Spatiality, Gender and Nation. The Gay Elegy and the Social Function of Funeral Discourse in War Poetry by Emilio Prados.

Abstract

This article describes a process of production and transformation of the space of war and the nation as ideological formations associated with heteronormative masculinity. The argument focuses on the analysis of the social function of funerary discourse in verse as it appears in two poems written and originally published by Emilio Prados in 1937 in the midst of the armed struggle against fascism during the Spanish Civil War. On the one hand, the lament for the comrades who died fighting on the front lines provides Prados with the opportunity to express in the poem the affective link between men and a veiled inscription of same-sex desire. On the other hand, Prados introduces in his writing an anti-elegiac, macabre subtext associated to the fascist coup of July 1936, and to the anti-fascist resistance that confronted so much death and destruction incorporated to the representation of the masculine body in the poem. In both cases, this poet adds an objective to funerary discourse that transcends the public function of mourning and sets itself in homoerotic experiences. A discussion of the theoretical framework introduces the general argument of the article. This introduction addresses Henri Lefebvre’s notion of “social space”, Edward Soja’s discussion of the socio-spatial dialectic, and Denis Cosgrove’s explanation of the link between social formation and symbolic landscape. Some notes on the formal aspects of the anti-elegiac discourse ground the textual analysis that follows.