Papers by Miguel Garcia
Bulletin of Spanish Visual Studies, 2024
This article interrogates queer representations in twenty-first century Spanish film and streamin... more This article interrogates queer representations in twenty-first century Spanish film and streaming television series, focusing on a group of emerging millennial filmmakers: Paco León, Eduardo Casanova, and the filmmaking duo Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo (‘Los Javis’). I argue that the films and steaming series by these directors are representative of a Spanish queer aesthetics which navigates between combative subversion and mainstream inclusion. I assess to what extent contemporary screen cultures are still challenging hegemonic social and ideological constructs in relation to gender, sexuality, and identity and in what ways they grapple with LGBTQ+ visibility and subjectivity vis à vis the mainstream audio-visual media industry.
Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies, 2022
This article examines Federico García Lorca’s late poetic works from a queer perspective, offerin... more This article examines Federico García Lorca’s late poetic works from a queer perspective, offering close readings of a selection of poems from Diván del Tamarit and Sonetos del amor oscuro (1931–1936). Both works reveal Lorca’s mature lyrical approach to love experiences, desire and death, existential anguish and the role of poetic creation. I argue that Lorca creates a queer spatiotemporal realm in which the interweaving of desire and death mirrors the indeterminacy and transgressive nature of the bodies and identities invoked by the poetic voice. Drawing on Lorca’s poetic theory of duende, I examine fluidity and cyclicality between desire and death as key elements of heterodox subjective formation which challenge normative ideas of gender, affect, sexuality and identity. By transgressing time, space, bodies, gender and sexuality, Lorca imagines new and alternative ways of being, becoming and relating to the world which challenge linearity, logical or stable and fixed identities or binary physical-affective distinctions, proposing transformation, fluidity and metamorphosis as queer strategies of survival, rebirth and reinvention.
Cauce. Revista Internacional de Filología, Comunicación y sus Didácticas, 2021
This article focuses on a selection of poems from Federico García Lorca’s 1930s poetic works, Div... more This article focuses on a selection of poems from Federico García Lorca’s 1930s poetic works, Diván del Tamarit and Sonetos del amor oscuro, to argue that, by adding a non-normative element to his exploration of desire, Lorca queers poetic subjects and articulates gender, space and time in transgressive and innovative ways. Both poetic works reveal a sense of ambiguity made explicit as an integral part of the poetic artifice, together with spatiotemporal transgressions and re-appropriations of various poetic traditions, which reinforce the constructed and destructive nature of heteronormative discourses around gender and desire. Through close textual reading, I examine how Lorca creates an indeterminate and epenthetic poetic realm where the limits of desire and death are distorted and bodies, emotional states and spatiotemporal coordinates are unstable and fluid.
Conference Papers by Miguel Garcia
AHGBI Annual Conference, 2021
This paper was given at the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland (AHGBI) Annual... more This paper was given at the Association of Hispanists of Great Britain and Ireland (AHGBI) Annual Conference in 2021. The paper proposes a queer reading of Federico García Lorca’s late poetic works. Written during the final years of his life (1934-1936), both Diván del Tamarit and Sonetos del amor oscuro can be considered climactic works revealing a mature lyrical approach to love experiences, desire and death through poetic forms until then unprecedented in Lorca’s poetics. Due to their posthumous publication and the textual and editorial problems around both works, they continue to be a rather mysterious and at times controversial part of Lorca studies. Both works present poetic subjects and images fragmented at the spatiotemporal level, as well as bodies which are wounded or on the brink of destructuration, characterised by fluidity and indeterminacy. Taking queerness as the performative transgression of normativity, Lorca creates an indeterminate and epenthetic poetic space where the cyclical interweaving of desire and death signals that which escapes articulation and rationality, revealing a contestation of established norms via performative imitations and re-appropriations of poetic forms made aesthetically new.
ASAP Conference, 2021
This paper was part of the panel seminar discussion 'Millennial Fictions' at the 2021 Conference ... more This paper was part of the panel seminar discussion 'Millennial Fictions' at the 2021 Conference of ASAP (Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present). The paper examines queer representations in twenty-first century Spanish film, focusing on three emerging millennial filmmakers: Paco León, Eduardo Casanova and ‘Los Javis’ (Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo), who have all made their directorial debuts since 2000. I argue that the films by these directors — Kiki, el amor se hace (León, 2016), Pieles (Casanova, 2017), and La llamada (Ambrossi & Calvo, 2017)— as well as their works for television and digital media can be considered the shaping force of a Spanish queer aesthetics for the millennial generation. Exploring queer bodies and disrupting (hetero)normative constructs, re-appropriating and parodying gender and filmic genre motifs and expectations, and creating narratives and characters that defy essentialising notions of sexuality and gender, these young directors have managed to appeal to a variety of national and international audiences while debunking traditions and expectations associated with LGBTQ cinemas and communities.
Outreach Activities by Miguel Garcia
AS-Level and A-Level Study Day on Spanish and Chilean cinema dealing with dictatorship, the trans... more AS-Level and A-Level Study Day on Spanish and Chilean cinema dealing with dictatorship, the transition to democracy and historical memory. Students attended a screening of El silencio de otros
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Papers by Miguel Garcia
Conference Papers by Miguel Garcia
Outreach Activities by Miguel Garcia
Books by Miguel Garcia