Stretching the Map

A Cartography of Publications on Sexual Dissidence in the Spanish State during the Transition

Abstract

For more than a decade, there has been a renewal of studies focused on analyzing the history, politics, and culture of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s in Spain, as part of a broader questioning of the official narratives of late Francoism and the Transition to democracy. In this article, we present a mapping of the publications that have appeared between 2010 and the present in which this renewal can be traced through several forms of counter-readings. First, we survey the bibliography that reveals a double tension present in the memory maps of sexual dissidence: one operates along a horizontal axis, stretching the boundaries of the cartography toward geographies beyond the Madrid–Barcelona axis; the other operates along a vertical axis, from top to bottom, incorporating the voices and experiences of people (primarily lesbians, bisexuals, and trans individuals) who have so far had less prominence in the official histories of the movement. Second, we review publications that take cultural productions—film, music, comics, among others—as their starting point for recovering memory. In this second group, approaches based on archival research gain particular importance. The article concludes with a set of reflections in which we identify the silences and gaps that constitute future challenges for researchers.