Taking the Bull by the Horns: Representing Gender through Animals in Franco's Spain

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the (de)construction of gender and nation through animal symbols in Franco’s Spain. The project explores, first, a web of miscellaneous discourses articulated around the official bestiary rhetoric that serve in the composition of uniform gender models tailor-made for the virile totalitarian state. The selection of texts presented is eclectic, both in its nature and form. It encompasses a wide repertoire of multi-media discourses (i.e., scientific, religious, legal, educational, political, commercial, humorous and popular) presented visually (movies, posters, comics, cartoons, flags, advertisements, logotypes), aurally (songs, harangues, sermons, speeches, radio programs) and in the written form (literary excerpts, newspapers, magazines, medical and religious treatises, conduct manuals, epistles), and whose aim is, ultimately, to illustrate the dissemination and scope of zoomorphic images in the representation of nation and gender during the Francoist dictatorship.

Apart from providing a panoramic view of the gendered fauna, these historical documents will also serve as the unifying thread to unravel the complexities of several censored artistic productions that cunningly resort to the prevailing bestial iconography to attack the androcentric state. By focusing on the animalized portrayals of the female characters of la Gata [the She-Cat] in Margarita Alexandre and Rafael María Torrecilla’s movie La gata (1956), la Loba [the She-wolf] in Rafael de León, Andrés Moles and Manuel López Quiroga’s copla “La Loba” (1960), and the surrealistic centaur woman Albina in Ana María Moix’s novel Walter, ¿por qué te fuiste? (1973), this work attempts to illustrate the co-existence of a counter discourse able to re-define the monolithic pillars of gender and nation upon which the Francoist regime was constructed.

Finally, to highlight the relevance of animal symbolism in the formation of concepts of gender and nation, this dissertation notes a similar deployment of the Francoist bestiary rhetoric in the nationalist discourse of the far-right Spanish political party VOX (2013-present).