Revitalizing Youth in the Body Politics of Contemporary Spanish Culture.

Abstract

This dissertation establishes an immunizing model for conceptualizing modern Spanish masculinity through an analysis of texts by fascist theorists Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Juan Antonio Vallejo-Nágera, and cinema by José Luis Sáenz de Heredia. It then proceeds to expose how film and literature by the “children of Franco” challenges such hegemonic models of masculinity through readings of the films La caza, by Carlos Saura, La mala educación by Pedro Almodóvar, and Pa negre by Agustí Villaronga. The novel Señas de identidad and autobiography Coto vedado by Juan Goytisolo participate in this project of resistence from the realm of literature. I then demonstrate the legacy of the imposition of Francoist masculinity found in the current political period in Spain in films and a novel dealing with drugs and youth in the Transition, and films concerning the health of the body during the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Eloy de la Iglesia’s El Pico, José Angel Mañas’s Las historias del Kronen, and Pedro Almodóvar’s Todo sobre mi madre betray such continuities between old fascist and contemporary paradigms for conceptualizing the body. This immunizing model of heroic imperial masculinity haunts Spanish culture in representations of the young male. The fascist victory of the Spanish Civil War brought with it cultural, educational, and medical apparatuses of biopolitical control. Such machineries were designed to “cure” the nation of leftist political ideologies, effeminacy, and the decline of the imperial race. For the regime, the greatest promise of a robust future for Spain resided in its youth. And, so, they became a primary target of its disciplining mechanisms. This revitalizing mandate on youth of some seventy years ago still reverberates in new cultural production today. Traces of its contours are evident in depictions of the tumultuous development of the intellectual commitments, sexuality, and bodily health of the young from the Franco period to the Transition. I call the traces of this phenomenon evidence of a bad education, and it has marked narratives of growing-up as a boy in Spain since its authoritarian institutionalization.