Between Crime and Madness: Sexual and Affective Relationships between Women and Gender Non-Conformism under the Franco Regime

Abstract

This paper analyzes judicial files from the Vagrancy Court located in Sevilla (Spain) as well as a first-person account of an encounter with a psychiatric patient who was “not-conforming with [her] femininity.” Through these sources, this paper traces the variable dynamics and mutually productive tensions between “negotiated” and “oppositional” codes in gender performances and sexual/affective relationships under the Franco Regime. It argues that the state authorities were fundamentally interested in keeping their politics of silence, which required exceptional interventions to prevent the hypervisibility of lesbian affects and of the masculinity of individuals officially registered as women. These interventions produced tensions with social and family networks that exercised their own informal control over women. Expressions of gender and sexual/affective non-conformism appropriated the negotiated codes of accommodation and dissimulation as well as the porous boundaries between women’s friendship and love. There were also oppositional strategies, including “going into the wild” and confronting relatives. The experiences of personal autonomy on which this study centers reveal that these experiences neither fit nor could be read within the dominant code of the Francoist authorities. Last, this study also argues that the internal contradictions of that dominant code contributed to undermine the adaptive elements of negotiated codes and show their oppositional potential.