The Queer Spaces and Fluid Bodies of Nazario's Anarcoma

Abstract

At a time when Spanish culture was attempting to emerge from the shadow of an oppressive dictatorship, a generation of queer artists used comics to comment on the time's significant cultural changes. This essay examines the original queer sensibility of the comic Anarcoma , by Nazario, as a symbol of the changes that were happening all over post-Franco Spain. Centering on the exploits of the titular transsexual detective, Anarcoma takes the cultural and sexual expectations inherited from franquismo and queers them, resulting in a new set of images which can be associated with democratic Spain. With its distinct visual representations, Anarcoma refigures gendered and sexual bodies while navigating real Barcelona spaces. This use of urban space rhetorically ties the boundary crossing of Anarcoma as a fictional individual with the developments and changes in the gay community of Barcelona and in Spain at large. An analysis of the specific spaces and how they are refigured and linked to the body of Anarcoma serves to reflect the development of gay identity in Spain. The fluid body of the detective, visually tied to masculinity and femininity, sometimes simultaneously, elucidates the way gender is presented in comics and shows how questions of gender and gender norms figure prominently in the nascent gay movement of Spain. A further analysis of the comic's secondary characters also highlights this queering of the norms through the further abstraction of coded images of gender.

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