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Barnard College

Publication Date

Spring 2019

Program Name

Spain: Policy, Law, and Regional Autonomy in Europe

Abstract

This paper will investigate the ways in which the politics of gender and sexuality during the Franco Regime in Spain (1936-1975) manifest in the transitional justice movement in Spain today. Under the Franco regime, gender and sexuality were policed through a series of ideological and repressive state apparatuses which the current democratic government has attempted to repeal and demolish. Through those apparatuses, bodies were punished, immobilized, and impressed upon in order to sort the demographic into normative hierarchized binaries for the purpose of legitimizing the state and exerting power in the service of domination over the populace. While many of the apparatuses under the Franco regime were demolished by the new democratic government, we must still query the ultimate success of those repeals. For under the current government’s negotiation of the past, and the ‘pact of silence’, as it were, I argue that we can see the re-animation and perpetuations of many of the systems of oppression the government seeks to dismantle. Queer and female bodies continue to be punished and immobilized in a larger hegemonic project of domination and state legitimization; this begs the question: whom does the pact of silence serve? More urgently, my research question: might the pact of silence established under the Transitional Justice Movement perpetuate the very systems of oppression it claims to dismantle?

Disciplines

European History | European Languages and Societies | Inequality and Stratification | International and Intercultural Communication | Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Studies | Political Science

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