Referencia completa: Cleminson, Richard, Fernández, Pura y Vázquez García, Francisco: «The social significance of homosexuals scandals in Spain in the late Nineteenth Century», Journal of the History of Sexuality, 23 (2014), 3 (CHICAGO, USA), pp. 358-382

In what follows, we explore two principal scandals of a (homo)sexual nature that occurred during the closing years of the nineteenth century. We argue that not only were such articulations new in the sense that it was only with the growth of a national and regional press that permitted them but also that they were new to Spain since it was only with the scandalous behaviour of Queen Isabella II in the 1870s that such a way of representing sexuality came about. The two cases we examine – the first from the 1870s-1880s concerning the ‘decadence’ of the aristocratic class and the second from the 1890s concerning the morality of the political class – also connect with and reflect broader issues alive in Spain at the time. These were: concerns over the moral fabric of the nation, its relative make-up in terms of the social classes and the “usefulness”, in an on-going liberal project of modernity, of the aristocracy; the connections between moral decadence and the perception of national decline particularly in respect of the enduring question marks over the longevity and durability of the remaining Spanish colonies, once part of an extensive overseas empire; concerns about rising class conflicts during a period of workers’ mobilization and challenges to the emerging capitalist order and the state; a preoccupation with Spain’s standing with reference to other European countries, particularly acute around the legacy of the “black legend”, supposed “primitiveness” and a lack of social, political and economic development; and finally, an emerging powerful medical, legal and social hygienic discourse and practice that sought to purify the social by increased intervention in the population at large, an endeavour that procured and was often awarded state recognition and backing.

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