Dissertation: "Failure to Deliver: Transitional Masculinities in Late and Post Francoist Film (1960-1980)"

Certified Spring 2010

Ana Vivancos is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Georgia. She defended her dissertation in May, 2010. Her thesis studies the evolution of the masculine roles in Spanish popular cinema during the period that includes the last years of Franco’s dictatorship and the subsequent transition to democracy. Based upon insights drawn from Film studies methodologies such as Star and Genre studies, as well as from Cultural studies, she argues that this process reflects the anxiety and self-perceptions of Spaniards as well as the relation between gender and ideas of the nation. Upon awakening from a 40 year stagnant period of patriarchal traditionalism, Spanish society needed to come to terms with the paradigms of new urban, industrialized and late capitalistic modes in a comparatively short period of time, and the fast transformation of masculine roles in mainstream film is one of the main witness of its consequences. Ideas of masculinity and its relation to the nation become central in cultural products of the period, and most particularly in popular cinema. A whole plethora of new men (a group that included sex-crazed workers, angst-ridden middle-class professionals, homosexual politicians or even man-to-women transexuals) substitute the traditional hegemonic masculinity on the screen. The various conflicts they get involved in, included in generic films as different as sexy comedies or political melodramas, betray their anxiety and their arduous fight to retain at least part of the controlling power that characterized the masculine position in traditional Spanish culture.