Queer Literature in Spain: Pathways to Normalisation

Abstract

More than any other, the idea of normalisation has provoked deep divisions within queer activism both at a philosophical and also at a political level. At the root of these divisions lies the irreconcilable divergence between an agenda for social change, which advocates the need for society to accept all sexual behaviours and identities as normal, and an approach of radical resistance against some social structures that can only offer a bourgeois and conformist normalisation. Literary fiction and homo-gay-queer themed cinema have explored these and other sides of the idea of normalisation and have thus contributed to the taking of decisive steps: from the poetics of transgression towards the poetics of celebration and social transformation. In this paper we examine two of these literary normalisation strategies: the use of humour and the proliferation of discursive perspectives both in the cinema and in narrative fiction during the last decades.