Maruja Mallo and Concha Méndez: Creative Friendship, Female Embodiment and Ludic Space

Wood interrogates alternative articulations of the female form as embodied self in the works of Maruja Mallo and Concha Méndez in the latter half of the 1920s. Focusing on the foregrounding of bodily autonomy, active corporeality and performative praxis, the chapter explores the ways in which socio-cultural discourses shape meanings of womanhood and how Mallo and Méndez challenged (hetero)normative matrices and (re)positioned concepts of female creativity, agency and authorship. Wood also explores the creative potential of female friendship and vanguardist exploitation of the psychic qualities of modern urban existence, considered the preserve of the male. The chapter concludes with analyses of Mallo’s La mujer de la cabra (1927), Figura de deporte (1927) and Verbenas’ series, interspersed with selected poems from Méndez’s first two collections, Inquietudes (1926) and Surtidor (1928), exemplifying a reciprocal aesthetic.