Santiago Fouz-Hernández

ME CUESTA TANTO OLVIDARTE: MECANO AND THE MOVIDA REMIXED, REVISITED AND REPACKAGED

In a recent piece about movida-related literature, Paul Julian Smith critiques the tendency that he perceives in some ‘‘Spanish cultural scholars based in the US’’ (51) to read the cultural production of the Spanish transition as a sort of elegy for the dictator as a putative lost object. He argues that the movida resists a conventional Freudian reading in that it is far from constituted in mourning and melancholia (52 3). What is interesting now, in the light of recent events discussed in this article, is that the movida itself has become a lost golden age and a strong site of nostalgia. One version of the origins of the term nostalgia, from a Greek and Latin root (Greek nostos ‘home’ and New Latin algia ‘pain’), was first coined as a medical term by Johannes Hofer in 1688. Encountered in soldiers homesick for their homes, the condition manifested itself for Hofer in a dislocation from reality, a slowness, a listlessness and a tendency to ‘‘lose touch with the present’’ (Boym 3). In this initial diagnosis, then, nostalgia represents itself to the medic as a condition in which the patient becomes enamoured of a voice or a fragment of something that reminds him of home. The condition is precisely about an investment in objects and other fragments of the lost place, the lost loved one, the lost golden age. In short, then, nostalgia was always a kind of fetishism, to recast it in conventional Freudian terms: it was always about desire caused by an absence that could not be made whole. In this article, I set out to analyse the specifics of a nostalgia epidemic in Spain attaching itself to a series of products and, in particular, the musical Hoy no me puedo levantar (2005), in which an idealized and idealizing narrative of the movida, and the group Mecano’s contested part in it, is reduced to commodity, the new object cause of desire that fuels nostalgia in its late capitalist incarnation.

Phallic Matters? Ewan McGregor and the Representation of the Male Body in Peter Greenaway’s The Pillow Book (1996)

This article is a study of the representation of the male body in contemporary British cinema. It starts with a short exploration of how 1990s representations of masculinity in British cinema differed from those of the previous decade. A brief analysis of Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game and of some of the recent roles of actor Hugh Grant in mainstream cinema leads to a more detailed case study of Scottish actor Ewan McGregor and his role in Peter Greenaway’s film The Pillow Book. Relevant background on both actor and director reveals an overt awareness of and interest in the male body. The film’s approach to masculinity and its focus on the male integral nude question some of the, by now, tired conceptions that have surrounded many debates on male representation, such as the emphasis on the activity/passivity binary, the (male) gaze, or narcissism.

Ensnared Between Pleasure and Politics: Looking for Chicas Bigas Luna, Re-viewing Bambola

Reading through a selection of press cuttings, interviews and other visual and printed materials related to the release of Bigas Luna’s fifteen feature films spanning over thirty years, one can easily identify a relatively short list of key terms that keep recurring in interviews, press conferences, position articles and film reviews, particularly since the release of his second film, Bilbao, in 1978. These include: machismo, eroticism, pornography, exploitation, masculinity, femininity, the body, excess, food, Mediterranean (sea, countries, culture, stereotypes). Of all his works, the trilogy of ‘Iberian Portraits’ released in the first half of the 1990s, and in particular the film Jamon, jamon (1992), has attracted the most academic attention to date. The director’s emphasis on his leading actresses during the promotion of these films contrasts with the focus of reviews on the trilogy’s playful staging of Iberian masculinities. With some exceptions (see, for example, Deleyto (1999) or Evans (2004)), academic articles and studies devoted to Jamon, jamon have also largely focused on men and masculinities. As a result of this, the ‘Iberian Portraits’ Trilogy (Bigas Luna and Cuca Canals, 1994) is now widely known as the ‘masculine trilogy’ and, what was meant to be a follow-up ‘Latin’ trilogy — at the request of French producer Daniel Toscan du Plantier (Caballero, 1996) — with films set in Italy (Bambola, 1996); France (Le Femme de chambre du Titanic (The Chambermaid on the Titanic), 1997) and Spain (which Bigas Luna originally intended to be based on the story of Carmen, although in the end he opted for Volaverunt, 1999) — has become known as the ‘feminine trilogy’.

Identity without limits: Queer debates and representation in Contemporary Spain

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), 2 post-Franco Spanish law has been much more favourable in Spain than in Anglo-American countries. 3 This paradox can find its logic in Foucaults 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. 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. 5 The diversity of (regional) identities within Spain is suggestive of the countrys 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’. 6

Re-thinking ‘identities’ : cultural articulations of alterity and resistance in the new millennium.

In this essay, I examine contemporary renegotiations of feminism that constitute a challenge not only for self-defined feminists, but also for mainstream interpretive communities, and that in fact have the potential for a quasi-universal impact. I do so by focusing on the work of French female artists and performers Wendy Delorme and Emilie Jouvet. A key question provoked by their work is the extent to which their butch/fem(me) lesbian performances and textual artefacts constitute politically intelligible resistance to hegemonic norms of gender, sex and sexuality. The significance of this question extends well beyond the national boundaries of Delorme and Jouvet’s French identity. Indeed, their counter-discourses to more conventional feminisms have emerged not from any specifically French tradition, but as part of a more global movement. This globality is reflected in both of the texts selected as case-studies below. Delorme’s written text situates itself firmly in a clearly international context of discourses on feminism and sexuality, particularly queer (which is still as yet a relatively new discourse in France). Jouvet’s filmic text has a soundtrack which alternates between French and English, has a focus on performers of three different nationalities (American, French, German), and covers their tour across broad sweeps of Europe (Belgium, Denmark, France, and Germany). Delorme has in the past both taught at the University of Paris and acted in experimental lesbian X-rated films. However, her most notable interventions in the politics of gender and sex have taken the form...This volume sets out to re-imagine the theoretical and epistemological presuppositions of existing scholarship on identities. Despite a well-established body of scholarly texts that examine the concept from a wide range of perspectives, there is a surprising dearth of work on multiple, heterogeneous forms of identity. Numerous studies of ethnic, linguistic, regional and religious identities have appeared, but largely in isolation from one another. Rethinking ‘Identities’ is a multi-authored project that is original in providing – in distributed and granular mode – a hyper-contemporary and wide-ranging applied analysis that questions notions of identity based on nation and region, language, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion or even ‘the human’. The volume achieves this by mobilizing various contexts of identity (gender, ethnicity, sexuality, nation) and medium (art, cinema, literature, music, theatre, video). Emphasizing the extreme contemporary (the twenty-first century) and the challenges posed by an increasingly global society, this collection of essays builds upon existing intellectual investigations of identity with the aim of offering a fresh perspective that transcends cognitive and geographical frontiers.During the early 2000s Great Britain witnessed a considerable rise in numbers of the Russian-speaking former-Soviet migrant population.1 This has been the result of the greatly increased opportunities for migration in most former Soviet states, the eastwards enlargement of the European Union, and the economically driven relaxation of immigration regulations under the UK’s Labour government between 1997 and 2008.2 Although they patently form a linguistically cohesive group, the Russian-speaking migrants discussed here are not easy to define as a group in ethnic, national or diasporic terms. They include individuals arriving from different post-Soviet countries in several successive migrant waves, in a whole range of changing personal, professional and socio-economic circumstances. Their ethnic self-identifications, national loyalties, generational experiences and expressions of mutual solidarity remain complex and flexible, as do their migrant statuses and trajectories. Conceptualizing the ‘Russianness’ of this population is far from straightforward since many of these migrants’ identifications with Russian language, culture and history point to their common upbringing and roots in the former Soviet ‘empire’ rather than to either a particular ethnicity or citizenship. Indeed, both the term rossiiane, meaning ‘citizens of the Russian Federation’, and russkie, meaning ‘ethnic Russians’, are much too narrow and specific to apply to this migrant population as a whole. The term sootechestvenniki (compatriots), deployed by the Russian government in its legislation and policy documents in reference to ‘Russians outside Russia’ as a form of diaspora, is even more problematic on account of...Much has been written about Madrid’s iconic status in Spanish cinema as the epicentre of post-Franco liberation.1 Once symbolic of the totalitarian centrality promoted by the dictatorship, it soon became the site of modernity, urban freedom and jouissance, particularly during the movida (a time of great cultural creativity and social liberation following Franco’s death in the late 1970s and early 1980s) and due in no small part to the way in which it was depicted as some sort of playground in the early Almodovar films. Whilst still retaining some of its old centralist connotations, in the democratic era Madrid has become an icon of the quintessential celebration of difference, a welcoming place where Spaniards from all over the country, tourists and immigrants can live together, and, with some exceptions, it is still often depicted as such in contemporary film, literature and popular culture.2 The Chueca Square area in central Madrid has also experienced a radical evolution and it could be regarded, to some extent, as both a microcosm of the changes experienced in the city and the nation more widely and also a symbol of its openness. Once a semi-derelict and highly undesirable, even dangerous, part of town associated with crime, in the last three decades or so Chueca has become one of the city’s trendiest and priciest neighbourhoods. The barrio underwent a dramatic facelift as Spanish GLBTQ communities adopted it as its national epicentre.3...