To Give the Body Presence: Performance Practices in Late Franchoism

Abstract

This article discusses the aesthetic and political implications the presence of the body had in performance practices that took place during the final years of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain. Through the analysis of various performances, it addresses issues related to political repression, feminism, gender construction or body discourses inherited from the dictatorship’s ideology. Performance art is presented as a strategy through which language can be bent; as a place of exception from where to name that which cannot be said. The aesthetic becomes a space in which the social, the political and the ethical appear.