ABSTRACT
In the context of a growing rhetoric of homonationalism often nurtured by governments and public administrations, Spanish cinema has become in recent years a privileged vantage point for the critical reflection of queer identities in transition. This chapter problematises queer migrant and transnational affects as they respond to, and are impacted by, multiple layers of regulation and normalisation in a multicultural, multilingual part of Europe. Basque films Ander (Roberto Castón, 2009) and A escondidas (Mikel Rueda, 2014) thematise queer migration from Peru and Morocco respectively. Both films critically engage with the three key notions this chapter seeks to mobilise: (i) queer transitional identities in an increasingly (homo)nationalistic Europe that places huge expectations on migrants’ bodies and sexualities; (ii) the queering of geographies and locations such as rural areas that are often represented as alternative spaces to hegemonic urban queer environments and that metonymically connect cosmopolitan Europe to preconceived ideas of the peripheral Other; and (iii) the unsettling potential of transnational queer affects to, in the words of Hanadi Al-Samman (2013), ‘complicate the binaries of the closet/coming out, shame/pride, and complicity/resistance’. The conceptual assemblage proposed renders both films particularly eloquent in relation to Nacira Guénif’s idea of the migrant body not only as nomadic in Rosi Braidotti’s terms but also as resistant to normalising agencies and protocols. It is argued that both films establish a dialogue between affects, bodies and locations, and question dominant discourses of both queerness and migration. In particular, local and foreign male bodies are quite literally – or at least cinematically – mirrored, thus destabilising rigid binarisms and gender/sexuality/race control systems observed in mainstream Spanish films.
