ABSTRACT
The question to which my title makes reference is neither new nor original. That is to say, an implicit Spanish history of sexuality has become an almost unexceptional topic as a result of the surge of women authors—Consuelo García, María Jaén, Mercedes Abad, Almudena Grandes, and Ana Rossetti, among others—who in the 1980s and early 1990s explored sexual experiences by writing in the so-called erotic genre. Branded as a sort of literary phenomenon because of the convergence of “women authors,” “the erotic,” and best-selling numbers, this specific arena of the literary field has also produced a massive body of critical evaluations—Acereda, Drinkwater, Gilkison, Pérez, and Vails, to name a few. Interestingly enough, this talking about sex and sexuality had already been taking place in Spain since the early seventies as part of the emergent literary, critical, and theoretical practices that were to flourish in the twilight years of Francoism, and that were somehow further unveiled by the destape years of the transitión (transition). 1 Thus, we have Xavier Domingo’s essay Erótica hispánica in 1972 as one mode of talking about sex, 2 but also Ana María Moix’s narrative of sexual awakening, Esther Tusquets’s famed trilogy of love triangles, and Carme Riera’s stories of lesbian love, as other discursive manifestations of a talking that argued against the hypostatization of desire along one unitary sexual model. 3
