Session 7: Sex, Law and Culture

1st Global Conference

Monday 4th May 2009 – Thursday 7th May 2009
Budapest, Hungary

The Well of Punishment: Sex Legislation and the Prosecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Film Narratives of Spanish Fascism
Alejandro Melero Salvador
School of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

The Spanish fascist Dictatorship (1939-1975) is remembered, amongst other horrors, for having created one of the strictest sexual legislations in recent history. Under different sets of laws, Spaniards had to live under a number of severe regulations that dealt with most aspects of sexual behaviour, and that were admittedly inspired and dictated by the Catholic hierarchy. Sexual minorities, together with prostitution, were carefully prosecuted, to the extent that scientists, jurists and relevant politicians spent a lot of time, money and effort in the study of the prosecution of homosexuality. One of the biggest obsessions of those who studied homosexuality as a crime was that of discovering the origins of a sexual condition that was thought to be “a sickness”, as well as finding a cure for it. Gays and lesbians were prosecuted under three different legislations, the last one being the so-called Law of Social Danger, which operated until 1979. This law stated that “men and women found guilty of homosexuality […] could be imprisoned” and/or forced into exile. Two concentration camps were created for this purpose and my recent archival research includes the reports of medical experiments with gay men.

My paper studies the legacy of this last legislation in the film narratives of the late Francoism (1970s) and focuses on how a number of films paid attention to the question of the cause of homosexuality as a sickness. In order to do so, I look at a number of popular films and analyse how the representation of gays and lesbians is influenced by the precepts of the Law of Social Danger and the doctors and jurists who created it. I focus on the creation and stereotypification of gay men as traumatised individuals, and analyse how scriptwriters and directors followed the official legislation, while questioning and subverting it.

My paper works on three theoretical levels. First, I use fascist legal and medical texts around homosexuality. For this, I include archival material never seen before. Then, I refer to Foucault’s considerations on the creation and penalisation of the figure of the monster.  Finally, I introduce film and narrative theory that helps me to study the process of putting into narrative the sexual bylaws of Spanish fascism.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

John Patrick Shanley’s ‘Parable’ and the Ethics of Doubt”
Richard A. Bryan
Department of Languages, Literature, and Philosophy, Armstrong Atlantic State University, Savannah, GA, USA

With his 2005 Pultizer-Prize-winning play, now a major motion picture starring venerable actors Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Patrick Shanley has received almost uniform praise for Doubt, the work he subtitles “a parable.”  Indeed, the fact is that not only Doubt, but “doubt” itself, has received uniform praise, and that Shanley’s play invites a plethora of disquieting connections, conflations, and conclusions.

It is has often been remarked that Shanley’s play takes the form of a “mystery,” and that audiences are left to ponder the central dilemma of the work—that is, whether or not Father Flynn has, in fact, behaved inappropriately toward the adolescent student and alter boy, Donald Muller, in whom he has taken a special interest.  However, this ostensible center of the play belies and obscures other fundamental issues, including the way that Shanley conflates notions of doubt and faith, and the way he fails to distinguish between effeminacy, homosexuality, and pedophilia.  Such failures make the document rife for misunderstanding, misinterpretation, and misuse.  In addition, there are aspects of the play to suggest that Shanley, himself, has taken sides—that, beneath the rhetoric of “mystery” and “doubt,” the author has stacked the deck in favor of certain ideologies and outcomes.

I hope to demonstrate how Shanley’s play, at best, fails to question harmful sexual stereotypes.  At worst, Shanley’s substitution of ambiguity for complexity may encourage the play’s use as apologia for a host of conservative attitudes regarding sexuality and function or to excuse the repressive actions and agendas that frequently accompany such attitudes.  Ultimately, Doubt may function less like a mystery and, perhaps unintentionally, like a medieval morality play.