Contra el armario. Archivos y escenarios disidentes

The basis that makes up the works included in this volume are heterogeneous: on the one hand, the philological perspective attached to the text and its interpretation; on the other, the concern for the archive and its reverse, the counter-archive, as a mechanism for reading “against the grain” in a Benjamin way. The purpose is none other than to recover and repair the memory of sexually dissident people. All of them address aspects of diversity, from the beginning of the 20th century to the present, with the aim of reflecting the various ways in which the selected authors have lived or read the difference from their fictional or autobiographical writing. This broad chronological arc helps to understand the varied experiences and circumstances that surround the construction of sexual-affective diversity.

The approach proposed by this volume reflects the variants that the expression of this difference adopts according to the sociopolitical contexts, the weight of shame, the strategies of survival and contestation, the class and the place from which it is enunciated, the biographical circumstances, even the sexual orientation: the Franco dictatorship, exile, fear of social stigma, policies of silence about AIDS, artivism as a space of sociability and struggle, nostalgia for a dull Hellas, internalized homophobia, the dandy or scoundrel celebration, the discourses of insult and

homonormative violence against the effeminate run through these lives and their textuality, destabilizing the usual narratives about gay literature.