LGTBIQ+ biographies in Spain, from police files to YouTube

Abstract

Biographies, embedded in the narrative conventions of a specific culture (Plummer, 1995), help to link human actions with socially understandable stories (Polkinghorne, 1988: Butler, 1991). LGTBIQ+ biographical stories in Spain have experienced a fast transformation in the last forty years. From an LGTBIQ+ biographical construction made through social control from police files during the dictatorship and post-dictatorship, to the emergence of the ‘narratives of the self’ (Ellis, 1991), 'mystories' (Ulmer y Koro-Ljungberg, 2015) or 'autoethnography' on social media. For LGTBIQ+ people, social media have provided an opportunity to generate and develop a consistent self (Beck y Beck-Gernsheim, 2003), and at the same time its political significance has been revealed (De Ridder y Van Bauwel, 2015) in a social context where LGTBIQ+ identity is fully legal but is still part of a heteronormative social context (Butler 1991; Santore 2011). Taking the accounts of Elsa Ruiz Cómica and Dulceida, we intend to understand the historical moment in which the digital LGTBIQ+ autobiographical story was emancipated in Spain. From a critical point of view (Van Zoonen, 1994) we want to focus on elements such as the authorship of the accounts; the critical moments that articulate the story; as well as the audiovisual production and aesthetics of technological mediation, which reveal the reappropriation strategies of LGTBIQ+ narratives in a historical context where  LGTBIQ+ people whose police biographies are still in the archives, still live together with teenager youtubers (Gasol, 2022).