ABSTRACT
Gender is one of the social realities often explored in Catalan dramas of the 1990s precisely because of the lasting “legacies” of General Franco’s dictatorship. Franco imposed rigid gender roles through various state-sanctioned mechanisms such as the Sección Femenina, a mandatory “women’s arts” civil service program, and compulsory military service for men.1 Though women had achieved the right to vote in Spain in 1931 and had participated on military fronts during the civil war, the dictatorship ensured that women returned to the connes of domesticity and subservience to men. Men, for their part, had to be the embodiment of masculinity-strong, self-assured, domineering, and in charge (at least such was the expectation for males on the winning side). R.W. Connell’s concept of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and ‘emphasized femininity’ exemplify the type of gender relations imposed and practiced during Franco’s 36-year reign. Whether idealized or implemented, the expected gender behaviors related to masculinity and femininity institutionalize the subordination of women to men (Gender & Power 183-190). Once the dictatorship ended and Spain transitioned to a democratic constitutional monarchy, gender relations changed, albeit slowly, since three and a half decades of rigidly codied, binary gender roles, and structured inequality among men and women, were deeply entrenched in Spanish society. While other aspects of Spanish society shifted quickly, hegemonic ideals of “proper” gender-specic behavior and institutionalized inequity took longer to change, thus the recurring topic in 1990s Catalan drama. To demonstrate the negotiation of such gender-related social realities, I analyze Companyia T de Teatre’s work, Homes! In this chapter I demonstrate how the instability of linguistic meaning replicates the instability of gender identity and, via parody, questions the socially constructed concepts and performances of male and female. Furthermore, I argue that Homes! emphasizes and dismantles the absurdity of genderic codes of conduct, illustrated through language use, in order to critique male and female ways of perceiving and dening one’s own and the “other” gender in a supposedly “modern” society.
