The earliest traceable accounts of the AIDS outbreak in Spain began to emerge during its political transition to democracy, with small clusters of cases appearing as early as 1981. HIV/AIDS would go on to shape Spain throughout its pivotal period as a fledgling democracy, underpinning the cultural explosions of the Movida, a sharp rise in intravenous drug use, and the struggles of a coalescing LGBT+ community. Feeling Sick: The Early Years of HIV/AIDS in Spain examines the cultural history of these early years of HIV/AIDS in Spain as it has been told through television and print media, ephemeral products of visual culture, fiction film, and the so-called risk groups that lived through the epidemic. The book draws on the work of Raymond Williams to characterize this emergent period within a structure of “feeling sick” and thus defined by discordant voices, disagreement, and meaning-making in a period of history in formation. Through close readings of Spanish visual culture and media alongside analysis of historical and medical documents, it asserts that a structure of feeling sick begins to coalesce around the emergence of HIV/AIDS and traces out a distinctive sense of living through history as it unfolds. By critically evaluating a selection of cultural materials, this book claims that the earliest years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Spain reveal common fears about global connectivity, the proliferation of vulnerable ties to others, and the potential of cultural and physical contaminations. Ultimately, Feeling Sick challenges the dominant narratives in which life and disease are seen as separate and unequal, and in which illness is only destructive and devastating. An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM.

The earliest traceable accounts of the AIDS outbreak in Spain began to emerge during its political transition to democracy, with small clusters of cases appearing as early as 1981. HIV/AIDS would go on to shape Spain throughout its pivotal period as a fledgling democracy, underpinning the cultural explosions of the Movida, a sharp rise in intravenous drug use, and the struggles of a coalescing LGBT+ community. Feeling Sick: The Early Years of HIV/AIDS in Spain examines the cultural history of these early years of HIV/AIDS in Spain as it has been told through television and print media, ephemeral products of visual culture, fiction film, and the so-called risk groups that lived through the epidemic. The book draws on the work of Raymond Williams to characterize this emergent period within a structure of "feeling sick" and thus defined by discordant voices, disagreement, and meaning-making in a period of history in formation. Through close readings of Spanish visual culture and media alongside analysis of historical and medical documents, it asserts that a structure of feeling sick begins to coalesce around the emergence of HIV/AIDS and traces out a distinctive sense of living through history as it unfolds. By critically evaluating a selection of cultural materials, this book claims that the earliest years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Spain reveal common fears about global connectivity, the proliferation of vulnerable ties to others, and the potential of cultural and physical contaminations. Ultimately, Feeling Sick challenges the dominant narratives in which life and disease are seen as separate and unequal, and in which illness is only destructive and devastating.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. The early twentieth century was awash in revolutionary scientific discourse, and its uptake in the public imaginary through popular scientific writings touched every area of human experience, from politics and governance to social mores and culture. Feeling Strangely argues that these shifting scientific understandings and their integration into Hispanic and Lusophone society reshaped the experience of gender. The book analyzes gender as a felt experience and explores how that experience is shaped by popular scientific discourse by examining the “strange” femininity of young protagonists in four novels written by women in Spanish and Portuguese: Rosa Chacel’s Memorias de Leticia Valle (published in Argentina in 1945); Norah Lange’s Personas en la sala (Argentina, 1950); Carmen Laforet’s Nada (Spain, 1945); and Clarice Lispector’s Perto do coração selvagem (Brazil, 1943). It pairs each novel with a broad scientific theme selected from those that captured the contemporary popular imagination to argue that the young female protagonists in these novels all put forth visions of young womanhood as an experience of strangeness. Building on Carmen Martín Gaite’s term chicas raras, Rankin proposes this strangeness as constitutive of a gendered experience inextricable from affective and material engagements with the world.

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library as part of the Opening the Future project with COPIM. The 2008 financial crisis prompted the most significant social protests since 1968 in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States. These protests generated not only social reform but also collaborative and affective affiliations, often seen through artistic and cultural materials. Taking Spain as a focal point, this book examines film production at both points in time, showing how it emerges from simultaneously divergent and comparable economic and political milieux. The book aims to recognize and celebrate the political responsibility exercised and expressed by a new generation of Spaniards deeply immersed in those protests. Through the convergences of two markedly significant periods in two separate centuries, filmmakers expose the deficiencies of Spain’s democracy in 2008—the D€MOCRAZY in the title, a slogan seen on a banner carried by the protesters—while creating a new sensibility and forms of social life that bring back the notions of community and the common good that had been forgotten in the midst of such a brittle environment.

The Spanish Golden Age, a cultural narrative that has developed and over four centuries, remains a key element of how Spaniards articulate cultural identities, both within Spain and to the outside world. The Currency of Cultural Patrimony examines the development of this narrative by artists, intellectuals, historians, academics, and institutions. By defining the Spanish Golden Age as a diachronic problem, it examines several of Spain’s most canonical golden-age literary narratives (including Don Quixote, Fuenteovejuna, and Las mocedades del Cid) as texts whose institutionalization, mediation, and commercialization over the course of four hundred years inform their meaning both for contemporary Spaniards and for the field of Hispanic Studies around the world. Spain’s persistent deployment of this cultural patrimony as the canonical epicentre of a national literary tradition has stimulated diverse and often contradictory interpretations, the cumulative effect of which informs their reception by each new generation of Spaniards. This book’s analysis of how this patrimony is interpreted according to both tradition and current circumstances illuminates new angles from which scholars can approach some of Hispanism’s most persistent and vexing questions, including the growing divide between popular and academic understandings of the Spanish nation’s “classics.”

Fables of Development: Capitalism and Social Imaginaries in Spain (1950-1967) focuses on a basic paradox: why is it that the so-called “Spanish economic miracle” —a purportedly secular, rational, and technocratic process— was fictionally portrayed through providential narratives in which supernatural and extraordinary elements were often involved? In order to answer this question, this book examines cultural fictions and social life at the time when Spain turned from autarchy to the project of industrial and tourist development. Beyond the narratives about progress, modernity, and consumer satisfaction on a global and national level, the cultural archives of the period offer intellectual findings about the expectations of a social majority who lived in the precariousness and who did not have sufficient income to acquire the consumer goods that were advertised. Through the scrutiny of interdisciplinary archives (literary texts, cinema, newsreels, comics, and journalistic sources, among other cultural artifacts), each chapter offers an analysis of the social imaginaries about the circulation and distribution of capital and resources in the period from 1950, when General Franco’s government began to integrate into international markets and institutions following its agreements with the United States, to 1967, when the implementation of the First Development Plan (1964-1967) was completed.

The presence of bodies and sex in detective fiction has been a long-term feature of this internationally popular genre. Titillation is at the centre of narratives reliant upon discovery and revelation: motives and criminals are slowly revealed, along with sexualized and violated bodies – from femmes fatales to the corpses of victims. A satisfying, gratifying genre for its readership, the detective novel promises the disruption and subsequent restoration of order in societies tarnished by disillusionment which hope for a better future. This book takes as its focus examples of detective fiction from Cuba and Mexico during or in the aftermath of huge social upheaval (the Special Period and the War on Drugs), analyzing representations of sexualities, bodies, and the genre itself. Through an investigation of novels by Leonardo Padura and Amir Valle of Cuba, and Bef and Rogelio Guedea of Mexico, this work investigates increasingly fluid sexualities and bodies in challenging examples of metaphysical detective fiction, a particularly anxious subgenre which challenges both the structures and limits of the detective novel and the reader’s understanding of true and false and right and wrong, representative of troubling periods of severe social disruption for Cuba and Mexico.