Margaret Mary WoodPrecursora de las visiones renovadas de la figura del extraño

Abstract

Recent reflections on the figure of the stranger, which result from its identification as paradigmatic of contemporary society (Marotta, 2010: 106), continue to consider Georg Simmel’s understanding of this social form in “The Stranger” (1908) as the primary reference point. Margaret Mary Wood was, however, the first to develop a comprehensive description of this subject in The Stranger: A Study in Social Relationships (1934). The main purpose of this article is to rescue her neglected contribution within the masculinized tradition of study of strangeness, and thus expose its centrality among the classical theorizations of this figure within the framework of the new academic interest to overcome its dominant perception as a fetishized identity (Ahmed, 2000). The central hypothesis is that Wood’s contribution represents an inescapable precedent to the study of the new version of this entity, the cosmopolitan stranger, as well as to more recent efforts to understand the stranger as an individual embodied condition which depends on the circumstances in which it is established, wherein social emotionality as a relational form has a fundamental role in its formation (Jackson et al., 2017).