Associate Professor Ana Simón Alegre will open the panel with a paper discussing women writers Concepción Gimeno de Flaquer (Spain, 1850-Argentina, 1919) and Josefa Murillo (Mexico 1860-1898), who were labeled as cursis or pretentious women during their lives. The insult reflected widespread fears concerning the feminist and queer gender identities modeled by these authors in their lives and literary works. Several decades later, now-canonical queer figures associated with Spain’s Generation of 1927 and Mexico’s Contemporáneos continued to face intense social backlash. In her paper, doctoral candidate Rhiannon Clarke will examine connections between Federico García Lorca (Spain, 1898-1936), Salvador Novo (Mexico, 1904-1974), and other queer members of these groups before and after the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Republican exile following the conflict led to the convergence of queer creators in Mexico, Argentina, and elsewhere, which in turn prompted new publishing projects, literary and artistic creations, and (as Clarke will emphasize) collective efforts to work through trauma and memorialize Lorca. Taking up another woman writer, doctoral candidate Kara Cybanski will close the panel with a second paper foregrounding work that emerged from the Spanish Republican exile. Beloved children’s book author Elena Fortún (Spain, 1886-1952) wrote two novels for adults during her exile in Argentina in the 1940s but left them unpublished in her lifetime due to fear of censorship under the Franco regime. The semi-autobiographical novels Oculto sendero (2016) and El pensionado de Santa Casilda (2022) feature queer friendships and spaces of queer sociability and were likely the result of queer partnerships, since Fortún most probably penned the latter novel in collaboration with Matilde Ras (Spain, 1881-1969).

Together, the three papers trace the development of transatlantic queer cultures spanning Spain and Latin America from the late nineteenth through mid twentieth centuries. During this period, concepts of queerness expanded from a focus on unconventional gender identities (Gimeno de Flaquer, Murillo) to encompass sexual dissidence, increasingly visible urban queer subcultures (Lorca, Novo), and the modern gay and lesbian closet (Fortún). Conflicts including the Mexican Revolution, World War I, and the Spanish Civil War both opened and closed opportunities for the Modern Woman, locas and maricas (intentionally flamboyant, effeminate gay men), and members of a so-called Third Sex. The papers trace these ebbs and flows while also exploring how modern Hispanic queer cultures are remembered and forgotten today. Each paper will last for a maximum of eighteen minutes, leaving approximately twenty minutes for brief introductions and ample discussion.

In our view, bringing together this panel of scholars at all academic ranks, from regionally diverse institutions in the United States and Canada, is an important act of resistance in the face of queer erasure and oppression in our current political moment. The connections that we hope to forge between panelists and audience members will both commemorate and prolong the sort of collective queer world-making that we will explore in the presentations.