ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the 1982 Spanish TV adaptations of three of the most well-known examples of the female picaresque: La lozana andaluza (1528), La pícara Justina (1605), and La hija de Celestina (1612). At the beginning of the 1980s, Spain was in the midst of its transition to democracy, during which a new cinematographic trend known as el destape emerged. Liberated from Franco’s censorship, a body of films was created exercising a newly found freedom mostly through the exposure of female nudity. This chapter considers destape films centered on the figure of classic pícaras, thus opening the canons both of 1980s Spanish film and early modern picaresque to mutually enriching new readings. Both genres, the female picaresque and the destape films that reimagine it, were originally created by male authors and directors for a mostly male audience, and they overtly appeal to an exploitative male gaze that is rigorously pornographic in its focus on exposing the bodies of prostitutes for pleasurable consumption. This chapter reaches across the centuries to draw attention to the commonalities that mark how female sexuality is packaged and consumed by male creators and audiences both in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in the twentieth century. It also reflects on the cultural work performed by an erotics of the canon in which classics of Spain’s famed Golden Age become sites for a visceral celebration of the national past.
