Cultures of the Erotic in Spain 1898–1939 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cultures of the Erotic in Spain 1898–1939 Lou Charnon-Deutsch Zubiaurre, Maite. Cultures of the Erotic in Spain 1898–1939. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2012. 398 pp. As Jo Labanyi has observed and Maite Zubiaurre amply demonstrates in this long-awaited study, modern Spain is a “ghost” story in terms of our knowledge of popular culture, but this comprehensive exhibition and interpretation of erotic culture goes a long way towards demystifying certain chapters of the nearly lost, [End Page 605] “ghostly” areas of culture occluded during the Franco regime. It does this in a prose that is both readable and succinct and at the same time adventurously thought provoking, combining engaging discussions of canonical texts of early sexologists of every stripe followed by a compendious survey, copiously illustrated and individually analyzed, of the multifarious subculture of erotica that flooded the market in Spain as in all of Europe during the modernist period about which we know so little. Among the author’s unique contributions is her insistence on the blurring of the boundary between scientific sexology promulgated by prominent figures such as Gregorio Marañón and others, and popular knowledge generated in other forms of literature: pseudo-scientific lectures, manuals and pamphlets, sicaliptic fiction, and all forms of visual culture. The “two Spains,” symbolized by the “circumspect noventayochistas” and the sicaliptic bohemianism of, for example, Álvaro Retana, coexisted and fed off each other (10), giving us a new lens that Zubiaurre dubs the “third Spain” with which to view the sexual conflicts of the period she studies. The story begins helpfully by tracing the early, uneasy, reception of the new study of sexology in Spain, much of it imported from Germany and Great Britain, and exploring the resistant attitudes but also the ambiguity toward sexual matters as they worked their way into the texts of Spanish thinkers. Among the topics necessarily forming the basis for this discussion in addition to foreign influences are Gregorio Marañón’s famous lectures Tres ensayos sobre la vida sexual, the contributions of the Instituto de Medicina Social, numerous articles on sexual themes in scientific journals and pamphlets, conferences on eugenics, and a wide range of pseudo-scientific texts on sexual education, including the “temas sexuales” promulgated by Ángel Martín de Lucenay that all contributed to the growing “medicalization of sex” as normative thinking on sex in the nineteenth century gave way to non-normative sexual knowledge and cultural practices in the twentieth (43). Special attention in chapters two and three is devoted to the reception of psychoanalytic thinking on sex stemming from the writings of Sigmond Freud, Havelock Ellis, and other important sexologists circulating in Spain. Despite their knowledge of imported sexology, however, Spanish intellectual leaders Ramón y Cajal, Marañón, and Ortega kept sexuality at a distance through various sublimations that characterized the “high modernist puritanism” evident even among staunch republicans like Gregorio Marañón (85). This fascinating discussion of the way Spanish canonical writers kept “sex at a distance” is followed in later chapters by what comprised the outer limits of that distance, which obviously these men deplored but could not altogether suppress (59). Even if it rarely erupts to the surface of their writing it never disappears and one of the accomplishments of this book is the successful exploration of what lies below the surface of the writing of elite thinkers on love and sex who sought to “tackle the new sexual conflict, neutralize its disruptive agenda, and preserve the solid virtues of traditionalist Spain” (85). Each in his own fashion constructed philosophical and scientific systems within western heteronormativity and essentialist notions of women’s and men’s mission that Zubiaurre concludes are misogynistic. If the first few chapters display an engagement with the texts of eminent sexologists in which the many sides of the question of reception of sexual knowledge are explored at length, chapter four on the “sexual pedagogy” of postcards [End Page 606] plunges the reader into the products of visual culture that elite sexologists looked upon with dismay. Erotic postcards are catalogued according to their libidinous reception by a wider public (including female consumers) increasingly open to sicaliptic culture, and then compared with...