Laura Talamante
Research project
Mapping Women’s Revolutionary Political Influence and Control of their Daily Environment
Project abstract
The research of Laura Talamante focuses on Marseille as an alternative center of revolutionary politics and power in the south of France. The current project builds upon her previous digital mapping publications as part of the development of a digital mapping book and interactive website that illuminates women’s revolutionary political influence and the possibilities and limitations for control of the daily environment. Her goal for expanding the project is to use digital mapping as another lens to develop her previous research and publications on women’s influence on and use of revolutionary divorce and marriage laws. Analysis of how ordinary citizens shaped revolutionary ideology and culture and thus influenced changes in family law adds another deep layer to her cultural mapping of the city. Mapping women from various social milieus revolutionary experiences illuminates their use of familial, social, and economic networks to influence the development of revolutionary consciousness, politics, and culture. Digital mapping allows readers to interactively explore beyond the text how women transformed public spaces such as churches, markets, boutiques, and the streets into political spaces. Women also transformed private spaces into political spaces through advocacy for and use of revolutionary marriage and divorce laws.
The Spatial Turn
As part of the spatial turn in the humanities, she uses digital mapping so viewers can better visualize and understand overlapping revolutionary uses of, contestations over, and transformations of space in Marseille where local and regional political differences shaped national politics. She uses digital mapping and the ability to layer data geographically, temporally, and topically as a tool for better understanding the breadth and depth of women’s political engagement in Marseille—the second largest city in France. No studies exist using interactive mapping to assess women’s revolutionary experiences. Her work is influenced by Michel Vovelle who employed comparative geography and quantitative analysis in an analog format for understanding the geosocial-political dissemination, reception, and adaptation of revolutionary culture and politics. She uses geosocial-political mapping, but in a digitally layered and searchable format, to understand local and regional tendencies by analyzing particular moments, “stresses, aggressions, stages in what one can call a collective awareness,” to investigate women’s developing national political consciousness, networks, and concerted political action in Marseille from 1789-1794. She investigates multiple spaces in the cityscape and beyond where revolutionary power relations transpired. Examples are digitally layered across the city’s section and users can filter by: protests, riots, and street politics; political associations and actions; revolutionary courts; section and regional politics. Digitally mapping women’s revolutionary experiences geographically illuminates women’s impact on coalition building and shaping revolutionary consciousness in Marseille’s local and regional politics.
“Thick” Mapping
She employs what is known in the field of digital humanities as “thick mapping,” which “refers to the processes of collecting, aggregating, and visualizing ever more layers of geographic or place-specific data. Thick maps are sometimes called “deep maps” because they embody temporal and historical dynamics through a multiplicity of layered narratives, sources, and even representational practices” that contribute to scholarly research and teaching. Thick mapping borrows from Clifford Geertz’s concept of “thick description” and the tools of cultural analysis whereby thick mappings, “like thick descriptions, emphasize context and meaning-making through a combination of micro and macro analyses that foster a multiplicity of interpretations.” Further, her use of thick mapping intersects with feminist geography and the concepts of “feminist visualities” and “feminist cartography” that subverts the status quo of male power hierarchies in the past and in the present by making women the subject of geographic research. In geography, visual imagery is part of the epistemological foundation and feminist geographers are Geographic Information Systems (GIS) as part of the spatial turn that are embedded with historical and contemporary maps, photographs and other imagery as part of mapping gendered spaces and analyzing gendered spatial patterns. Users of her digital maps go beyond past the actions of well-known male figures and focus on ordinary and a few extraordinary women through historical images and primary source excerpts to better understand the geographic relationship between women’s actions and how they used space. Interactive maps allow users to shape their own analyses as they visualize a dynamic past where women’s geosocial-political use of formal and informal spaces transformed the political and cultural landscape.
Mapping Marriage and Divorce in Revolutionary Marseille
The addition of mapping women’s use of family tribunals and revolutionary divorce and inheritance laws will build upon her previous thick mapping to demonstrate women’s challenges to patriarchal authority and their varied contribution to new political, social, and cultural constructions of the republican family model. A revision of her previous analyses of marriage and divorce that maps and correlates with census records allows for socioeconomic analyses of women’s use of their new civil rights. Further, it connects to her mapping of census records and analysis of women’s challenges to patriarchy and their measures of control over private space outside of marriage.
Biography
Laura Talamante is Professor and Chair of History at California State University, Dominguez Hills. As a Latina and first-generation college student and scholar, she divides her interests between teaching, research, scholarship, and academic service. She earned her Ph.D. in History at UCLA, where her, “Les Citoyennes Marseillaises: Women and Political Change during the French Revolution,” won the Mary Wollstonecraft Dissertation Award. She has received numerous honors and awards, including residency fellowships at the Brown Foundation Maison Dora Maar in Ménerbes, France and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, a National Endowment for the Humanities Landmarks of American History and Culture grant, and two French American Cultural Exchange Tournée Festival of French Films grants. Most recently she won the Presidential Outstanding Professor of the Year Award and the Tyler Stovall Western Society for French History Mission Prize. She publishes primarily on women, politics and culture, citizenship development, revolutionary geopolitical and geosocial mapping, and proto-feminism in Enlightenment and revolutionary Marseille.
During her fellowship at the Maison Dora Maar and as a participant in the former Genre, Femmes, Méditteranée (now GenderMed : Penser le Genre en Mediterranée) at the Maison méditerranéenne des sciences de l’Homme in Aix-Provence, she presented and developed her article, “Political Divisions, Gender and Politics: The Case of Revolutionary Marseille” (2017). This led to her contribution, “Transgresser au féminin: Rose Michel Reynoir, une féministe avant la letter,” to the research group’s 2020 Genre, récits et usages de la transgression that she co-authored with Christophe Regina. Her collaborative work includes publishing “Education during the Enlightenment: Women Engaging Critical Inquiry,” with CSUDH History major, Jasmine Abang. While a specialist on eighteenth-century women and gender history, she has also contributed to interdisciplinary projects, such as the Los Angeles and Marseille “Citizenship and Migrants,” which involved students and migrants from Los Angeles and Marseille. As a result of her residency at the HERS Institute, she developed the CSUDH Women’s Leadership Workshops for faculty and staff. Working with faculty and staff led to research on contemporary women’s leadership aspirations in higher education and the forthcoming “An Intersectional Analysis of Barriers and Opportunities for Women’s Promotion to Full Professor at a Hispanic and Minority-Serving Public Institution,” with Dr. Nicole Rodriguez.
