Another Country : Sexuality and National Identity in Catalan Gay Fiction

Abstract

This book studies the emergence, in the late 1960s and 1970s, of a sophisticated body of gay fiction in Catalan, and examines the relation between the representation of homosexuality and the discourses on national identity that legitimate modern Catalan literature. Gay fiction, argues the author, reveals a tension between the nation and the body in Catalan literature: Catalonia is a nation different from Spain, a cultural and political minority within Europe; but the existence of sexual minorities within its boundaries reveals its inner complexity, which resists homogenization. Catalonia is another country in more ways than one. Drawing on a variety of critical discourses (gay theory, psychoanalysis, and authors such as Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Bourdieu), Another Country explores the intertwinings of identity, cultural politics, and desire in the work of Terenci Moix, Lluís Fernàndez, Biel Mesquida, and Lluís Maria Todó. The book analyses how gay writers renegotiate identity discourses in Catalan literature in order to introduce homosexuality into them, often with destabilising effects. The role of gay authors in the process of canon construction (a crucial aspect of contemporary cultural nationalism in Catalonia) is also considered, focusing on postmodernism and the divide between high and mass culture. Finally, Another Country addresses the interplay of homosexual desire within the frame of a distinction between perversion and transgression, and proposes an alliance between queer and nationalist discourses.