Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid by Francisco Fernández de Alba (review)

With this most recent publication from Toronto's esteemed Iberic book series, Francisco Fernández de Alba has delivered a highly original contribution to Madrilenian cultural studies. A most splendid and representative detail, if also relatively minor, appears in the introduction, where already readers are sure to be impressed by the author's penchant for archival research. It is the year 1969. In number 393 of the magazine Triunfo, there appear two book reviews: Eduardo Rico on Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation, and Alonso de los Ríos on Henri Lefebvre's The Right to the City. This is an auspicious moment, we are informed: "Their publication was the sign of a cultural environment brimming with fundamental changes in the structure of feeling, one that would quickly take root in Madrid" (12). One might adopt a slogan connected with May 1968 and say that underneath the staid and repressive pavement of life in Madrid there was a beach. In an echo and homage to the critique of everyday life and aesthetics for which both Lefebvre and Sontag are known, the author leaves no paving stone unturned.

Fernández de Alba takes a long view of the transition, weaving politics, culture, urbanism, sexuality, altered consciousness and dissent together into an analysis that spans from 1966 to 1982. Chapter one, "Madrid: Planning the Democratic City," is attentive both to the city's past and its future General Plan of 1985, to concrete structures (such as the Pelota Court in Recoletos, the Olavide market, the Gesa gas station) as well as overarching spatial narratives. The focal point of the analysis are urban and architectural practices as they were theorized and carried out by the city's neighborhood associations, the municipal government of Tierno Galván, and contributors to journals as varied as Triunfo, Cuadernos para el Diálogo and Telva. Urbanistic thinking through the 1970s emerges not as uniform, but instead a site of both great conflict and great potential whose political nuance and public consequences receive a compelling treatment.

In chapter two, "Sex: Building Plural Communities," Madrid becomes a central site for understanding the emergence of "three parallel movements: feminism, the sexual revolution, and the fight for LGBT emancipation" (42). The presence of naked bodies in photography, magazines and films prompted conservative critics to cling to hateful ideology cloaked in claims of immorality while their progressive counterparts kept their target on an exploitative and profit-seeking industry. Fernández de Alba balances his nuanced discussion of numerous articles, films, and a novel (Eduardo Mendicutti's Una mala noche la tiene cualquiera) with a deep regard for context—the rise of women's associations, feminist treatises by pioneers such as Lidia Falcón, sex education under Francoism, both homophobia and audience resignification as a way of approaching the presence of gay characters in the comedia sexy, and the international attention given to transgender bodies, prompted in part by the Johns Hopkins Gender Identity Clinic and subsequently made more visible in the wider cultural sphere.

Chapter three, "Drugs: The Burden of Modernity," moves from the international outlawing of heroin in 1925 to its extensive coverage in the pages of Triunfo from the 1960s and 70s. Fernández de Alba attends to social indicators of the rise in drug (ab)use and explores its nuanced connections with images of a modern and international consumerist society, successfully historicizing the drug and suggesting that it lent cohesion to burgeoning social movements in the capital and provided (ab)users with a sense of identity that was otherwise lacking. Social reality is given a weight equal to representation (films and el cine quinqui), and drug (ab)use emerges as an act of rebellion, not of escape—a repositioning that effectively asserts the classist character of prominent drug-use narratives.

Not entirely unrelated to the case of heroin, chapter four, "Fashion: Democracy, Prêt-a-Porter," also treats its subject "an identity maker and central element of youth culture in Madrid" (91...