Paper short abstract:

Post-Franco reorganizations of gender and sexuality have produced new physical realities including new bodies and places out of old spaces and bodies in the capital city of Madrid. This paper will address how the Madrid barrio of Chueca is produced as a gay space out of the use of commodities and images thought by Spaniards to be indicative of a global gay identity; as well as the emotional /perceptual construction of the border between homonormative space and heteronormative space.

Paper long abstract:

The rise of public gay identity in Spain after the death of Franco in 1975 has reorganized systems of sexuality and gender. Before the death of Franco public manifestations of queerness were forbidden and punishable by prison terms. Post-Franco reorganizations have produced new physical realities including new bodies and places out of old spaces and bodies in the capital city of Madrid. This paper will address how the Madrid barrio of Chueca is produced as a gay space out of the use of commodities and images thought by Spaniards to be indicative of a global gay identity; as well as the emotional /perceptual construction of the border between homonormative space and heteronormative space. The connection between gay identity and 'modernidad' (modernity (but not in terms of an historical epoch and more in terms of a rejection of the Franco-ist past)) produces place in particular manners by using various tools at various scales of analysis ranging from the global commodity to the everyday lived experiences of crossing from heterosexual space to gay space within the confined of the city itself. Essentially, this paper traces how Chueca was and is produced as a gay place through use of the commodity, images and the emotional lives of the men and women who move between what they term as gay and heterosexual space. This paper is based on three years of anthropological fieldwork in the gay neighborhood of Chueca.