'Los invisibles' : a history of male homosexuality in Spain, 1850-1939

Gender studies of Spain has thus far focused almost exclusively on women, leaving the social and political history of male homosexuality virtually untouched. ’Los Invisibles’ fills this significant gap in the study of Spanish culture by analyzing the effects of medical and legal regulation on male homosexuals. Drawing from the discourse of medical history, Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García evaluate the impact of psychiatry, education, race, and the growth of gay subcultures on cultural representations of homosexuality in this pioneering study. Research into homosexuality in Spain is in its infancy. The last ten or fifteen years have seen a proliferation of studies on gender in Spain but much of this work has concentrated on women's history, literature and femininity. In contrast to existing research which concentrates on literature and literary figures, Los Invisibles focuses on the change in cultural representation of same-sex activity of through medicalisation, social and political anxieties about race and the late emergence of homosexual sub-cultures in the last quarter of the twentieth century. As such, this book constitutes an analysis of discourses and ideas from a social history and medical history position. Much of the research for the book was supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust to research the medicalisation of homosexuality in Spain.A PDF version of this book is available for free in open access via the OAPEN Library platform. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license and is part of the OAPEN-UK research project. "Gender studies of Spain has thus far focused almost exclusively on women, leaving the social and political history of male homosexuality virtually untouched. 'Los Invisibles' fills this significant gap in the study of Spanish culture by analyzing the effects of medical and legal regulation on male homosexuals. Drawing from the discourse of medical history, Richard Cleminson and Francisco Vázquez García evaluate the impact of psychiatry, education, race, and the growth of gay subcultures on cultural representations of homosexuality in this pioneering study."--Publisher's website Series Editors’ Foreword 9 Acknowledgements 11 Introduction 13 The Birth of the ‘Invert’: a Truncated Process of Medicalization 41 The Sexological Context, 1915–1939: SexualInversion, Marañón’s ‘Intersexuality’ and the‘Social Dangerousness’ of the Homosexual 107 ‘Quien Con Niños se Junta’: Childhoodand the Spectre of Homoerastia 149 ‘In Search of Men’: Regeneracionismo andthe Crisis of Masculinity (1898–1936) 187 Homosexual Subcultures in Spain:the Intersection of Medicine, Politics andIdentity 229 Conclusion 277 Bibliography 293 Index 317 Examining the social, medical and cultural history of male homosexuality in Spain, this book looks at it from the time homosexuality came to be an issue of medical, legal and cultural concern."