The Cities and People Research Group, from the Institute of Political and Social Sciences (Autonomous University of Barcelona), organizes every year a course on Feminist Political Theory Readings with the objective to facilitate the analysis of selected authors that combine literature and political thought. Maria Rodó de Zárate, postdoctoral researcher in Gender and ICT, has taken part in this year’s sessions with a presentation on the conception of identity in the poetic work of Maria Mercè Marçal.

In her presentation, Rodó de Zárate has shown that this Catalan writer was a pioneer internationally regarding the feminist intersectional perspectives of identity. Based on her experience, Maria Mercè Marçal’s work offered a complex and multidimensional understanding of identity and political struggle, and contains political conceptualizations that are essential in current feminisms, with issues such as care work, maternity, abortion, sexuality or lesbian visibility.

Maria Rodó de Zárate’s main research fields are the Right to the City and feminist geographies, geographies of sexualities and of youth, with a special focus on intersectionality theory.