Creadores homosexuales, cultura camp y representaciones queer en la ficción televisiva española de los años ochenta

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the elaboration of a queer history of Spanish television by studying the televisual works of these creators and analyzing their creative practices in relation with their queer identities. It focuses on the 1980s: with the beginning of democracy, openly homosexual creators like Terenci Moix or Pedro Almodóvar, and others who had not publicly expressed their sexuality but explicitly showed themselves as queers, like Javier Gurruchaga, made markedly authorial television fictions. In these fictions, these creators negotiated their creative practices with codes and traditions from the homosexual culture, such as the recurrent use of women as main and important secondary characters in their narratives, the utilization of camp as the principal aesthetic code, or the development of queer intertextuality linked with the cultural tradition of camp. Moreover, they negotiated their discourse with the dominant heteronormativity to represent queer identities in times when their public visibility on television was scarce and unnormalized. The existing social conventions in their historical context (in terms of gender, sexuality, aesthetics, class, and what could be publicly expressed on television) were highly problematized and even provocatively subverted by means of these creative practices. Still unexplored, this article intends to study them in depth.