Method

The digital archive includes a mix of academic works and cultural productions, each with different licensing statuses. Some items are openly accessible on the internet (for example, Sor Juana’s sonnets are in public domain), while others are copyrighted and restricted from being included in the archive due to legal limitations (for example, books like Prometo Fallar and Varella). The associated metadata provides details on each work’s specific licensing conditions.

For the cataloging process, the works were thoroughly reviewed and separated mostly in two categories, when possible: Indirect Non-Binary Spanish and Direct Non-Binary Spanish.

Colonial Production: This refers to texts produced during the colonial period that explore the conditions of possibility of achieving gender-inclusive language in some way. For example, the imposition of binary gender can be seen in dictionaries of Indigenous languages produced by colonizers, and in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s Sonetos, some sites display the avoidance of gender marking, possibly to indicate gender and sexual dissidence.

Indirect Non-Binary Spanish: This refers to a gender-inclusive grammatical formulation that maintains the traditional rules of Spanish to aim at gender inclusivity. For example, “todas las personas son bonitas” instead of “todos son bonitos”.

Direct Non-Binary Spanish: This refers to a gender-inclusive grammatical formulation that changes the traditional rules of Spanish to aim at gender inclusivity. For example, “todes son bonites” instead of “todos son bonitos”.

Some of the early modern and colonial materials do not necessarily utilize grammatical innovation but serve as evidence of the limits of the (grammatical) gender binary in Spanish. This project features these works to archive and historicize early manifestations toward gender-inclusive language in Spanish.

To display the metadata, the project utilized the CollectionBuilder framework. The annotated metadata, as well as the framework itself, are published under a Creative Commons 4.0 CC-BY license, based on the original CollectionBuilder project, which is licensed under the MIT license.