This article examines Jessica Dismorr and Lucía Sánchez Saornil as avant-garde women in Vorticism and ultraísmo, who, like other experimental artists, operated from the margins of established conventions. The two movements aligned themselves with F.T. Marinetti’s Futurism in his celebration of speed, technology, and modern city life as well as his despisal of effeminacy and traditional art. Within this framework, Dismorr and Sánchez Saornil embraced marginality as a deliberate act of defiance, and adopted the confrontational ethos of the avant-garde. In doing so, they repurposed the aesthetic registers of their male counterparts not only to legitimize their presence in man-centred artistic circles but also to resist the domestic and artistic expectations imposed on women. Their political militancy evinces their desire radically to reconfigure gender dynamics and aesthetics. Illustrative cases of their efforts are the poems they produced during their avant-garde phase that later evolved into political awareness. The contrastive analysis of Dismorr and Sánchez Saornil sheds light on the double displacement that they experienced as avant-gardists and women within the peripheral spaces of Vorticism and ultraísmo and their subsequent transition to anti-fascist art.
Leticia Pérez Alonso (Sun,) studied this question.