ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the complexities of Spanish women writers' relationships to their reading public, and to the literary market in general at the end of the millennium. Despite the apparent lack of a truly critical social or cultural analysis in their fictional works, these writers often claim to present an ideological critique in their works, in particular, by subverting the dominant ideologies of gender and sexuality. Extebarria and Almudena Grandes purport to advocate the "progressive" agendas of exploding sexual taboos, liberating women's bodies and sexualities, and constructing new models of female subjectivitiy. The mark of gender contributes to the rise of "women's literature" as a commercial phenomenon which, in turn, creates cultural expectations as to what women's literature is and should be. The problem for women writers is not simply the fact that the literary establishment implicitly privileges the "masculine" over the "feminine" perspective, even if the people were to presume the existence of essentialist categories.
