Guillermo J. de Osma (1853–1922) was the first Spaniard to study at Oxford after the Universities Tests Act 1871 opened the ancient universities of England to non-Anglicans. Known in his time as a diplomat, politician, art collector, and scholar, Osma established the first Spanish studentship and modern endowment at Oxford—the de Osma Studentship—in 1920. The Studentship has been held by many distinguished Oxford-trained Hispanists over the past hundred years. Yet, despite his active role in Spanish public and cultural life, his unique links with Oxford and his contribution to twentieth-century British–Spanish relations, today, Osma is a little-known figure in the Spanish-speaking world and remains virtually unknown in Anglophone countries. This article is based on previously unseen Spanish and British archival material, interviews and correspondence with de Osma Studentship holders from several generations, and testimonies shared at the celebration of the de Osma Centenary held in Oxford, which was a direct result of the research undertaken here. Drawing on this material, the article traces some of the cultural and academic implications of the establishment of the de Osma Studentship, revealing the untold story of its origins and development.
Artículos en revistas ; This paper presents the current status of engineering studies in Spain, including the structure and professional profile of the existing degrees, and all the specific circumstances social, legal and political - that complete the scenario. The impact of Bologna on this scenario is still uncertain, but in this paper the two main options - «smooth evolution» and «deep revolution» - are described and analysed. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion
Disability Studies and Spanish Culture is the first book to apply the tenets of Disability Studies to the Spanish context. In particular, this work is an important corrective to existing cultural studies of disability in Spain that tend to largely ignore intellectual disabilities. Taking on the representation of Down syndrome, autism, alexia/agnosia as well as childhood disability, its chapters combine close readings of a number of Spanish cultural products (films, novels, the comic/graphic novel and the public exhibition) with a broader socio-cultural take on the state of disability in Spain. While researchers and students of cinema will be particularly interested in the book's detailed analyses of the formal aspects of the films, comics, and novels discussed, readers from backgrounds in history, political science and sociology will all be able to appreciate discussions of contemporary legislation, advocacy groups, cultural perceptions, models of social integration and more.
This presentation reports on an exploratory, corpus-driven study of French and Spanish stance expressions in debates held at the European Parliament. Stance is here understood as "the speaker's evaluative, epistemic or affective positioning towards a stance object" (Kärkkäinen 2012: 2195). More specifically, our paper focuses on recurrent multi-word stance expressions, such as French à mon avis 'in my opinion', il me semble + ADJ + de 'it seems + ADJ + to', il est essentiel de 'it is essential to' and Spanish yo creo que 'I believe that', me gustaría 'I would like to', es necesario 'it is necessary', and takes stocks of insights from both contrastive pragmatics (Aijmer 2011) and contrastive phraseology (Ebeling & Oksefjell Ebeling 2013, Granger 2014). Our study relies on comparable Europarl subcorpora of European parliamentary proceedings in French and Spanish (see Koehn 2005), corresponding to approximately 10 years of debates (up to 2010) and 3 million tokens per language. The subcorpora used in this study are restricted to verbatim reports of speeches originally delivered in French and Spanish by Members of Parliament (see Cartoni & Meyer's directional version of Europarl, which relies on Europarl's language tag). In other words, they do not contain any translated texts. Even though it must be acknowledged that French and Spanish are occasionally used by non-native speakers in the European Parliament, in the vast majority of cases, the two languages are used by Members of Parliament from France, French-speaking Belgium and Spain, respectively. In this paper, we adopt a corpus-driven approach to stance. The stance data were obtained by automatically extracting n-grams (also called 'lexical bundles'), which are recurrent sequences of n contiguous words, i.e. "sequences of word forms that commonly go together in natural discourse" (Biber et al. 1999: 90). As pointed out by Granger (2014: 69), n-grams "are a powerful window onto pragmatics and rhetoric. It is undeniably a quick-and-dirty method, but one that has great heuristic power: it generates a multitude of word sequences that have so far received very little interest in the contrastive literature". In this study, we have extracted 2- to 5-grams with a minimum frequency of 50 occurrences per million words. The automatically retrieved n-grams were then manually analyzed in context so as to identify stance expressions and patterns. Methodologically, the comparative analysis of French and Spanish, which are arguably quite close, being two Romance languages, raises a number of issues. One of them is that Spanish is a pro-drop language, while French is not. As a result, Spanish stance expressions containing a conjugated verb form may either be 1- or 2-grams, depending on the optional overt expression of the subject (e.g. (yo) creo 'I believe', (nosotros) pensamos 'we think'), while in French, corresponding expressions typically contain two words (je crois 'I believe', nous pensons 'we think'). In order to ensure an optimal cross-linguistic comparability of the datasets analyzed, a number of additional single-word stance expressions corresponding to the multi-word sequences identified through the n-gram approach were also extracted (e.g. lamento/je regrette 'I regret', desearía/je souhaiterais 'I would like to'). The presentation of the results will proceed in three steps. First, we will provide a structured, contrastive overview of the hundreds of stance expressions uncovered through the n-gram approach adopted in this paper, paying special attention to well-known French-Spanish morphosyntactic contrasts, such as the compulsory subject expression in French vs. the pro-drop character of Spanish, and the wider use of verbs with an experiencer dative in Spanish (e.g. me gustaría decir 'I would like to say'; cf. Vázquez Rozas 2016). Second, we will zoom in on the different uses of formally similar or cognate forms, such as croire/creer 'believe' and penser/pensar 'think'. Indeed, as repeatedly shown in studies on French and English political interviews (Fetzer & Johansson 2010), English and Spanish parliamentary enquiries (Marín Arrese 2015) and Catalan and Spanish parliamentary debates (De Cock & Nogué Serrano 2017), the use of cognate forms and seemingly similar patterns may in fact differ significantly across languages, mainly in terms of frequency, distribution and pragmatic/argumentative functioning. Finally, as noted by Goethals & Blancke (2014) in relation to thanking in French, Spanish and Dutch in the European Parliament, speakers of different languages adhere to different discursive conventions, even within the same parliament. In our paper, we will examine if and to what extent multi-word stance expressions can be used to uncover the variation of discursive conventions concerning stance-taking across linguistic communities. In our conclusion, we will sketch our future work, which mainly consists in extending the analysis to other languages (Dutch and English) and additional registers (newspaper editorials and research articles; cf. Neumann 2013, 2014) and in using parallel corpus data to analyze the impact of translation on some of the stance-related discursive and pragmatic traits of parliamentary proceedings.
This presentation reports on an exploratory, corpus-driven study of French and Spanish stance expressions in debates held at the European Parliament. Stance is here understood as "the speaker's evaluative, epistemic or affective positioning towards a stance object" (Kärkkäinen 2012: 2195). More specifically, our paper focuses on recurrent multi-word stance expressions, such as French à mon avis 'in my opinion', il me semble + ADJ + de 'it seems + ADJ + to', il est essentiel de 'it is essential to' and Spanish yo creo que 'I believe that', me gustaría 'I would like to', es necesario 'it is necessary', and takes stocks of insights from both contrastive pragmatics (Aijmer 2011) and contrastive phraseology (Ebeling & Oksefjell Ebeling 2013, Granger 2014). Our study relies on comparable Europarl subcorpora of European parliamentary proceedings in French and Spanish (see Koehn 2005), corresponding to approximately 10 years of debates (up to 2010) and 3 million tokens per language. The subcorpora used in this study are restricted to verbatim reports of speeches originally delivered in French and Spanish by Members of Parliament (see Cartoni & Meyer's directional version of Europarl, which relies on Europarl's language tag). In other words, they do not contain any translated texts. Even though it must be acknowledged that French and Spanish are occasionally used by non-native speakers in the European Parliament, in the vast majority of cases, the two languages are used by Members of Parliament from France, French-speaking Belgium and Spain, respectively. In this paper, we adopt a corpus-driven approach to stance. The stance data were obtained by automatically extracting n-grams (also called 'lexical bundles'), which are recurrent sequences of n contiguous words, i.e. "sequences of word forms that commonly go together in natural discourse" (Biber et al. 1999: 90). As pointed out by Granger (2014: 69), n-grams "are a powerful window onto pragmatics and rhetoric. It is undeniably a quick-and-dirty method, but one that has great heuristic power: it generates a multitude of word sequences that have so far received very little interest in the contrastive literature". In this study, we have extracted 2- to 5-grams with a minimum frequency of 50 occurrences per million words. The automatically retrieved n-grams were then manually analyzed in context so as to identify stance expressions and patterns. Methodologically, the comparative analysis of French and Spanish, which are arguably quite close, being two Romance languages, raises a number of issues. One of them is that Spanish is a pro-drop language, while French is not. As a result, Spanish stance expressions containing a conjugated verb form may either be 1- or 2-grams, depending on the optional overt expression of the subject (e.g. (yo) creo 'I believe', (nosotros) pensamos 'we think'), while in French, corresponding expressions typically contain two words (je crois 'I believe', nous pensons 'we think'). In order to ensure an optimal cross-linguistic comparability of the datasets analyzed, a number of additional single-word stance expressions corresponding to the multi-word sequences identified through the n-gram approach were also extracted (e.g. lamento/je regrette 'I regret', desearía/je souhaiterais 'I would like to'). The presentation of the results will proceed in three steps. First, we will provide a structured, contrastive overview of the hundreds of stance expressions uncovered through the n-gram approach adopted in this paper, paying special attention to well-known French-Spanish morphosyntactic contrasts, such as the compulsory subject expression in French vs. the pro-drop character of Spanish, and the wider use of verbs with an experiencer dative in Spanish (e.g. me gustaría decir 'I would like to say'; cf. Vázquez Rozas 2016). Second, we will zoom in on the different uses of formally similar or cognate forms, such as croire/creer 'believe' and penser/pensar 'think'. Indeed, as repeatedly shown in studies on French and English political interviews (Fetzer & Johansson 2010), English and Spanish parliamentary enquiries (Marín Arrese 2015) and Catalan and Spanish parliamentary debates (De Cock & Nogué Serrano 2017), the use of cognate forms and seemingly similar patterns may in fact differ significantly across languages, mainly in terms of frequency, distribution and pragmatic/argumentative functioning. Finally, as noted by Goethals & Blancke (2014) in relation to thanking in French, Spanish and Dutch in the European Parliament, speakers of different languages adhere to different discursive conventions, even within the same parliament. In our paper, we will examine if and to what extent multi-word stance expressions can be used to uncover the variation of discursive conventions concerning stance-taking across linguistic communities. In our conclusion, we will sketch our future work, which mainly consists in extending the analysis to other languages (Dutch and English) and additional registers (newspaper editorials and research articles; cf. Neumann 2013, 2014) and in using parallel corpus data to analyze the impact of translation on some of the stance-related discursive and pragmatic traits of parliamentary proceedings.
Marine debris is widely recognized as a global environmental problem. One of its main components, microplastics, has been found in several sea salt samples from different countries, indicating that sea products are irremediably contaminated by microplastics. Previous studies show very confusing results, reporting amounts of microparticles (MPs) in salt ranging from zero to 680 MPs/kg, with no mention of the possible causes of such differences. Several errors in the experimental procedures used were found and are reported in the present work. Likewise, 21 different samples of commercial table salt from Spain have been analyzed for MPs content and nature. The samples comprise sea salts and well salts, before and after packing. The microplastic content found was of 50–280 MPs/kg salt, being polyethylene-terephthalate (PET) the most frequently found polymer, followed by polypropylene (PP) and polyethylene (PE), with no significant differences among all the samples. The results indicate that even though the micro-particles might originate from multiple sources, there is a background presence of microplastics in the environment. ; Support for this work was provided by the CTQ2016-76608-R project from the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (Spain) and the PROMETEOII/2014/007 project from the Valencian Community Government (Spain). The author M.E. Iñiguez also thanks the Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (Spain) for a Ph.D. grant (contract grant number BES-2014-069473).
The employment of used vegetable oils (UVOs) as raw materials in key sectors as energy production or bio-lubricant synthesis represents one of the most relevant priorities in the European Union (EU) normative context. In many countries, the development of new production processes based on the circular economy model, as well as the definition of future energy and production targets, involve the utilization of wastes as raw material. In this context, the main currently applied EU regulations are presented and discussed. As in the EU, the general legislative process consists of the definition in each State Member of specific legislation, which transposes the EU indications. Two relevant countries are herein considered: Italy and Spain. Through the analysis of the conditions required in both countries for UVOs' collection, disposal, storage, and recycling, a wide panorama of the current situation is provided.
Humor and laughter are quintessentially human, yet they are often ignored in scholarly studies. The Humanities in particular tend to privilege "serious" literature, especially with works that were produced during oppressive regimes. In the case of Spain and Francisco Franco's dictatorship, this academic tendency engenders a flawed outsider's view of two generations of Spaniards—representing them as laughless and therefore less human—despite the fact that public expressions of humor persisted and evolved during the regime. This dissertation focuses on two of the foremost examples of popular Spanish humor under Franco: the magazine La Codorniz (1941-1978) and the comedian Miguel Gila (1919-2001), important cultural touchstones that are almost completely unknown outside of Spain. Gila's famous war monologues and La Codorniz's shift from abstract to politically-engaged humor exemplify the major polemics of humor studies, synthesizing many of the binaries posited by scholars over millennia. Is humor irrational or wise? Is it an antisocial weapon or a stress-relieving social lubricant? Does it undermine authority or perpetuate the status quo? Chapter 1 gives an overview of the three historically dominant theories of humor: Superiority, Relief, and Incongruity. I present the major arguments of each theory and evaluate them primarily for their usefulness in understanding popular, public humor in Spain under Franco. Chapter two examines the intellectual underpinnings of the weekly humor magazine La Codorniz, beginning with Ramón Gómez de la Serna and his application of avant-garde ideals to el humor nuevo español. The bulk of the chapter considers the evolution of Spanish humor as demonstrated in La Codorniz under its two famous directors: Miguel Mihura (1941-1944) and Álvaro de Laiglesia (1944-1977), examining works by Tono, Mihura, Wenceslao Fernández Flórez, Édgar Neville, and Evaristo Acevedo, among others. Chapter 3 analyzes Gila's war monologues—their history and reception in postwar Spain and beyond. And Chapter 4 presents original transcriptions and translations of these classic performances based on the earliest recordings (1957 and 1959), with a brief introduction that draws connections between humor and translation in a sketch of the humorist as translator.
This article combines two aspects of the Spanish diasporic experience in the Americas often treated separately: migration and exile. Studies of the Republican exile have concentrated primarily on members of political and cultural elites forced to leave Spain in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War and Franco's victory in 1939. Here, I look instead at how events in Spain affected the lives of Spaniards living abroad when civil war broke out in 1936. I analyze the activities in support of the Republic organized by Spaniards in the United States, and argue that the war in Spain and the Popular Front culture forged in America in the 1930s transformed these communities deeply. Not only did they become more visible, but, perhaps more important, they participated in events that fostered collaboration across generations, ethnicities, races, creeds, and social classes. The article highlights the important role played by women and children in these communities, and examines how the war shaped the identity of Spanish-American youth. These activities helped pave the way for the integration of Spanish immigrants into American society. This Americanization, often reluctant, was linked to Franco's victory, an outcome that, for many, closed the door to a possible return to Spain, transforming migrants into exiles. As such, they continued to struggle for the restoration of democracy in Spain during the four decades of the dictatorship. ; Este artículo combina dos aspectos de la experiencia de la diáspora española en América que suelen tratarse por separado: emigración y exilio. Los estudios del exilio republicano se han concentrado generalmente en miembros de las élites políticas y culturales forzados a abandonar España a consecuencia de la guerra civil y la victoria franquista en 1939. Aquí examino cómo los sucesos en España afectaron las vidas de españoles residentes en el extranjero cuando estalló la guerra en 1936. Analizando las actividades de ayuda a la República organizadas por españoles en los Estados Unidos, arguyo ...
This dissertation examines the role of the U.S. Spanish-language media environment in connecting state lawmakers to the interests and preferences held by their Hispanic constituents. The presence and absence of Spanish-language media affects levels of political knowledge among U.S. Hispanics, and the degree to which state legislators engage in the media entrepreneurial activities that link them to their constituents and to other policymakers. As a representational link between lawmakers and U.S. Latinos, the Spanish-language media facilitate a "home style" of representation of U.S. Hispanics that contributes to the development of Hispanic policy agendas in the U.S. states.
The aim of the present TFM study is twofold: on the one hand, to contribute a first Spanish translation of an English text, identifying general problems in the process, and on the other hand, to illustrate new paths of research in the field of English-Spanish Translation Studies through the selection and preliminary analysis of a particular linguistic issue singled out as significant in the current literature. A wide research previous to translation was required to carry out this project. Copyright legislation was to be initially revised given the fact that the stories, though originally belonging to the folklore of different communities, had been afterwards retold and compiled by one author. Once confirmed that the tales were translatable due to the purposes of this academic project, the field of children's literature and its relationship with translation was explored. To this a search of information on the author, Alison Lurie followed. And an investigation on Spanish-English translation problems, demanding critical solutions, both at a general level and at a more specialised one. After the translation process, came the choice of a specific translation issue to be discussed using the source and target texts as corpus. The aim here was to find a topic of current interest and relevance, as well as originality. Connectives attracted special attention of the present researcher and the tutor of this TFM, as a new category of elements particularly significant for children's narratives both semantically and structurally. However, the novelty of the category as such, the number of elements potentially involved and the lack of specific cross-linguistic studies made the analysis and background research more complicated than expected. A preliminary analysis and discussion of results was carried out on a group of connectives representing the main four types of semantic types of structural connection, only to recognise that further research is needed on this realm.
In 1690, Alonso de Leon arrived in East Texas to establish two missions among the Asinai. He was accompanied by Fr. Fontcuberta, Fr. Casanas, Fr. Bordoy, Fr. Massanet, and Brother Antonio. Fr. Massanet returned to Mexico to inform the Viceroy about the trip, and came back to East Texas with Teran de Los Rios in August 1691. Fr. Fontcuberta died in February 1691 of an epidemic that, according to Fr. Casanas, killed about 3,000 natives in the area. Fr. Casanas who died in New Mexico in 1696, left us the first intimate view of the Caddoan-speaking groups in East Texas. Casanas Relacion was written in spurts and delivered to Teran de los Rios in August 1691. The Teran expedition brought to the Asinai Fr. Hidalgo who stayed about two years. In 1716, Fr. Hidalgo returned to Texas with Fr. Espinosa. While in the Asinai Province, the social conditions, the environment for learning and the interests of the three friars were quite different. We have found little archival material from Hidalgo, and Espinosa s style and education provide a disengaged narrative that loses flavor and re-uses some of the material provided by the other friars. The arrival of the Spaniards did not match native expectations. The Asinai wanted a Spanish community composed of families that would live side-by-side with them and would provide a measure of protection and prestige, as well as trade opportunities. Instead they got seven single males: four friars and three soldiers. Casanas grappled with a new language and its dialects, unfamiliar social and religious practices, a major epidemic in 1691 that deeply affected the relationship between Europeans and Natives, and very poor harvests in 1691 and 1692. His Relacion, which serves as a colonial baseline, was created while learning, attempting to proselytize and surviving. Casanas Relacion is constructed from several kinds of knowledge: what he saw, experienced, and was told. Casanas did not travel beyond the Asinai Province, nor could he: most of the time there were only two other friars and three soldiers, and between February and August 1691 Casanas was left with one companion and two soldiers. At first, Casanas was at Mission San Francisco de los Tejas because he only established Mission Santisimo Nombre de Maria (hereafter shown as S.N. de Maria) in October 1690. From 1690 through 1691 he probably remained at S. N. de Maria where he was met by Teran on August 4. 1691. Unlike Hidalgo and Espinosa, most of the information related by Casanas concerns the political and religious structure and the practices of the people in the Asinai Province. In this article I will concentrate on two issues: first, what can we learn about the location of the nations belonging to the Asinai Province using the archival materials from these friars, and second what cosmological and religious changes occurred between the period of Casanas and Hidalgo, and the period of Hidalgo and Espinosa. I should add that all the evidence to be presented, except for obvious exceptions. is based completely on the archival materials mentioned.
Within the context of Spanish politics in the first half of the twentieth century, Jews appear as a common denominator in the political platforms of both the Spanish liberals and the Spanish Right. Given Spain's long and tumultuous history with the Jews, interesting questions then arise as to how and why Jews figured into Spanish politics as such. The questions of this paper center around three themes: Jews in Spanish political discourse, distinctions within Jewish communities, and the Jewish perspective. How did Jews fit into the different political ideologies of the Spanish left and the right, and to what extent did they enter into the política arena, and why? Were "the Jews" an all-encompassing and homogenous group in the minds of Spanish philosemites and antisemites? Or were distinctions made between certain Jewish communities? If so, why? Moreover, where did Jews place themselves in this narrative? What can be learned from exploring their own perspective? The objectives of this paper are two-fold: first, to obtain an overview of how Jews were presented and perceived in Spanish society and politics at the start of the twentieth century through exploring the themes of philosemitism and antisemitism, and second, to explore the relationship between Spain and the Jews in two different periods: the Spanish Civil War fought between 1936-1939 and the Second World War (1939-1945) and the Holocaust in order to expound a closer look at how, as political pawns, they figured into the establishment and formative years of fascist Francoist Spain. This particular period in Spanish history is very compelling to study because it sees Spain's decline as an imperial power in 1898, which prompted questions of national status and regeneration to emerge in the political arena at the start of the twentieth century. Furthermore, it is also characterized by political and social upheavals: the Second Spanish Republic established in 1931 and the subsequent battle fought between loyalists to the Republic and Franco's Nationalists in ...
Over the 2010s, unprecedented policy attention has been brought to universal basic income. The proposal of giving all members of a polity a periodic, unconditional and individual cash transfer has effectively shifted from the margins to concrete political debates in Europe. This raises new questions about how local policy-makers justify basic income in these debates, as public justifications have a role in shaping the perceived legitimacy of a policy proposal. Although there has been an expansion in basic income research, only a handful of studies have addressed this dimension. The aim of the study was to examine how parliamentarians in two European countries, Finland and Spain, justify basic income. The case countries were selected on the bases that there has been a wide discussion on basic income in the recent decades in both countries, and basic income related pilot projects have recently taken place in both. The two countries also have a history of persistent long-term unemployment, which has been argued to possibly enhance interest in basic income. The study addressed how the purpose of basic income is understood in Finnish and Spanish parliamentary debates and to what extent justifications shared similarities across case parliaments. The data consisted of plenary sitting documents (N = 104) from Finnish and Spanish parliaments that contained at least one mention of basic income over the periods of 2005–2007 and 2015–2017, (N = 89 documents from Finland, N = 15 from Spain). The case study approached basic income debates from the theoretical perspectives of domestication of global models and epistemic governance. Discourse analysis and the epistemic governance framework were utilized to organize findings. The goals in arguments for basic income were identified and linked to assumptions about the environment, actors, norms, and values they relate to. The results presented the three most prevalent discourses according to the purpose of basic income. These were i) fixing the safety net, ii) encouraging activity, and iii) emancipation of popular classes. In the safety net discourse, the existent social benefits system was perceived to be a result of a mismatch of short-term reforms for fixing systemic problems and basic income, in contrast, was positioned as a cohesive reform. Work was understood as an increasingly insecure source of income, and old group categorizations of benefits receivers as no longer matching with the new situation. The activity discourse depicted humans as naturally striving towards activity and basic income as a means to enhance work participation. In the emancipation discourse, basic income was a means for increasing material independence, which was seen as a necessary precondition for fulfilling democratic rights. The safety net discourse was shared in basic income justifications across the case parliaments, the activation discourse was specific to Finnish justifications, and the emancipation discourse specific to Spanish justifications. The activity discourse and the emancipation discourse depict very different ways of understanding the purpose and the scope of potential of basic income. Based on the analysis, there is a wide consensus among parliamentarians across the case parliaments on the need to streamline the social safety net and that working life has changed. The results illustrate the complexities of basic income and how it can be conceptualized and justified in various ways. To discuss politics of basic income and how the proposal is received in different countries, there is a need for future case studies that examine how basic income looks like within local discourses, and how these discourses connect with the institutional and political context in which they appear.
En este trabajo se pretende establecer un diálogo entre dos fenómenos culturales que guardan cierta relación con el "descubrimiento" oficial de la diversidad sexual en España. El primero de ellos es la eclosión de la literatura de temática homosexual, coincidente cronológica e históricamente con el restablecimiento del régimen democrático —fenómeno todavía no adecuadamente comprendido y vulnerable a las fáciles descalificaciones de la crítica literaria académica. El segundo fenómeno es el cambio de actitud de los estudios culturales en España en lo referente a la representación del cuerpo, el género y la sexualidad, mediante la asimilación, a veces apresurada y poco crítica, de la denominada "queer theory". Un escrutinio crítico de estos dos fenómenos considerados recíprocamente nos permite reformular la cuestión que enmarca este dossier del siguiente modo: ¿en qué sentido podemos afirmar que los estudios culturales han marcado la pauta para comprender las transformaciones culturales que están teniendo lugar en España? ; This paper scrutinises the relation between two cultural phenomena related to the institutional "discovery" of sexual and gender diversity in Spain. One is the boom of homosexually-themed fiction literature at the beginning of the new democratic regime. This boom, which has been subject to the academic literary criticism's facile and swift dismissal, is yet to be properly comprehended. The other refers to the attitude change within Spanish cultural studies in relation to body representations, gender and sexuality —change which has been mediated by the sometimes shallow adoption of queer theory. A critical consideration of these two phenomena will lead to the following umbrella question: up to what point can it be asserted that current cultural transformations in Spain are determined by similar changes within the discipline of cultural studies?
