https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9113-9010
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Abstract
Queerfeminist strategies in the reconstruction of memories, such as performative uses of fantasy in (auto)biographical (non)fiction texts, can bring out what has been repressed by androcentric narratives of History. Through memory dispositives, which trigger frictions between past and present, fiction and reality, creators manage to confront trauma. This is illustrated by close reading two works dealing with (post)memories of the Spanish Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship: Carmen Martín Gaite’s novel El cuarto de atrás (1978) and Maite García Ribot’s documentary film Cartas a María (2015). While Martín Gaite navigates through her own fictionalized memories, García Ribot reconstructs her grandfather’s exile.
Notes
1 Carmen Martín Gaite, El cuarto de atrás (Barcelona: Ediciones Destino, 1981 [1st ed. 1978]). Further references are to this edition and will be given in parentheses in the main text.
2 We understand transmedia in a wide sense, as the tendency of certain arguments, themes and characters to appear in different media. See Domingo Sánchez-Mesa & Jan Baetens, ‘La literatura en expansión: intermedialidad y transmedialidad en el cruce entre la literatura comparada, los estudios culturales y los New Media Studies’, Tropelías. Revista de Teoría de la Literatura y Literatura Comparada, 27 (2017), 6–27; available online at <https://papiro.unizar.es/ojs/index.php/tropelias/article/view/1536> (accessed 14 March 2024).
3 We use the term ‘memory dispositive’ in the sense proposed by Laura Basu (as ‘memory dispositifs’), who explains that: ‘it is not only a collection of representations that makes a memory but their constellation: their positioning in relation to each other’. A memory dispositive, she further argues, ‘allows us to begin to map those constellations and understand how they function’. That is how the filmmaker, as we develop throughout the article, employs the letters (Laura Basu, ‘Memory Dispositifs and National Identities: The Case of Ned Kelly’, Memory Studies, 4:1 [2011], 33–41 [p. 35]).
4 Patricia Grace King, ‘ “There’s Always a Dreamed Text”: Defying Mythologized History in Carmen Martín Gaite’s El cuarto de atrás’, South Atlantic Review, 69:1 (2004), 33–60 (p. 34).
5 King, ‘ “There’s Always a Dreamed Text” ’, 34.
6 Nicholas Mirzoeff, ‘The Right to Look’, Critical Inquiry, 37:3 (2011), 473–96 (p. 475).
7 King, ‘ “There’s Always a Dreamed Text” ’, 34.
8 David K. Herzberger, ‘Narrating the Past: History and the Novel of Memory in Postwar Spain’, PMLA. Modern Language Association, 106:1 (1991), 34–45 (p. 36). Herzberger also mentions the following novels of memory as examples supporting his argument: Juan Benet’s Volverás a Región (1967), Una meditación (1970) and Saúl ante Samuel (1980); Miguel Delibes’ Cinco horas con Mario (1966); and Luis Goytisolo’s Recuento (1973) and La cólera de Aquiles (1979).
9 Some examples of these documentaries include Muerte en El Valle (Christina María Hardt, 1996); Nadar (Carla Subirana, 2008); El muro de los olvidados (Joseph Gordillo, 2008); Pepe el andaluz (Alejandro Alvarado & Concha Barquero, 2012); and Tierra encima (Sergio Morcillo, 2005). For more information see Laia Quílez Esteve, ‘Memorias protésicas: Posmemoria y cine documental en la España contemporánea’, in La comunicación en la profesión y en la universidad hoy, Historia y Comunicación Social, 18 (2013), 387–98; available online at <https://revistas.ucm.es/index.php/HICS/article/view/43974> (accessed 15 March 2024); and Mario de la Torre Espinosa, ‘Cines del yo: el documental autoficcional contemporáneo español’, BHS, XCII:5 (2015), 567–82.
10 Marianne Hirsch, ‘Connective Arts of Postmemory’, Analecta Política. Revista Científica, 9:16 (2019), 171–76 (p. 172); available online at <https://revistas.upb.edu.co/index.php/analecta/article/view/502> (accessed 15 March 2024).
11 Marianne Hirsch, ‘Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile’, in Creativity and Exile: European/American Perspectives II, ed. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Poetics Today, 17:4 (1996), 659–86 (p. 662).
12 See Mirzoeff, ‘The Right to Look’.
13 Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities. An Introduction’, in Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities, ed. Teresa de Lauretis, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, 3:2 (1991), iii–xviii (p. v).
14 See, for example: C. L. Quinan, Hybrid Anxieties: Queering the French-Algerian War and Its Postcolonial Legacies (Lincoln, NE: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2020).
15 Karen Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, in Feminist Materialisms, ed. Hilda Rømer Christensen & Bettina Hauge, Kvinder, Køn og forskning, 1:2 (2012), 25–53 (p. 29).
16 Marietta Radomska, Tara Mehrabi & Nina Lykke, ‘Introduction. Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning from a Queerfeminist Perspective’, in Queer Death Studies, ed. Marietta Radomska, Tara Mehrabi & Nina Lykke, Australian Feminist Studies, 35:104 (2020), 81–100 (p. 89).
17 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999), ix, 5 & 11.
18 Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La frontera. The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2007 [1st ed. 1987]), 101.
19 Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness’, Feminist Studies, 16:1 (1990), 115–50 (p. 127).
20 Radomska, Mehrabi & Lykke, ‘Queer Death Studies’, 89; original emphasis.
21 Noreen Giffney & Myra J. Hird, ‘Introduction: Queering the Non/Human’, in Queering the Non/Human, ed. Noreen Giffney & Myra J. Hird (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2008), 1–16 (p. 5).
22 Radomska, Mehrabi & Lykke, ‘Queer Death Studies’, 92.
23 Judith Butler, ‘Critically Queer’, GLQ. A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 1:1 (1993), 17–32 (p. 19).
24 Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, 44.
25 Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, 43.
26 Barad, ‘Nature’s Queer Performativity’, 41.
27 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York/London: Routledge, 1990), 141.
28 Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard U. P., 2015), 29.
29 Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, 63.
30 J. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York/London: New York U. P., 2005), 1.
31 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 77.
32 Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 78.
33 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana U. P., 2010), 202.
34 Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 204.
35 Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 204.
36 Even the decision to shoot Western Deep on Super 8mm film was motivated by McQueen’s search for this performative effect, as he explains: ‘I wanted to shoot on something that had grain. I wanted it to stick to the viewer. I wanted something that the viewer could hold onto, that had texture, the texture of rock, the drilling and mining. I wanted the audience to actually feel the molecules of dust’. Quoted in Lucia Aspesi, Fiammetta Griccioli & Mariagiulia Leuzzi, Steve McQueen: Sunshine State, exhibition programme, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan/Tate Modern, London (Milan: Pirelli HangarBicocca, 2022), 16–17.
37 Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (London/New York: Routledge, 2000), 6.
38 For a discussion of how documentary cinema co-creates the realities it shows see Orianna Aketzalli Calderón-Sandoval, ‘Visualising In/Equalities through Contemporary Documentary Cinema: A Diffractive Reading of Feminist Practices in Spanish and Italian Non-Fiction Films’, Doctoral dissertation (Universidad de Granada & Università di Bologna, 2019).
39 Lola Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise (London: Hajar Press, 2021), 27.
40 Olufemi, Experiments in Imagining Otherwise, 34.
41 Jasbir K. Puar, ‘ “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory’, philoSOPHIA, 2:1 (2012), 49–66. For further discussions of f(r)ictions applied to art spaces, see Ángela Harris-Sánchez, ‘Power in Public Art Spaces. F(r)ictions, Performativity and the Generation of Counter-Hegemonic Narratives’, Doctoral dissertation (Universidad de Granada & Università di Bologna, 2023).
42 Päivi Jokinen & Susan Nordstrom, ‘A Queer Cyborg Ethnographer in the Performative Friction of Dissenting Ontologies’, Qualitative Inquiry, 26:6 (2020), 639–49 (p. 639).
43 Jasmina Lukić & Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, ‘Feminist Perspectives on Close Reading’, in Theories and Methodologies in Postgraduate Feminist Research: Researching Differently, ed. Rosemarie Buikema, Gabriele Griffin & Nina Lykke (New York/London: Routledge, 2011), 85–160 (p. 106; original emphasis).
44 Joan Lipman Brown, ‘A Fantastic Memoir: Technique and History in El cuarto de atrás’, Anales de Literatura Española Contemporánea, 6 (1981), 13–20 (p. 13).
45 Patrick Paul Garlinger, Confessions of the Letter Closet: Epistolary Fiction and Queer Desire in Modern Spain (Minneapolis/London: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005), 37.
46 Garlinger, Confessions of the Letter Closet, 50.
47 This anonymous, undated engraving is part of the Carmen Martín Gaite archive in the Biblioteca Digital de Castilla y León, reference ES.VIBBCL 2.5.3\ACMG,48,10; available online at <https://bibliotecadigital.jcyl.es/es/consulta/registro.do?id=26076> (accessed 6 June 2024).
48 Garlinger, Confessions of the Letter Closet, 38.
49 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Queer and Now’, in The Routledge Queer Studies Reader, ed. Donald E. Hall et al. (London/New York: Routledge, 2012 [1st ed. 1991]), 3–17 (p. 5).
50 A similar strategy is employed by Guillermo del Toro in his film El laberinto del fauno (2006).
51 Apart from the aforementioned work by Garlinger, this argument has also been developed in: Danae Gallo González, ‘Los fantasmas queer de la dictadura franquista: ¡Toda una re-velación!’, Doctoral dissertation (University of Kentucky, 2012), 35–43.
52 Garlinger, Confessions of the Letter Closet, 36.
53 Garlinger, Confessions of the Letter Closet, 48.
54 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 11 & 12.
55 Butler, ‘Critically Queer’, 23.
56 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC/London: Duke U. P., 2010), 55.
57 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 50.
58 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 65 & 55.
59 Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana U. P., 1987), 108.
60 Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Queer and Now’, 9.
61 José Francisco Cerdán, ‘No hacer nada’, in No se está quieto: nuevas formas documentales en el audiovisual hispánico, ed. Marta Álvarez, Hanna Hatzmann & Inmaculada Sánchez Alarcón (Madrid: Iberoamericana/Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 2015), 33–58.
62 Laia Quílez Esteve, ‘Hacia una teoría de la posmemoria: reflexiones en torno a las representaciones de la memoria generacional’, Historiografías. Revista de Historia y Teoría, 8 (2014), 57–75; available online at <https://papiro.unizar.es/ojs/index.php/historiografias/article/view/2417> (accessed 19 March 2024).
63 Laia Quílez Esteve & Nuria Araüna Baró, ‘Diálogo con la ausencia: la epístola como herencia del pasado traumático en el cine documental español contemporáneo’, L’Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos, 28 (2019), 209–22, p. 210; available online at <https://revistaatalante.com/index.php/atalante/article/view/707> (accessed 19 March 2024).
64 Quílez Esteve & Araüna, ‘Diálogo con la ausencia’, 213.
65 Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 204.
66 John Rajchman, ‘Foucault’s Art of Seeing’, October, 44 (1988), 88–117 (p. 91).
67 For a comprehensive argument sustaining the use of concepts as methods, see Ángela Harris Sánchez, ‘Power in Public Art Spaces: F(r)ictions, Performativity and the Generation of Counter-Hegemonic Narratives’.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of intertest was reported by the authors.