A closet for Spanish Feminism

Abstract

In the documentary Hidden & Proper. Las sinsombrero (2018) and in most of my Research work, I have defended the need to study women and feminism in modern Spain as a continuum and not as political and cultural phenomenon that stops in 1936 and kicks off again after 1975, when Franco dies. Vital research on historical memory has happened in Hispanism in the new millennium but the lives and experiences of women during Francoism have been largely left out. I propose a re-evaluation of the public, private and secret citizenship of women in authoritarian regimes by examining women’s and feminist history from the space of the closet. Defined as the basis of homosexual identity from the end of the 19th-century, the concept is useful to analyse different forms of gender unorthodoxy and dissidence. Francoism produced closets. Closets hid dissidence. In the closet of our feminism lies a legacy of parafeminist histories, experiences and culture this article seeks to outline.