Seminário

From revolutionary claims to citizenship rights: the Spanish LGTB movement as a laboratory case to explain this journey

Gracia Trujillo (Universidade de Castilla-La Mancha)

5 de junho de 2013, 17h00

Sala 2, CES-Coimbra

Resumo

My conference will focus on the evolution of identity discourses and claims-making made by the Spanish LGTB movement from mid 1970s on, and will try to explain why and how social movements change their demands, and how they do so. In Spain, as mostly in elsewhere in the western world, demands and arguments displayed by the LGTB movement have become increasingly de-sexualised (with the exception of the more radical, queer groups). The moderate part of the movement has increasingly abandoned sexual themes to display broader narratives that spin around citizenship and human rights. The major section of the Spanish LGTB groups aligned during the 1990s with the international call for the legal recognition of same-sex couples; this replaced a period of revolutionary politics and claims that help classified this social movement as a revolutionary, anti-capitalist social movement (ideas followed up by the queer and feminist groups). From 1998 onwards, however, the predominant frame was that of marriage and full adoption rights. In my talk, I will try to underline what points we still need to consider to explain these transformations on identity discourses, demands and the prices-to pay by the movements, arguing that the Spanish experience might be a good laboratory to do so.


Nota biográfica

Gracia Trujillo holds a PhD in Sociology (Autonomous University of Madrid) and is Doctora Miembro of the Juan March Institute, Madrid. Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Castilla- La Mancha, she also teaches Feminist and Queer theories and practices in other postgraduate programmes (UNIA, UCM). She has been Visiting Scholar at the NYU, University of Bolonia (Italy) and Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). She is coauthor of the Spanish collective works The Axis of Evil is Heterosexual. Queer Feminist Representations, Movements and Practices (2005), A Universal Discrimination. Homosexuality in Francoism and in the Transition to Democracy (2008), and Political Bodies and Agency. Feminist Analysis on Body, Work and Coloniality (2011), among others. She has also published, together with Kerman Calvo, “Fighting for Love Righs. Claims and Strategies of the LGTB movement in Spain” (Sexualities, 2011). Her book Desire and Resistance. Thirty years of Lesbian Mobilization in Spain (1977- 2007) (Egales, 2010), won the “Desayuno en Urano” award to the best essay on LGTB queer issues published in 2010. Feminist and queer activist since 1995, she has cofunded several feminist and queer groups such as Las Goudous, Bollus Vivendi and Grupo de Trabajo Queer. She now integrates a queer group, la Asamblea Transmaricabollo de Sol, which is part of the protest movement called May 15th, born in the streets on 2011.               


Nota: Atividade no âmbito do Núcleo de Estudos sobre Democracia, Cidadania e Direito (DECIDe)