Pursuing membership in the polity: the Spanish gay and lesbian movement in comparative perspective, 1970-1997

Abstract

[EN]The Spanish gay and lesbian social movement was born in 1975 amidst the process of social and political change that transformed Spain into a modern democracy. That was a social movement with undisguised revolutionary aspirations, adamant about remaining an outsider of the nascent democratic polity. Two decades later, the movement is a full-fledged insider, committed to mainstream demands, non-violent repertoires of protest and legitimate emancipation models. In the span of two decades, activism has replaced militancy, a culture of cooperation with the authorities has replaced a culture of conflict and, lastly, a discourse based on human rights recognition has occupied the space when a Marxist, revolutionary discourse of rapid and dramatic transformation used to dwell. By an extensive and systematic analysis of the discourse and the strategies of Spanish gay and lesbian political organisations I seek to explain why this social movement has ended up pursuing the mainstream and, as a result, demanding membership in the polity. In the thesis I link the process of negotiation of reality with the ideas and founding intellectual underpinnings of activists. Social movement scholars – in a context where the so-called structure of political opportunities is assumed to influence social movements to an extraordinary extent – have come to accept that the political environment has a bearing on social movements only after a process of incorporation has taken place. However, we simply do not know how this process of interpretation unfolds. I claim that the founding ideas of political generations, established and assimilated in the process that brings these generations to life, are the key intellectual underpinnings that sustain such an interpretative process. My research reveals that social movement organisations do not respond automatically to the ebbs and flows of the environment; rather, they behave according to the founding principles of activists that, in turn, are crafted in consonance to the particular process of generational building. In the particular case of Spain, the mainstreaming of the gay and lesbian movements was powerfully embedded in a process of generational replacement: a new political generation was created all throughout the 1980s, nurtured by the expansion of the commercial subculture and the assimilation of foreign discourses on gay culture and human rights. This was a generation that believed in the capacity of sexuality to be a collective identity maker and, as such, it bitterly clashed with the pioneering generation of activism, the one formed during the 1970s (and politically socialized around the ideas of Marxism and social revolution).