Maria Martinez From the Subjected Subject to the Vulnerable Subject: An Unfinished Discussion in Contemporary Spanish Feminisms I n this article I discuss the question of the subject of feminism. This issue emerges and reemerges constantly in feminist literature and activist dis- course. 1 The subject of feminism is by no means static or consensual but rather is a field of arguments, disagreements, transformations, and problem- atizations that vary over time. In this article I do not aim to cover feminist and queer theoretical discussions on the subject of feminism, which many other theorists have already done with great quality and impact. 2 Rather, I intend to place this question in a particular frame: the feminist movement in con- temporary Spain. This is a particularly interesting case, since this movement was constituted after forty years of a dictatorship that understood women as inferior to men. While these gender hierarchies of course were not unique to Spain, here they were part of national politics. In Spain, the feminist movement was “born” in 1975, with the I Jornadas de la Mujer (First national conference for women’s liberation) in Madrid, This article was made possible thanks to the financial support of the postdoctoral program of the Spanish Basque Government (2016–19) and of the Research Group of the Basque Uni- versity System (IT706–13), located at the University of the Basque Country. Many people contributed to the development of the arguments made in this article and have commented on one or several of its passages: my PhD supervisor, Benjamín Tejerina; my dissertation com- mittee; and the research project team “Victim(s) Worlds,” especially Gabriel Gatti, David Casado-Neira, Sandrine Revet, and Ramón Sáez. The current version of this text owes much to the excellent and challenging comments of the three anonymous Signs reviewers as well as the work of the editorial team, to whom I would like to direct my thanks for the work they put in. 1 This distinction between academic and activist feminists is merely analytical, not just be- cause many academics are also activists but also because nonacademics straddle the border be- tween expert knowledge and ethno-knowledge. 2 It is impossible to list all the texts that have considered this question, but works that have had considerable impact in Spain include Alcoff (1988), Riley (1988), Nicholson (1989), But- ler and Scott (1992), Benhabib et al. (1995), Butler (1999), and hooks et al. (2004). In Span- ish academia, I would highlight the work done by Celia Amorós and her working group on feminism and Enlightenment: e.g., Amorós (1997) and Amorós and de Miguel (2005). In Johnson and Zubiaurre (2012) we find a recent review of Spanish feminist thinking where the discussion of the subject of feminism is central. [Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2018, vol. 43, no. 2] © 2017 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2018/4302-0004$10.00