La sexualidad como frontera entre presas políticas y presas comunes bajo los nazis y el franquismo

Abstract

Female common and political prisoners lived together in the heart of the crowded postwar Francoist prisons, thus sharing a close intimacy. In an environment of unavoidable promiscuity, many female common prisoners were keen on self-eroticism and lesbian displays, which were the only ones that were possible within that context of internment. The official morality and the intolerant social mentality of that time towards those kinds of expressions of sexuality went hand in hand. The same circumstances ruled Nazi concentration camps, where a lot of female political exiles and some former prisoners from Franco’s jails ended up. We are interested here in the analysis of the reasons for the development of a rigid sexual morality by female political prisoners, most of them communist, within both kinds of “total institutions”, as they showed rejection towards the aforementioned expressions. This had to do with the tendency that the authorities of the centers had of turning laissez faire policies into a bargaining chip in order to attain greater control of the prisoners, especially of the female political prisoners. The strategy that was chosen to avoid the vulnerability against policies ultimately doomed to extermination, was a life of militancy based on an iron discipline. This included keeping at a distance from the female common prisoners and the denial of every single display of sexual pleasure within the internment centers.