The Social Significance of Homosexual Scandals in Spain in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Cocks has argued that sexual scandal, often operating by means of press sensationalism and navigating cautiously between secrecy and disclosure, constitutes yet another ingredi- ent of biopower as identified by Foucault: not simply as a creation of the state but beginning with processes rooted in civil society.8 Cocks suggests, for example, that transvestism seems "to mimic more legitimate forms of civil society" and appears to undermine or question established notions of masculinity and masculine sociability,9 although, as Bristow notes, the relation between scandal and the tightening of legal repression or the sur- veillance of homosexuality remains open to discussion.10 Within an imperial and colonial context, scandals of a homosexual nature have been seen to presage the collapse of old values by displaying for all to see that which was rotten and corrupt in society, as in the German case of Philip, prince of eulenburg.11 Scandals also drew on tensions that existed between different models of colonial experience, class, and masculinity and have cast light on the very fragility of the colonial undertaking itself, whereby the decay of the metropole was contrasted to the perceived fixity of values in the colony.12 In many european countries, aristocratic homosexuality proved not only the decadence of this class, associated with useless labor, overstimulation, and effeminacy, but also provided a mirror image for late nineteenth-century societies to judge themselves against the progress made by other nations.13 sexual sCandal In spaIn This article develops the association between scandal and homosexuality and examines its anatomy by focusing on two scandalous occurrences that revolved around what might be termed gendered and sexual transgression in the late nineteenth century in Spain.