001.06_eng_web

Page 1

The Crisis of Masculinity During the Transition, the public and private spheres under Francoism, and their figures of authority and gender codes, were reorganised. Artists and film-makers explored the distinctive forms of masculinity from the dictatorship, addressing the transformations that took place in Spanish Parliament and civil society, whilst touching on intimacy, family and daily life.

Moustaches and baldness formed the metonymy of a crestfallen masculinity, represented in politics and domestic interiors with the figure of the bread-winning father. In tune with works such as those produced by Lluís Casals and Carlos Pazos, the aesthetic and moral continuity of Francoism was called into question, with the same codes of authority cast into the political sphere, restored, or not, generation after generation and made visible over time on election posters. In the gallery of portraits from the time, photographers such as Alberto Schommer humorously captured the new configuration of Spanish manhood, while the imagery of intellectuals and politicians played with encapsulating national tradition — soldiers or bullfighters were armed with suits and ties like modern swords and red cloths. In La Cabina (The Telephone Box, 1972), a faithful allegory of the time, Antonio Mercero investigated late-Francoism masculinity and the repression that structured it, the telephone box representing masculine confinement and isolation. The political subject of developmentalism — mature, bald, grey, moustached — supported the decline of that period in history, before the emergence of other bodies, those of the Transition’s youth and baby boom children, which, through their presence, cancelled out a patriarchal regime and its symbols.


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.