Identity without limits: Queer debates and representation in Contemporary Spain
Year: 2004
Type: article
Abstract: In June 2002, the Spanish Pride movement celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. One of the striking contradictions that emerges from comparing the Anglo-American and the Spanish gay struggles is that whilst most Anglo-American societies have been traditionally more accepting of gay and lesbian people (hence many lesbian and gay Spaniards emigrate to the United Kingdom or to the States),Footnote 2 post-Franco Spanish law has been much more favourable in Spain than in Anglo-American countries.Footnote 3 This paradox can find its logic in Foucault's belief that repressive power is not an oppressive force but a ‘productive network’ as indeed De Fluvia, Aliaga and Cortes, and Bergmann and Smith have noted.Footnote 4 It was the existence of old discriminatory laws that encouraged the early lesbian and gay movements of the 1970s in Catalonia and the Basque Country. As observed by Llamas and Vidarte, the historical rejection of imposed identities in various regions of Spain underline the close relationship between nationalist, and gay and lesbian movements within the nation.Footnote 5 The diversity of (regional) identities within Spain is suggestive of the country's queer potential and yet, as these authors argue, those same principles, together with the nomadic nature of the lesbian and gay struggle, make it difficult to conceive a ‘national’ struggle or to talk about Spain in terms of a ‘queer nation’.Footnote 6
Author: Santiago Fouz-Hernández
Institution: Durham University
Language: English
Topic: Gender and Feminist Studies
Subfield: Gender Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2012054769