ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I analyse the ways in which imaginative spaces of resistance; the creation of a queer urban utopia; emotional communities; and the triad of female economic independence, bodily decline, and sexuality function to reimagine and reconfigure this internal exile, defined as exclusion within one’s own community and homeland. These marginal characters struggle to flourish, adopting a panoply of cultural, spatial and economic strategies that are inherently communitarian, and in so doing, they reassert their individual agency, instating their claims to a selfhood denied to them by an exclusionary and gendered construction of nationhood. I will also analyse the figure of the perpetrator, Roberto Conesa, in order to examine the struggle between the institutional sanctioning of perpetration and the individual conscience.
