Estudios LGBTIQ+, Comunicación y Cultura
The Journal of LGBTIQ+ Studies, Communication and Culture, published by the Complutense University of Madrid, is an academic research journal dedicated to exploring media, cultural, artistic, and social dimensions of LGBTIQ+ Studies. It publishes articles in English and Spanish and appears twice a year. In line with the guidelines of Ediciones Complutense, the journal may also produce special issues. The journal focuses on the intersections between LGBTIQ+ Studies, communication, and culture—for example, representations of LGBTIQ+ identities in film, television, media, photography, art, literature, fashion, and broader cultural trends. While it is primarily oriented towards the Ibero-American context, it also engages with its connections to other regions and socio-cultural settings, reflecting the increasingly global nature of academic research. All submissions undergo a rigorous peer-review process by external experts and must follow APA 7th edition guidelines. The journal is published in electronic format (e-ISSN: XXX). The journal is edited by the Complutense Research Group “GECA: Gender, Aesthetics and Audiovisual Culture” (based in the Faculty of Information Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid). GECA is an interdisciplinary, interdepartmental, interfaculty, and international research group with over thirteen years of experience. Its main areas of research include audiovisual culture—such as film, television, digital media, advertising and public relations, sound and music, photography, fashion, fiction, literary texts, and contemporary artistic practices—as well as cultural studies, gender studies (with a particular focus on LGBTIQ+ perspectives), and the wider field of Communication and Culture across the social sciences, humanities, and the arts.
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Una cuestión de responsabilidad. A propósito del VIH y el sida
Copyright (c) 2026 Estudios LGBTIQ+, Comunicación y Cultura
A Cartography of HIV and AIDS: Archives, Memories, Representations and Narratives
The dossier approaches HIV and AIDS as cultural, political, and affective phenomena shaped by disputes over representation, memory, and resistance. From an interdisciplinary and intersectional perspective, the collected contributions examine archives, narratives, and artistic productions related to HIV/AIDS across different contemporary contexts. Through studies focused on media, cinema, photography, literature, music, activism, and oral memory, the issue explores tensions between stigma, visibility, and self-representation, as well as the ways affected communities have produced counter-narratives against hegemonic discourses. Overall, the dossier proposes understanding HIV/AIDS beyond its biomedical dimension by addressing its social, cultural, and political implications in contemporary societies.
The Show Must Go On: Affective Archives, Autorepresentationand Care Policies in the Cultural Memory of HIV in Valencia
The Show Must Go On: 35 Years of HIV and AIDS Activism in ComitéVLC operates as a dispositif of cultural memory, affective archive, and political self-representation. Through a critical reading of its curatorial strategies, visual materials, and historical narratives, the exhibition reconstructs the genealogy of anti-AIDS activism in Valencia from the late 1980s to the present day. The analysis addresses the centrality of community care, cultural production, and visibility politics developed by ComitéVLC in response to stigma and social exclusion. It also examines the role of art, alternative media, and photographic self-representation in the construction of HIV counter-archives. From a queer and intersectional perspective, the exhibition can be understood as a critical intervention against contemporary dynamics of forgetting and the depoliticization of HIV and AIDS.
Streaming Gentrification and Muxe Representation: Visibility, Exoticization, and Resistance in El secreto del río (Netflix, 2024)
This article analyzes the Mexican series El secreto del río (Netflix, 2024) as a paradigmatic case of what is proposed here as streaming gentrification: the process by which global video-on-demand platforms access, reframe, and commodify local cultural phenomena, simultaneously producing visibility and the risk of exoticization. The concept is distinguished from mere visibility insofar as it does not describe the simple presence of an identity on screen, but rather the transformation that presence undergoes when integrated into the industrial logics of the global catalogue: algorithms, audience retention, and product differentiation. The study’s objective is to examine how the series reproduces and/or resists processes of exoticization and commodification of the Zapotec muxe identity within the context of the digital cultural economy. Through a queer decolonial textual-narrative analysis of ten representative sequences from the eight episodes of the first season, three registers of this process are identified: the aestheticizing visualization of muxe territory and bodies, the narrativization of identity as a dramatic resource within the cultural dramatic thriller, and the algorithmic globalization of an ancestral identity subjected to cataloguing logic. Results show that, of the ten sequences analyzed, seven present a predominance of resistance and three of exoticization, with a relevant asymmetry: exoticization operates in the visual register, resistance in the narrative. It is argued that the series produces a zone of negotiation in which narrative silence, the presence of real muxes in the cast, the narrative agency of the character Solange, and Sicarú’s autonomous ending operate as forms of partial resistance. The concept of streaming gentrification is proposed as an analytical tool for decolonial queer studies in the context of digital cultural industries, with potential to extend to other cases of indigenous gender-diverse identity representation on global platforms.
Listening to HIV/AIDS: The CD as a medium for sonic activism in Anglophone music
This work focuses on the CD as an object of study to examine the role of sound and music as tools of resistance and activism during the early years of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the United States. Through a selection of artistic practices linked to sound, the text explores their potential to make visible silenced experiences through social stigma and a lack of institutional response to the crisis. The text describes how such sonorities worked as tools of visibility, mourning, and political action. The methodology is grounded in critical sonic approach and by mapping a body of musical work released on CD, encompassing albums, singles, and soundtracks across diverse genres. Additionally, this study includes an analysis of the content within their liner notes and inserts. The compiled works include John Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1 (1991), Pauline Oliveros’s Epigraphs in the Time of AIDS, Alexandra Pajak’s Sounds of HIV, and the collective Ultra-red’s An Archive of Silence, alongside works by Michael Callen, Diamanda Galás, Stefan Tischler, and David Wojnarowicz, key figures in New York’s sonic activism. These artistic strategies not only documented the biomedical and social crisis of HIV/AIDS, but also made HIV a catalyst of social change, compelling the public sphere to hear what political power or some religious institutions sought to silence. The cases studied here indicate that music, beyond its affective dimension, is an essential means of collective memory, affective circulation, and activism.
Living with Antiretrovirals? HIV/AIDS, Body, Inequality, and Gender in Marta Dillon’s Columns (Argentina, 1995–2003)
This article analyzes the inscription of antiretroviral treatment in Marta Dillon’s columns published between 1995 and 2003 in the supplement No, approached as a cultural archive of HIV in Argentina. Drawing on a qualitative approach and a chronological reading of the corpus, it examines how therapeutic experience is narrated in a context of shifting biomedical consensus, marked by the introduction of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), commonly known as triple therapy, and by profound inequalities in access. The analysis shows that medication does not appear as a stable technical device or a linear guarantee of survival, but rather as an experience shaped by temporal asynchronies, uncertainty, and unequal material conditions, intensified by economic crisis and the neoliberal context of the 1990s. It also argues that Dillon’s writing displaces the centrality of medical knowledge by integrating treatment into a broader framework that articulates motherhood, desire, activism, and community networks, thereby configuring a choral space that renders visible voices marginalized by state policies. Within this framework, antiretrovirals operate as a pharmakon: both a promise of continuity and a reminder of vulnerability. The article concludes that these columns discuss with hegemonic narratives of HIV while producing situated forms of embodied memory and health citizenship, in dialogue with the material and political conditions that structure the experience of illness.
Deconstructing Bias: Women and HIV in Audiovisual Narratives
This study examines four audiovisual productions in which HIV-positive women are portrayed as the central characters in narrative, figures whose experiences have historically been marginalised in the public perception of HIV/AIDS, in contrast to the relevance given to gay men. A comparative methodology is used to analyse how stigma, gender hierarchies, and media bias have contributed to sidelining the stories of HIV-positive women, relegating them to a secondary position. The study begins with a look at productions such as Yo soy positivo, ¿y tú? (2009) and Silencio (2025), in which the diagnosis functions as the narrative axis. In both, the focus is on the disclosure of serological status and the anxieties arising from disclosing one’s HIV-positive status in a domestic setting or within sexual and emotional relationships, using archetypes in the construction of characters. In contrast, works such as Indetectables (2017) and Soy Visible (2023) shift the focus towards affirmative narratives, highlighting the collective dimension of activism and how the performativity of anti-stigma campaigns has helped to build less violent worlds, whilst leaving unresolved issues regarding other bodies and adherence. The study concludes that contemporary audiovisual production must go beyond mere visibility, exploring the materiality of the body, the diversity of experiences and the co-construction of narratives by the protagonists themselves. Only in this way is it possible to add complexity to the imaginaries of HIV and generate critical, situated and transformative representations, capable of challenging inherited biases and opening space for new forms of social and cultural sensitivity.
LGBT+ Activism in Sinaloa, Mexico: Between Memory, Resistance, and Visibility: A Narrative of Pioneering Leadership in HIV Prevention
This article analyzes the development of LGBT+ activism in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, through a narrative centered on pioneering leadership in HIV prevention, articulated from collective memory, social resistance, and political visibility. Its objective is to examine how this leadership shaped a model of activism that integrated these elements, contributing to the gradual institutionalization of sexual diversity policies at the regional level. The research was conducted using a qualitative, interpretive methodology with a socio-historical perspective. The life history technique was employed; the participant was selected through purposive sampling, and data collection was carried out through in-depth, semi-structured interviews, following the ethical principles of social research. The study reconstructs processes of community organization that emerged between the 1980s and 1990s, within a context marked by stigma, institutional discrimination, and limited governmental response to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. The findings reveal that pioneering leadership in Sinaloa built networks of solidarity that transcended biomedical intervention, shaping a space of historical memory that today supports new forms of collective action. It is concluded that LGBT+ activism in Sinaloa has been fundamental in transforming social imaginaries and expanding rights, positioning itself as a regional reference at the intersection of public health and social justice.
Carratalá, A. (2025) Tratamiento ético de la comunidad LGTBI+ en los medios. Tecnos. Colección: Guías Prácticas, Ética de la Comunicación. Madrid. ISBN: 978-84-309-9365-9, 200 págs.
«And AIDS, girl, what a thing!»: The first decade of aids in the newspapers of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil
Since its emergence in the 1980s, the AIDS pandemic has transcended the biological sphere to establish itself as a field of intense scientific, geopolitical, and ideological disputes. The narratives produced about the virus not only sought to explain its origins but also permeated daily life and history, shaping a social imaginary that has been profoundly transformed over these four decades. Under this premise, the present article aims to analyze the discursive practices regarding HIV/AIDS in newspapers from the state of Rio Grande do Norte (Brazil) during the 1980s, the first decade of the virus. Methodologically, the research utilized the Digital Newspaper Library platform to access digitized dailies, selecting the newspaper O Poti due to its regional relevance and thematic density. Grounded in the perspective of social constructionism on discursive practices, the collected material was organized into identification and analysis tables through a comprehensive reading of the texts. The results demonstrate that HIV/AIDS strained the medical-technological knowledge of the time and its speeches generated significant social panic. This fear manifested in the construction of the «other» as a defense strategy against the unknown, although it also ambiguously stimulated various forms of resistance. It is concluded that media discourse was central to the production of meaning regarding the disease. By questioning historical stigmatization, this work seeks to contribute ethically and politically to the field of study, deconstructing prejudices rooted in social memory.
“Biographical Ruptures” in the narratives of gay men coexisting with HIV: Disruptions, stigma, and the reinvention of masculinities in Brazil
This article examines how gay men living with HIV construct meanings and healthcare practices shaped by biographical ruptures, stigma, and structural inequalities. Biographical rupture is understood here as a disruptive event that reconfigures life trajectories, identities, and everyday practices. Grounded in a qualitative, ethnographically informed approach, the study was conducted as part of the postdoctoral project “Masculinities, Life Course, and Care”. It draws on semi-structured interviews and field observations with 11 cisgender gay men from diverse racial, generational, and class backgrounds. Data were analyzed through a hermeneutic perspective to interpret the meanings of living with HIV in contexts marked by precariousness, violence, and resistance. Findings indicate that an HIV diagnosis operates as a rupture, prompting self-reinvention, reconfigurations of masculinity, and transformations in relationships. These processes are shaped by intersecting factors such as race, generation, and class, which affect access to healthcare, experiences of stigma, and possibilities for care. “Coexisting” underscores the relational and insurgent character of living with HIV, involving support networks and everyday resistance. Participants challenge biomedical and normative discourses, producing embodied knowledge about life with HIV and redefining masculinities beyond heteronormative frameworks. The study advocates for culturally situated public policies.
AIDS narrative(s) of promiscuous care. Susan Sontag’s “The Way We Live Now” (1986) revisited
This paper sets out to revisit Susan Sontag’s short story “The Way We Live Now” (1986) through an interdisciplinary methodology, combining literary studies with queer studies and scholarship on the cultural representation of AIDS. An analysis of the story and the literary mechanisms through which it is constructed will be offered, as well as an exploration of the queer community of promiscuous care portrayed in it and the possibilities that queer writing offers as a tool for world-making. Moreover, the paper provides a critical view of AIDS and Its Metaphors, contrasting Sontag’s fictional work on AIDS with her more famous, and yet problematic, essayistic work on the subject. In turn, this comparative approach will help to reconsider the role of literary narrative in the production, previous and ongoing, of discourses on HIV/AIDS to demonstrate how this creative resource can create a counter-hegemonic discourse on AIDS still pertinent today through this new critic reassessment of Sontag’s piece(s).
The HIV-Aids concheperla: representation of HIV-Aids, hybridity, thanatography and neobarrosa drift in the essays and epistolary writing of Néstor Perlongher
The work of Néstor Perlongher, as diverse as prolific, transcended the barriers of literary and discursive genres. It was influenced by his wide formation and varied passions, such as sociology, anthropology and poetry. Here, I will focus on his texts classified as prose and will set aside his poetry. I will not cover it due to space constraints, as well as the objectives of this article. In 1997, Prosa Plebeya was published, a hard work of compilation of his essays carried out by Osvaldo Baigorria and Christian Ferrer. I will here examine those that explore AIDS and gender. On the other hand, I will work on the same themes and his letters compiled by Cecilia Palmeiro in 2016, under the title Néstor Perlongher, Correspondence to account for his theoretical reflection on the disease (in its pandemic stage), consider its different forms of representation as well as to account for its thanatographic, hybrid and self-figurative character.. We will see how the prose is blended with a neobarrosa aesthetic, playing with words, sounds, tones, and even with identity and gender categories. The prosaic becomes poetic even in the roughest moments of intimate and private experience. Everyday life, politics, education, desire, sex and the craft of writing are all intermingled in a fusion that transforms those lines into a document of the time that intersects public and private affairs, producing a discursive practice that transcends the immediate goals of communication (Bajtín, 2013). The hypothesis that guides the work thus aims to problematize how aesthetics, representation, denunciation and autobiography are constructed as a powerful and particular rhizome whose peculiar characteristic consists of proposing a deconstructive look at the disease in question, a deconstruction that places Perlongher in a novel and anticipatory voice within the Argentine literary field.
Cultural memory of HIV between historical documents and artistic representations: a case study
The HIV crisis gave rise not only to a public health crisis but also to a transformation in cultural narratives, shifting from discourses centred on fear and grief towards others focused on memory, activism and survival. This study analyses the construction of this memory through the Australian Response to AIDS Oral History Project and its artistic offshoots. Methodologically, an interpretative qualitative approach was adopted, developed as a cultural case study and its artistic derivatives. Using theoretical and purposive sampling, documentary, oral and audiovisual sources were analysed using a narrative-cultural analysis guide designed ad hoc. The analysis, based on emergent and deductive thematic categories, examined the representation of HIV, stigma, activism, the affective dimension of the disease and the construction of cultural memory through intertextual relationships between testimonies and cultural works. The analysis highlights the central role of testimony in shaping collective memory and in the fight against stigma. The cultural narrative of HIV shows continuity from the 1980s to the present day, establishing itself as a tool for raising awareness and humanising the disease. In conclusion, we can state that autobiographical narratives and their adaptations amplify individual experiences, contributing to global activism. However, stigmatising representations persist in contemporary cinema and, despite progress in reducing stigma, challenges remain in their portrayal, which underscores the importance of life stories in the construction of a critical and transformative cultural memory.
Fluidos discontinuos [Discontinuous Fluids]: Resistances and Variations in Desire in Jesús Martínez Oliva’s Work on HIV/AIDS
This text tries to analyze the corpus of Jesús Martínez Oliva about HIV/AIDS, a work that chronologically belongs to the first half of the 1990s. Although the artist’s work on the HIV/AIDS pandemic is not extensive, nor comparable in quantity to that produced by some of his contemporaries, it has nonetheless become a key reference for studies on the visual arts and the HIV crisis in Spain. This paper takes as its starting point the exhibition Fluidos discontinuos (1994), presented at the Fundació Miró, since this installation synthesizes the artist’s position toward HIV. First, it proposes a stance grounded in the continuation of living and desiring; second, it reflects on what sex had become following the introduction of the condom as a technology of prevention. From this perspective, Martínez Oliva examined the new mechanics and the physical and symbolic changes that emerged from the practice of safe sex. The text is structured in three sections, mirroring the construction of Fluidos discontinuos, which consisted of three pieces. Through them, it addresses interrupted energies, the adaptation of sexual practices during the HIV crisis, and the “dildification” of the other. This perspective departs from approaches centered on death, mourning, or protest—more common in representations of the subject—in order to focus instead on a form of resistance grounded in the persistence of desire.
AIDS, Homosexuality, and Stigma in Democratic Spain: From Historical Discourse to Symbolic Representation in Mejor no hables (1994)
This study analyses the social construction of AIDS in Spain, focusing on its historical association with homosexuality and the processes of stigmatization that extended beyond the medical sphere into the cultural imaginary. It develops a historical-cultural analysis based on press, bibliographic, and audiovisual sources concerning the AIDS crisis during the 1980s and 1990s, specifically centred on the short film Mejor no hables (Pedro Paz, 1994), examined from a discursive and symbolic perspective. The research shows that AIDS was represented in the media as a disease linked to marginalized groups, particularly the LGTBIQ+ community and people who use drugs (such as heroin), reinforcing dynamics of moral exclusion within the context of Spain’s democratic Transition. The short film employs the vampire metaphor to challenge these discourses, shifting the figure of the “monster” from the infected subject to social stigma itself, thereby re-signifying the fear of contagion and rendering visible loneliness, vulnerability, and a critique of moral blame. The conclusion reached is that Mejor no hables constitutes a cultural response to the symbolic construction of AIDS as the “plague of the twentieth century,” highlighting the role of cinema as a space of resistance against hegemonic discourses surrounding the disease.
More Than Just a Simple Farm Game: LGBTIQ+ representations and possibilities in cozy country life simulators
Farm life simulators have long been a significant niche within the video game industry. Whit more than twenty years of history, these titles – commonly know as farming games – have evolved to respond not only to gameplay and aesthetic trends, but also to new social and cultural demands. In this context, it is particularly noteworthy how developers have begun to explicitly incorporate representations and experiences of LGBTIQ+ communities. Although it may seem counterintuitive to associate LGBTIQ+ diversity with rural settings, cozy farming games are increasingly committed to broadening gender expression and relationship options, allowing players to choose partners freely, free from prejudice or limitations. This article aims to examine in detail the LGBTIQ+ possibilities offered by one of the most recent farming simulators, Story of Seasons: Grand Bazaar (Xseed Games, 2005). To this purpose, the results, which emerge from a formal analysis of the content and an autoethnographic ingame study, are structured around three key dimensions: 1) avatar customization options and forms of identity expression; 2) narrative development and the discursive construction of the game; 3) mechanics for establishing romantic relationships and forming LGBTIQ+ families.
«The intersex turning point»: Reseña de Gregori Flor, Nuria (2024). Intersexualidades: Emergencias y Debates en torno a Personas con Características Sexuales Diversas. Catarata, los Libros de, 304 páginas.
Alcibiades’ Political Bisexuality in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (Ubisoft Quebéc, 2018)
Bisexuality, within the field of Sexuality studies, has often been deemed invisible (Monro et al, 2017; Erickson-Schroth and Mitchel, 2009) and framed as a threat (Klein, 1993). For the bisexuals’ ability to engage with both men and women, they have been regarded as untrustworthy in many spaces. Comparably, Ancient Greek homosexuality, or pederasty, though proven to never have been considered a crime or prejudiced by law (Cohen, 1987; Hindley, 1991; Dover, 1978), was chastised in ancient texts for its involvement in politics, when associated with male prostitution (Oyamada, 2024), and never truly accepted by society (Hubbard, 1998). Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (Ubisoft Québec, 2018), when depicting Classical Athens and its wartime period, includes multiple historical spaces, figures, and events. Among the known Greek politicians, philosophers, and playwrights, Alcibiades (450-404 BCE) is included in main and side missions of the video game. Remembered as a controversial figure of the Peloponnesian War, a politician, a «strategos», and a student of Socrates, “Alkibiades” is loyal to historical, philosophical and even comical surviving references in various ways. And, in this modern depiction, his bisexuality is included in a variety of side missions all revolving, in their own way, around themes of sexuality and desire. Through the ancient references of Alcibiades bisexuality and Ubisoft’s modern portrayal, this paper argues that the game incorporates Alcibiades’ bisexuality not merely as a character trait, but as a political tool used during the times of the tensions and instabilities of Athenian politics.
Of Dommes and Night Queens: Kink, BDSM, and positive representations of alternative sexualities in the Ryu Ga Gotoku (Yakuza/Like a Dragon) video game series
This article analyses the representations of kink and BDSM in two non-BDSM mainstream games in the Ryu Ga Gotoku franchise, known in the West as Yakuza and Like a Dragon: Yakuza 0 (Ryu ga Gotoku Studio, 2015) and Yakuza: Like a Dragon (Ryu ga Gotoku Studio, 2020). For this purpose, this paper adapts a methodology of myth-analysis and the identification of recurrent motifs to analyse the discourses that these games generate around kink and BDSM as alternative and non-normative practices within their particular social and ludic imaginaries. By drawing on game studies and sex and sexuality studies, this article provides a reading of the dommes in Yakuza 0 and Yakuza: Like a Dragon as contextualised within popular culture, the genres of role-playing games (RPG) and beat’em ups, and the genealogy of dominatrices in Japanese games. The substories (game missions) studied here tell the stories of Ayu, a dominatrix with a lack of confidence, and Yumiko, a more experienced dominatrix bullied by colleagues and connected to a legendary Mr. Masochist who has become immune to pain. Together with the recurring job class of Night Queen, a fighting class, these substories frame kink and BDSM through the lens of professionalisation and normalisation. The analysis recognises 20 recurrent motifs that help articulate the discourses proposed by the games and construct a positive vision of kink and BDSM within the queer spaces of the underworld that allows the dommes to assert themselves within their communities
Queerbaiting and Fandom: The Influence of the Community on LGBTQ+ Representation in Arcane, the League of Legends Video Game Series
Arcane (Netflix, 2021–2024) adapts characters from League of Legends and, in that transition, reconfigures their identities under the influence of the fandom. We explore how Reddit conversations have intervened in the construction and evolution of these characters, with particular attention to Caitlyn and Vi: a relationship absent in the original game that the community stitched together and popularized until it became a centerpiece of the series. We posit a fanon–canon loop: fans’ readings and desires orient traits and bonds that are later consolidated in official products. Drawing on qualitative analysis of discussions, we show how the fandom normalizes diversity as something natural, demands explicitness free of harmful tropes, and operates as a collective workshop of meaning (nicknames, fanart, ethical debates). We assess the relevance of this fan agency in the evolution of the characters and in the explicit or implicit canonization of their relationship in Arcane.
Ontological Duality of the Closet in Times of Surveillance Capitalism: Liminal Worlds
This article examines the relationship between dissident identities and contemporary digital environments within a context marked by the expansion of surveillance capitalism and the growing technological mediation of everyday life. The social and cultural transformations driven by digitalization affect not only modes of communication but also processes of subjectivation, visibility, and resistance. Within this framework, the paper offers a theoretical reflection that connects classical debates on gender and sexuality with emerging challenges in hyperconnected societies. The analysis incorporates the study of the ontological duality of the closet from a philosophical perspective, understood as a space of tension between concealment and disclosure that is reconfigured under digital logics. This approach makes it possible to understand how algorithmic devices and social interaction platforms reshape queer visibility dynamics, generating new forms of control and exposure that impact both identity construction and the experience of intimacy. The article aims to introduce a series of neologisms, conceived as ontological realities and analytical categories, intended to provide a solid foundation for future reflections on this topic. Furthermore, it seeks to fully exploit the theoretical potential of existing scholarship on the closet—both nationally and internationally— by addressing it from a new paradigm: that of artificial intelligence, surveillance, and the reign of algorithms. The research explores a territory hitherto unexamined within academia: the status of closets in a context of algorithmic warfare. This proposal seeks to offer interpretative keys for understanding how digitalization and the data economy reconfigure contemporary closets, situating the discussion at the intersection of philosophy, feminist and queer theory, and technology studies. In doing so, it aims to contribute to a critical understanding of the processes shaping life in the digital age and to open spaces for debate on the ethical and political implications these transformations entail for LGBTIQ+ individuals.
The Poet’s Archive That Speaks the Truth: Lorca’s Audiovisual Discovery at the Menéndez Pidal Foundation
The recent discovery made by filmmaker Manuel Menchón—found while researching for his documentary La voz quebrada in the Menéndez Pidal family archive: previously unseen footage of Federico García Lorca waving from a car in 1932, on his way to Berlanga de Duero, where La Barraca would perform La vida es sueño—constitutes an event of historical and epistemological significance. It is not merely a matter of adding one more document to Lorca’s iconography; it is a call to interrogate the very nature of the archive in relation to memory, disappearance, and the mechanisms of silencing that have shaped Lorca’s reception for almost a century. This article proposes a reading of the discovery through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s theory of the archive as formulated in Mal d’archive (1995), in which the archive is not a neutral repository of information but a structure of power that produces, preserves, organises, and simultaneously destroys. The recovery of this footage—together with the technical restoration of other known films of La Barraca—offers a fertile ground for examining how the emergence of a forgotten document can alter the regime of visibility that has governed a historical figure whose life and death were marked by political and sexual repression. Lorca’s appearance in motion—smiling, alive, on his way to a democratizing cultural project—creates tension with narratives that have fixed him exclusively within his tragic fate or the static image of the martyred poet. This article analyses how the new audiovisual material contributes not only to a documentary expansion but also to an ethical reconfiguration of the archive, allowing us to question the historical silences surrounding his homosexuality, his murder, and the politics of disappearance that turned him into a symbol of a fractured Spain.
Awkward typefaces. Cinema, diversity and visual literacy for teacher training
The article’s aim argues for the need to incorporate, within initial teacher education, visual literacy tools capable of addressing LGBTIQ+ diversity without reducing it to an episodic curricular topic. Accordingly, the corpus is delimited around LGBTIQ+-themed film posters and, within that field, around typography as an interface that organises regimes of legibility, tone, and cultural authority. The method adopts a qualitative case-study design, based on a purposive selection of contemporary posters from international cinema and a genealogical contrast with key references from Spanish poster traditions, integrating a transdisciplinary reading that connects arts education with language and literary education, grounded in cultural studies. The results describe how typographic and compositional decisions modulate the visibility of dissidence, oscillating between closure, ambivalence, and irony, and how they provide analytic criteria transferable to university-based teacher training. The discussion links these graphic operations to forms of pedagogical mediation oriented towards human rights, and the conclusions propose a replicable line of understanding based on historical comparison, critical reading of paratexts, and interpretive design production, while identifying the corpus’s contextual heterogeneity as a limitation.
Presentation. Beyond the avatar: LGBTIQ+ representations, narratives and communities in video games
Video games constitute a strategic space for the representation, resistance and experimentation of gender and sexual identities. Faced with a cultural imaginary historically defined by cisheteronormative narratives, the medium has emerged as a key cultural artefact where LGBTIQ+ communities negotiate their visibility and build spaces for belonging and activism. Within the framework of Queer Game Studies and a broad conception of 'queer'—understood as the questioning of all normativity—this volume examines both representation within videoludic texts and the trajectories of players and creators, exploring how gaming mediates socialisation processes and collective imaginaries. Through various methodologies, the collected contributions demonstrate that video games transcend mere leisure to become a terrain for affective and political experimentation, essential for understanding the interaction between popular culture and identity in the contemporary era.
Argelina, Juan y Nabal, Eduardo. (2022). Voces transgresoras. Una memoria queer de la cultura insumisa. Madrid: Bohodón Ediciones, 254 páginas
«Bareback time» in Guillume Dustan and Erick Rémès: HIV-positive temporalities, bareback narratives and the (queer) review of the «queer» archives of HIV
In this article, we will attempt to demonstrate the existence of a «seropositive time», mediated and conditioned by the emergence, development, transmission, and control of HIV. By examining the cases of the «autopornographic» literature of Guillaume Dustan and Erik Rémès, and their advocacy of bareback sex, we will explore how the «temporal object» narrated in their work is as fundamental as the «metatemporality» in which it is inscribed, both in the time of its publication, during the second major HIV epidemic in France and the emergence of antiretroviral therapies in 1996, and in its current reception from a radically different «seropositive» temporal framework. Based on the theoretical frameworks of the works of Halberstam, Dean, Castiglia and Reed or Esteban Muñoz, among others, we will propose the possibility that this «HIV-positive temporality» can also intertwine the archives created around the very conception, revision and epistemology of the virus.
Inhabiting silence: affective archive and memory of HIV in Silencio (2025), by Eduardo Casanova
This text analyzes the miniseries Silencio (2025), created and directed by Eduardo Casanova, as an audiovisual work that problematizes the cultural memory of HIV/AIDS from an affective and queer perspective. Through an aesthetic that combines vampirism, dark humor and social critique, the series reflects on the persistent stigma surrounding people living with HIV today. The article proposes reading Silencio as an “affective archive” in the sense proposed by Cvetkovich (2018), that is, as a cultural device capable of preserving and reconfiguring emotions linked to the history of the epidemic. Through the analysis of its audiovisual narrative, the text examines how the relationship between the protagonists Malva and Triana shifts the representation of HIV from a strictly biomedical framework toward a field of affect, memory and queer desire. It also explores how the series establishes a dialogue between different historical temporalities—from the Black Death to the AIDS crisis in 1980s Spain—in order to reflect on the persistence of social silences surrounding stigmatized diseases. Finally, the article argues that Silencio functions as a form of cultural pedagogy that contributes to rethinking contemporary narratives about HIV in audiovisual culture, while also leaving open tensions regarding the representation of seropositive experience, care practices, and contemporary forms of visibility.
En juego: pantallas, protocolos y archivos
Performance and Detachment: Explorations of Race and Sexuality in Brontez Purnell’s Since I Laid My Burden Down (2017)
Este artículo sostiene que Since I Laid My Burden Down (2017), de Brontez Purnell, cuestiona las perspectivas ‘homonormativas’ sobre raza, clase, género y sexualidad al presentar las experiencias de un hombre afroamericano gay de clase trabajadora procedente de Alabama. Se argumenta que el texto establece la importancia de una literatura queer interseccional y pone de relieve dos métodos distintos mediante los cuales Purnell aborda la homonormatividad, el distanciamiento y la performance. El distanciamiento se define como una forma de alivio frente a un “mundo homofóbico” (Price, 2015) y como un método de procesamiento del trauma. Asimismo, se sostiene que el protagonista, DeShawn, recurre al distanciamiento para enfrentar la represión que experimenta en función de su raza, sexualidad y clase, además de sus vivencias de pérdida y duelo. Además de practicar el distanciamiento, se argumenta que DeShawn también se involucra en aspectos de performance y performatividad en relación con su sexualidad, entrelazando liberación y represión como parte de su experiencia queer. A partir del marco teórico de Judith Butler y Jacques Lacan, se sostiene que Purnell utiliza el objet petit a lacaniano como un dispositivo que DeShawn encarna y hacia el cual orienta su performance. Como otro fetichizado, DeShawn es simultáneamente deseado sexualmente y reprimido por otros hombres —principalmente blancos— en razón de su raza, sexualidad y clase. Dado que tanto el distanciamiento como la performance operan de manera concurrente en DeShawn, se concluye que Purnell presenta una experiencia inherentemente singular de una identidad queer afroamericana en los Estados Unidos contemporáneos, que explora intersecciones complejas y entrelazadas de raza, clase y sexualidad. En la medida en que el involucramiento de DeShawn con el distanciamiento y la performance sirve tanto para liberarlo como para reprimirlo, Purnell ofrece un relato de supervivencia y preservación en un mundo hetero- y homonormativo.