However, the grass-roots activism of important transfeminist, queer, and lesbian groups often integrated by refugees and immigrants from the Global South (e.g., Radical Gai, LSD, Guerrilla Travolaka) prevented this curtailing. Spain’s “elevation” to a global-North country by the 1990s paved the way for some Spanish “homonationalist” (Puar) policies (i.e., support for LGBT legal rights at the expense of the rights of immigrants) that threatened to curtail the promise of the radical, intersectional gay liberation movement of the 1970s. My book’s unique significance lies in its main argument that transnational emotional bonds were crucial for the development not only of the Spanish underground gay and lesbian liberation movement of the 1970s, but also of the global LGBT networks that would eventually lead to the current, mainstream, global discourse of LGBT rights as human rights-a strategy that has favored gay and lesbian agendas of respectability and insertion in official national projects, leading some Nation States to use LGBT legal rights to “pinkwash” their international image. The cultural works I study make important aesthetic innovations, and they consciously engage in LGBTQ activism (or “artivism”).
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It uses literary, historical, and theoretical methods to focus on intersections among epistolary, literary, visual, and activist discourses and transnational lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans*, and queer (LGBTQ) mobilizations in Spain in relation to key moments: (1) the early 1970s, during the waning years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, when the gay and lesbian liberation movement operated underground through multinational networks of solidarity and (2) the early 2000s, during the debates around the passing of Law 13/2005 of July 1, 2005-legalizing same-sex marriage-and Law 3/2007 of March 15, 2007-allowing trans* citizens to change their genders and names in the National Registry without proof of sex-reassignment surgery. With the economic support of a UM 2021-2022 UM Fellowship in the Arts and Humanities, I am working on a second book, “Transnational Queer Affects and Activism: Literary and Visual Public Interventions in Spanish Culture (1970s-2000s),” whose main goal is to evaluate how aesthetic and political objectives in Spanish creative works either depict or were produced as a result of affective transnational links among Spaniards and Latin Americans and/or US-Latinxs-connections that led to new activist strategies and to greater political effectiveness. My research focuses on contemporary Spanish narrative and film, cultural studies, transnational and migration studies, and queer theory. I am the author of the book Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture: From Franco to la movida (SUNY Press 2007) and the guest editor, with Brenna Munro, of the 2017 special issue of S&F Online on the topic of “Thinking Queer Activism Transnationally.” Gema Pérez-Sánchez, an associate professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature and scholar of queer artists and movements in the Spanish-speaking world.
![raphael perez gay pride art raphael perez gay pride art](https://www.absolutearts.com/artwork/r/rafiperez/man_woman_painting_art-1634887934.jpg)
![raphael perez gay pride art raphael perez gay pride art](https://www.artmajeur.com/medias/home/r/a/rafiperez/artwork/9318082_cimg0858.jpg)
To celebrate Pride, we've collected experiences and insights from just a few of our researchers and scholars studying areas of interest in LGBTQ+ art, communities, and health.