In the research concerning fictional audiovisual depiction of Queerness in Spain, there have, broadly speaking, been two recent eras defined as culturally and historically prominent. The first is aptly described by Santiago Fouz-Hernández who writes that for mainstream Queer visibility, ‘the modest momentum achieved during the second half of the 1990s was considerably amplified throughout the 2000s’ (2010: 81). Furthermore, in Chris Perriam’s monograph Spanish Queer Cinema, he specifically marks the introduction of civil unions in Catalonia as the start of a ‘substantial increase in the intensity and visibility of discourses – verbal and visual or performed – around LGBTQ identities’ (2013: 1). The second era starts with the arrival of Netflix, the world’s most popular streaming service, to Spain in 2015. The rise of Subscriptions Video on Demand services (SVoDs) is notable to this study for two reasons. On the one hand, these platforms allow for the inclusion of a greater number and variety of LGBTIQ + characters (Marcos-Ramos and González-de-Garay, 2021: 595) as a result of the commercial viability of producing programming for niche demographics. Conversely, Netflix in particular has sought to utilise Spain’s established televisual infrastructure to exploit the country’s decisive position as a programming pipeline to other Spanish-speaking nations and regions around the world’ (Edgerton, 2023: 129).
This thesis aims to chronicle the changes, consistencies, and regressions of Queer representation in Spanish culture by comparing these two periods of time. While much of the criticism on LGBTQ+ narratives is founded on visibility politics and the evaluation of positive/negative representation, I argue that this is insufficient for a rigorous analysis. As Queer film theorist Richard Dyer contends, one must discern how the principles of a text ‘in however ambiguous a way, [are] also principles of heterosexual hegemony’ (1977: 1) by linking aesthetics with sociopolitical analysis. Therefore, I will assess the degree of said ‘heterosexual hegemony’ in my chosen texts by equating it to and referencing what Lisa Duggan terms ‘the new homonormativity’. She defines this concept as ‘a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption’ (2003: 50). By adopting this framework, I intend to avoid the futility of a quantitative or simplistically positive/negative analysis of representation.
