This article examines questions of sexual citizenship in The Dress, directed by Tadeusz . It situates the film’s narrative alongside disability studies’ repositioning in a social model of the sexuality of people with disabilities. It argues that interpreting The Dress as a contribution to discourse about sexual inclusivity is not at odds with seeing the film as one in which the representation of human desires and frustrations assumes a universal relevance. Analysis of mise en scène and comparisons drawn from art history query the film’s use of aesthetics. Reference to Intimate Encounters 20 Years On underscores cultural specificities in turn between conservativism and progressivism.

Director David Wagner says Trade Queen ‘was never intended to be a period film’. However, the suitability of black-and-white 35 mm for the story points to the inflection between markers of analogue and digital registration as one that also codes the boundary between queer and straight experience. This article argues that while Trade Queen is tagged as a film without dialogue, the use of sound design and music in the film is critical to a narrative told aurally as well as visually. Furthermore, it is the use of sound in this film – which ends with vinyl interference – that articulates the tension between analogue and digital, and between heteronormative and queer experience. In punchlines, the synthesized reverb of Ruby Treasure’s score, and in interiors heard from the gated picket fence, we hear as well as see the transitions between public and private selves.

This article uses new economic and activist histories of Spain’s housing sector to read the representation of residential spaces in Spanish comics and graphic novels from 13, Rue del Percebe (Francisco Ibáñez, 1961) to Españistán (Aleix Saló, 2011), and La casa (Paco Roca, 2015). It examines how visual narrative art from Spain reflects continuities between housing strategy in the Franco era and its enduring effects on Spain’s economy following the 2008 crisis. The article presents a close reading of the innovative formal, narrative, and genre-specific techniques employed by Paco Roca in La casa. Its discrete sections articulate an economic and social history suturing the dictatorship period and the post-transitional democratic era, around the triadic development model (tourism-construction-financial development) pursued in Spain since the 1950s.

Through explicitation of Roquet's aesthetics - including echoes and reflections of Erice, Hammershoi and Martel - this article argues that The Goodbye harnesses intertextuality concisely to question how class, language, gender, servitude and race intersect. It addresses the role of grief in illuminating the indignities of deeply entrenched power relations.

This article frames its reading of Uncle Bill alongside the question of whether the Beats in Mexico were glorified tourists, or early, unwitting, exponents of deeply embedded ethnographic practices. This question is in turn linked to the contention of Mexican critics that Burroughs was ignorant of his cultural surroundings, through a close examination of the evocation of Mexico City in the 1950s. Particular attention is given to Bef's inclusion in Uncle Bill of a challenging series of panels without text. How does this work to illustrate mid-century Mexico City, and how does it complicate the legibility of the comic? The article queries the extent to which Burroughs, who styled his alter ego as ‘El Hombre Invisible—the Invisible Man…’ (Burroughs 2005: 56), is extricated from obscurity as a homosexual when his halting, fragmentary, and circuitous style is transformed into sequential art. Prior to opening up these questions, the article reviews the form and structure of Uncle Bill, as well as the author’s account of what he aimed to do with the text, and of influences on the style with which the book combines biography and autobiography.

My chapter focuses on two Spanish films that depict pain experiences alongside representations of disability: Insensibles (2012) directed by Juan Carlos Medina, and La herida (2013), directed by Fernando Franco. Examining the films' depictions of Borderline Personality Disorder and congenital analgesia, the chapter queries the psychosomatic and the Cartesian dualism that informs definitions of disability.

This article draws attention to, and identifies, the principal landmarks of Barcelona included in Bamboleho’s panoramic views. The meaning and history of these monuments add a further dimension to the film: the city’s shifting character. How is our understanding of crucial moments for the protagonists informed by the urban backdrop?

This article applies Jean E. Veevers' tripartite schematization of the social meaning of pets to an interpretation of canine protagonism in three Spanish texts. The functions of domestic pets identified by Veevers—projection, sociability and surrogacy—are mapped onto La criatura, directed by Eloy de la Iglesia (1977), Solas, written and directed by Benito Zambrano (1999) and Recuerdos de perrito de mierda, written and illustrated by Marta Alonso Berná (2014). Animal companions are made central in my analysis which fuses ethological cinematic theory with a review of critical reception to produce new readings of the texts. These uncover deconstruction of heteropatriarchy, gendered neo-liberalism and speciesism, loci hitherto unexplored in detail with respect to the corpus of material. The article posits the dog as an analogue skeuomorph and as a register of transformation that marks a shift in canine rhetorical value from psychopomp in the 1970s to remnantal residue of cultural memory in the 2010s.

Homosexuality and gay rights may seem tangential to the history of the Cold War, and to the collapse of Marxist-Leninist communism (which had little time or regard for non-reproductive queers).

This article reads Carla Subirana's documentary film Nedar against a background of panic in the mainstream media (in Spain as in the United States and the United Kingdom) about Alzheimer's disease and the apocalyptic demography presupposed by an aging population. It considers the history of Alzheimer's disease and diagnosis to propose that while technologies for the medical representation of the disease are becoming globalised, cultural responses to experiences of the disease are more distinctive. The article queries the use of illness as metaphor in Nedar and suggests that Alzheimer's, dementia, and amnesia are used to portray the irretrievable loss of information about personal and collective experience in Civil War and post-war Spain. The article details the film's juxtaposition of illness and archives within an exploration of the debate articulated by Susan Sontag and Nancy ScheperHughes over the appropriate use of disease metaphors: Alzheimer's complicates this debate because patients are sometimes unable to tell their own stories. The representation of amnesic disease is further complicated in a Catalan and Spanish context by a history of politically sanctioned forgetting and by the culturally specific value of memory. The article concludes by indicating that Subirana succeeds in using the connotative value of illness metaphors whilst also reaching an accommodation with her relatives' illnesses which differs from the practice of forgetting memory advocated by some of those who work with Alzheimer's patients in the English speaking world. It is also argued that unlike many other narratives of Alzheimer's disease, Nedar avoids recourse to the genre of horror, an eventuality which is in part facilitated by the film's origins in an investigative memorial project.

Critics, fans and bloggers have recently articulated a polarized set of responses to the 1967 film Sor Citroën alongside a growth in nostalgia for early models of smallformat Spanish cars. This article uses key texts by Virginia Scharff and Deborah Clark on the history of women's automobilism to posit that the dissonances and paradoxes that have previously been identified in Sor Citroën reflect not only the contradictions of a stagnant desarrollista politics but also the ambiguities and paradoxes of a car culture that has its roots in a patriarchal paradigm of automobile production and consumption. The article further posits that Sor Citroën reflects an inflection point in Spanish automotive culture and that its central character anticipates debate over the relationship between cars, reproduction and female autonomy. Dialogue with post-transitional Spanish film asks if Sor Citroën was a decisive departure from automoción patria or simply a brief detour from its trajectory.

This article examines resonances in popular culture of the location where Derailment is shot. It situates the use of close-ups within surrealist and other aesthetics. It asks how we reread the text in the knowledge of recent terrorist atrocities. By comparing Derailment with other short films, it also queries the sexuality of the glance.

Just as record numbers of migrants to Spain have been changing the country's demographic face in the last decade, so too has another phenomenon, that of international adoption, a movement of infant...