fears about uncontrolled urban masses, anarchism, and violence; and by a more general apprehension about crime, prostitution, vagrancy, alcoholism, and even insanity.  It was precisely at this moment when the category of the “deviant” (or the “delinquent”) came into being, to control and to contain discursively subjects who posed a threat to the social order.  Prof. Tsuchiya scrutinizes the cultural meanings and anxieties behind the obsessive interest in gender deviance during the Restoration period, focusing in particular on how tropes of gender intersected with those of race, class, and nation to generate the figure of the deviant subject.  She will consider literary and visual representations, as well as medical, anthropological, and political writings on women, framing gender deviance within the broader context of a fin-de-siècle “gender trouble” that includes non-normative male subjects, to explain why social deviance was often troped as “feminine” in the discourses of the period.  Finally, the study aims to demonstrate the ambiguous role of late nineteenth-century literary discourses on deviance which, while attempting to contain deviant subjects, ends up by founding new spaces of subjectivity (and agency) for those subjects positioned outside the social norm.