Loyal Subjects: Gender, Fidelity and the Post-Franco Falangist Memoir

Abstract

This article contrasts autobiographies and memoirs written during the post-Franco transition period, exploring the political subjectivities of male and female figures who had been active in the Falangist movement. While the male memoirs emphasize thickening individual agency and unfolding autonomy, the female memoirs are more relational—less individualizing, more heteronomous and displaying an intense preoccupation with and anxiety about fidelity, continuity and lineage. The article argues that the emphasis on fidelity in the women writers' accounts is, at least in part, a function of specific political events—the enforced unification of Nationalist forces in 1937—rather than simply arising from an exaltation of tradition and the fetishizing of essentialized gender norms. The burden of loyalty assumed by the female Falangists after the unification process becomes emplotted into the autobiographical self constructed in their memoirs, reminding us that these women were complex political subjects, even if denied such an identity by the State to which they pledged allegiance.