Revitalizing Youth in the Body Politics of Contemporary Spanish Culture by Aaron R. Boalick A ...

200 Pages·2013·0.63 MB·English

by  Aaron Boalick

Revitalizing Youth in the Body Politics of Contemporary Spanish Culture

by

Aaron R. Boalick

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
(Romance Languages and Literatures: Spanish)
in the University of Michigan
2013

Doctoral Committee:

Professor Cristina Moreiras-Menor, Chair
Professor David Caron
Professor David Halperin
Professor Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola
Professor Juli Highfill
© Aaron R. Boalick

2013
To Jeff

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Acknowledgements

The Department of Romance Languages and Literatures of the University of Michigan,
the Rackham Graduate School, and the Spanish Ministry of Culture’s Program for Cultural
Cooperation provided ample financial support for this dissertation. Carin Scott and Katie Hayes
graciously shepherded me through its administrative completion. Many dear friends challenged,
encouraged, inspired, supported, and amused me during its writing: Ashley Rainey Donahey,
Maxime Foerster, Aston Gonzalez, Trevor Hoppe, Tom Maranda, Maria Robles, and Rachel
TenHaaf stand out among them. Jarrod Hayes offered precious mentorship and friendship
throughout my graduate program.
I owe my doctoral committee a great deal for enabling me to study modern Spanish
culture, and for their rigorous feedback and mentorship that made my success possible. I am
grateful to them for modeling the kinds of pedagogy and scholarship that I aspire to produce.
David Caron’s wit is as sharp as his critical insight, and he has shaped my thinking in
fundamental ways. David Halperin taught the world How To Be Gay, and he generously
continues to teach me how to be an academic. Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola’s knows “all about
Almodóvar,” and his support for and critique of my work are invaluable. The care and
dedication Juli Highfill brings to her scholarship are matched only by her largess with her
students and peers. She can also throw a mean hook in the boxing ring! In one of the most
engaging graduate seminars of my experience, Cristina Moreiras-Menor inspired my interest in
the study of how Spanish cultural texts represent and interface with notions of time and history.
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Since then, she has selflessly directed and facilitated my work, and I am incredibly thankful for
her leadership and example.
I would like to express my gratitude to my family, and–especially–my mother for the
many sacrifices she made for my education. It is a priceless gift that I was really not destined to
receive. Last, but not at all least, I thank Jeff for his love and persistent encouragement
throughout the completion of this project.
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Table of Contents

Dedication…………………………………………………………………………………………ii

Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………iii

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...vi

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………..…1

Chapter
I. Inoculating Ideologies: Forming Fascist Masculinities………………………………15

II. The Homosexual Child as Antisocial ……………………………………………......70
Monster in (Post)Francoist Cultural Production

III. Narcotic Pleasures, Violence, and the Re-articulation……………………………..121
of Machismo in the Spanish Transition to Democracy

IV. Maculate Conceptions: Children………………………………………………….144
and HIV/AIDS in Recent Spanish Cinema

Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………...184

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….186
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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
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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.
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Introduction
Hopes and aspirations for the Nation’s future rest on its vision for its youth. The fate of
the young and the destiny of the state are so bound together in the national imagination that sites
of youth–from the spheres of metaphor, art, literature, and film, to those of praxis and politics–
are hotly contested battlefields for power. Such contests are strikingly apparent in modern Spain
by means of comparison of the post-war totalitarian consolidation of administration over
education and youth programs, and the installation of the censorship apparatus by the Franco
regime, all the way to the contrasting liberal rhetorics and representations of youth in the
Transition, leading to the status of the young in the contemporary democratic state. Franco
insisted that the education of children in the precepts of Spanish national-catholicism and their
indoctrination into his one-party rule was to be a major priority of his new regime, and so it
should be no surprise that artists frequently use the perspective of figures of youth in an attempt
to either reify, or to rethink and undermine his authority. Conversely, his death and the rise of
democracy in Spain are often allegorized as a national coming-of-age, and the faces of the
Transition and the budding democracy are cast as those of the young of the new state. Children,
in Spain, come to embody the “unfinished business” of the Transition, both through recollections
of childhoods, invoked from the Francoist past, and as open questions about the future of the
body politic.
While scholarship has concerned itself with, especially, the female bildungsroman in
post-war Spain, it has not sufficiently taken account of the role of the political in coming-of-age
narratives, or how depictions of and prescriptions for the bodies of youth inflect on larger
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questions and problems facing the national body. In other words, there has been inadequate
inquiry into discourses and mimetic models surrounding youth in the Franco and democratic
periods, aimed at forming good Spanish citizen-subjects, and the resistances, failures, successes,
consequences, and echoes thereof, that reach all the way into contemporary art and narrative.
Under Franco, forty years of social programming and rhetoric governing the young–from the
education system, dominated by the Catholic Church, to the editing, banning, and distribution of
films, books, and magazines by the state–had a profound impact on cultural production that
reverberates into the present. Youth were mobilized in film and literature during the Transition
period in attempts to rethink the bounds of collective relationality that remain limited in a
neoliberal democratic system of governance.
This study seeks to shed light on contemporary concerns surrounding the imperative of
growing up as a man, and coming-of-age in Spain, by taking a look at representations of youth in
the post-war period under Franco, and then representations of boys in the democratic period,
which it considers to be foundational moments that set the contemporary stage as points of
reference in coming-of-age narratives. Artists’ depictions of boyhood proffer continuities in the
relationship between the male body and national community across the fascist and democratic
periods that are characterized by an impulse towards the immunization of the male
body/collective from “contaminating” feminine or politically impure elements. By focusing on
youth and the pressures placed on the formative experience of coming-of-age, the study seeks to
mine a rich field in order to uncover and compare the biopolitical aims of the different regimes
of power. It will do so by taking a cultural-studies approach and examining narrative, film, and
political rhetoric from the war, post-war, and Transition periods, and then it will consider these
contexts as they relate to subsequent narratives of youth from within and outside of them.
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