The Queer Spaces and Fluid Bodies of Nazario’s Anarcoma

There’s a ladder in her nylons
Where we can climb up to the stars
Join a queue of Borsalinos
As you bend over the bar
Tattoo on her muscle says
‘Beware, Behave, be mine’
She’ll eat them up for breakfast
One at a time

Anarcoma, Anarcoma, Anarcoma -Lyrics to “Anarcoma” by Marc Almond

 
During the 1970s in Spain, the comic series Anarcoma stands out as emblematic not only of the social and political reality of the day, but also of the openness and freedom that accompanied the end of the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. It is a series that openly discusses taboo subjects such as homosexuality and gender identity, while at the same time questioning the myriad of issues tied to Spain’s transition to democracy, and especially the normative forces that had forced Spain into compliance with a rigid set of social expectations for so long. Anarcoma, created by the artist Nazario (Nazario Luque Vera), first appeared in serial form in El Víbora magazine in 1979, and later as a compilation, in 1981.¹
 
Born in Castilleja del Campo, Sevilla, Nazario grew up in an environment of Spanish traditionalism that soon made him realize that his creative destiny lay elsewhere, and so he made Barcelona his home in the early 1970s. The Catalan capital that welcomed the young artist was a city with a flourishing youth culture that was growing increasingly uneasy with the aging dictatorship.² Along with this culture came an active drive to break, bend, and refigure the norms that had oppressed Nazario and his contemporaries for so long. Nazario, in fact, calls himself a “militant homosexual,” and “militant” activists like Nazario were pushing to contribute to the rapid progress that Spain was attempting to make after years of oppression (“Disección” 55). Anarcoma emerges from this environment of radical change in Barcelona and in the rest of Spain. While various artists of this period fostered strong ties with the emergent gay political movement, Nazario viewed his artistic work itself as his contribution to militant activism. In an interview with the artist in Armand de Fluvià’s El movement gai a la clandestinitat del franquisme, Nazario says, “Jo en aquella època ja feia les meves històries d’Anarcoma, les meves històries de mariconeo. I pensava que amb això ja hi havia prou militància com perquè no em fes falta entrar en cap grup” ‘During that period I had already written my stories about Anarcoma, my queer stories. And I thought that with this there already was quite a lot of militancy so I felt it was unnecessary for me to join any group’ (76).³ The militant queerness of Anarcoma is precisely what distinguishes it and makes it such an important cultural text from this time period.
 
Anarcoma revolves around the life and adventures of the detective, Anarcoma. Dopico describes Nazario’s heroine as “un famoso travesti que pulula por las Ramblas barcelonesas, cuyas características físicas saltan a la vista y que se autodefine como ‘una maricona con tetas'” ‘a famous transvestite who mills around the Barcelona Ramblas, whose physical characteristics are obvious and who defines herself as ‘a faggot with tits” (393). Her actions and visual presentation can be interpreted as the ultimate symbol of the changes that were happening all over Spain.⁴
 
More than just a representation of the blurring of gender presentation or the reversal of established gender norms, however, Anarcoma is also a product of the Spanish comics traditions of the period in which it appears.⁵Anarcoma recalls the tradition of Spanish police-drama comics, like the Doctor Niebla series (see Fig. 1 below), populated with square jawed men and curvy women, which appeared beginning in the 1940s (Coma 425).⁶ Nazario describes Anarcoma in the introduction thus: “Es una mezcla, tanto en el físico como en su comportamiento, entre Lauren Bacall y Humfrey Bogart” ‘She is a mixture, as much in her appearance as in her behavior, between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart,’ a description that also connects the comic to a tradition of film noir detectives (Anarcoma 10). Still, despite the noir-inspired scenes and characters and themes of deception and intrigue, Anarcoma is far from a traditional comic (see Fig. 2 below).⁷Anarcoma simultaneously draws from these traditions and questions them, replicating in this sense the country’s attempt to reconcile its centuries-old culture with the need to transition into modernity. In effect, the comic queers the heteronorms which had, until this point, unwaveringly guided the nation. Juan Vicente Aliaga describes this process of questioning and queering: “Nazario ha recuperado, para el texto y la imagen, desde un punto de vista combativo y burlón, en un terreno imaginario preñado de realidad, los valores positivos de la feminización del varón y de la sexualidad despendolada, dándoles un toque queer avant la lettre” ‘Nazario has recovered, for the text and the image, from a combative and mocking point of view, in an imaginary land pregnant with reality, the positive values of the feminization of the male and of sexuality gone wild, giving them an avant la lettre queer touch’ (Aliaga and Cortes 68).
 

 

 

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Fig. 1.

Doctor Niebla (1952)

© 1988 Nazario & Ediciones La Cúpula, SL. Used by permission.

 

 

 

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Fig. 2.

Anarcoma (17)

© 1988 Nazario & Ediciones La Cúpula, SL. Used by permission.

 

 
Anarcoma and its original queer sensibility appear at a time when Spanish culture was attempting to emerge from the shadow of an oppressive dictatorship. A number of cultural texts of the time move specifically to forget the Franco period, and to re-create a sense of national cultural identity, in many cases by moving toward a kind of postmodern aesthetic that relies heavily on the primacy of images and eschews deep political discourse. Cristina Moreiras Menor highlights this trend:
 

Salir del ostracismo y el aislamiento que el antiguo régimen de Franco había impuesto, dejar de ser una comunidad ‘premoderna’, se convierte en prioridad fundamental y, a partir de ella, la construcción de una nueva imagen y de unas nuevas señas de identidad pasan por la destrucción, reconstrucción o incluso el desinterés aniquilador (como si no hubieran existido) de todos aquellos símbolos que se asocian con la vieja España.”
 

(65)

(Escaping from the ostracism and isolation that the former regime had imposed, ceasing to be a “pre-modern” community, became the fundamental priority and, from this, the construction of a new image and of new signs of identity go through the destruction of, reconstruction of or even an annihilating lack of interest in (as if it had never existed) all those symbols associated with old Spain.)

Anarcoma, we will see, takes the cultural and sexual expectations inherited from franquismo and queers them, resulting in a new set of images that can be associated with a democratic Spain.⁸

 
With its distinct visual representations, Anarcoma refigures gendered and sexual bodies while navigating real Barcelona spaces. This use of urban space rhetorically links the boundary crossing of Anarcoma as a fictional individual with the developments and changes within the gay community of Barcelona and of Spain at large, because the boundaries crossed by Anarcoma’s gender transgressions and those of supporting characters are linked to the real Barcelona spaces they inhabit. An analysis of the specific spaces and how they are refigured and tied to the fluid body of Anarcoma serves to reflect the development of gay identity in Spain.
 
Under the right-wing dictatorship of Francisco Franco, a large portion of the Spanish population had to remain “closeted,” in some sense of the word. Spaniards with more progressive or left leaning political views had to meet in secret; women who did not desire to be limited only to the domestic sphere had to carefully curtail any open expression of dissent, and Spanish gays and lesbians had to meet clandestinely, encode their correspondence to one another, and often endure life in a double closet.⁹ As the dictatorship of Franco entered its final years, Spanish people began to push back against the boundaries that had confined them for forty years. Beginning at first as a gradual transgression of these guiding norms, upon the death of Franco, as a nation, Spaniards began to emerge from the many closets where they had hidden themselves. This emergence on a number of fronts (political, social, cultural) was the beginning of what is widely known as the transición. During this period, Spain experienced an explosion of new production and thought that appeared as an attempt to reconcile its dark recent history with the promise of a new democratic country. With the increasing visibility of non-normative sexualities in Spain, and as a manifestation of this cultural and political transition, the figure of the transsexual became a popular, though controversial, metaphor for this period of Spanish history. A number of social and political thinkers who have examined the transición have pointed out that the figure of the transsexual can be rhetorically linked to it as a means of understanding social transformation in the period.¹⁰ “Such celebratory displays of cultural transvestism . . . were directly related to the euphoric sense of unlimited possibilities that came with ‘not having Franco'” (Vernon and Morris 7). The transsexual’s freedom from rigid sexual/gender models emblematizes the freedom of the country from a variety of rigid roles imposed earlier by Francoism. Cristina Moreiras Menor makes the connection between the presence of the transsexual in texts from this period and a move toward a more superficial, image based culture. She says, “En este sentido, ponen en escena una política de la transexualidad o travestismo donde lo que domina no es tanto la sexualidad como placer (jouissance) como la sexualidad como artificio y el juego de los signos sexuales” ‘In this sense, they stage a politics of transsexuality or travestism where what dominates is not as much sexuality as pleasure (jouissance) as sexuality as artifice and the game of sexual signs’ (78). The metaphor of the transsexual is not necessarily one that should be wielded universally, though. Many critics, including Garlinger and Pérez-Sánchez, have expressed “concern about uncritical endorsements of the drag metaphor of national identity” (Garlinger 367-68, Pérez-Sánchez 94). I argue, however, that the specific modes of queering of expectations of masculinity and femininity in Anarcoma themselves open up a space from which a new gay identity can emerge.¹¹ Built on this troubling of expectations, the freedom gained by this generation of Spanish gays and lesbians becomes less one tied to the specific political freedoms granted under democracy and more about the individual freedoms to more authentically express their sexuality.
 
The movement of transsexual and transvestite bodies through the evolving spaces of its cities, such as Barcelona, also highlights their role as focal points for the development of new identities. Barcelona during the transition was, in many ways, the birthplace of the gay community in Spain, as it was home to the first gatherings of gay and lesbian Spaniards, with a large number of transsexuals among them, who marched for the recognition of their rights.¹² While these now vocal groups disrupted the expected norms by taking to the public spaces of Barcelona, their openness resulted in a disruption of those discursive spaces. Public spaces had only recently been opened up to more freedom of expression, and in this specific expression (that of self-identification as gay) the concept of a gay community, both in more abstract cultural terms and very physical corporeal terms, began to form.
 
Other cultural and spatial factors figure into the development of gay identity. Barcelona is a city with strong ties to its traditional Catalan heritage, but this background was simultaneously rooted in the stricter traditions that had kept gay Spaniards in the closet, as well as a cultural tradition that allowed for the transition out of this closet. Barcelona and Cataluña as a whole had struggled with a desire for more cultural autonomy under the Franco regime, and with the end of the dictatorship, a more authentic expression of Catalan identity was possible. This revitalization of Catalan identity is reflected in the prized Catalan virtues of seny and arrauxment.¹³ The combination of common sense and tolerance of seny with the violent upheaval of arrauxment arguably provided Catalan cultural support for what would become the gay rights movement in Spain. The closeting forces that silenced Spanish gays and lesbians can be rhetorically linked to the oppression of Catalan cultural identity under the one-nation, one-culture rhetoric of the dictatorship, and so when free of these restraints, the resulting upheaval and demonstration of gays on the streets of Barcelona can be viewed as tied to a more open expression of Catalan cultural values.
 
In examining the city of Barcelona as a type of birthplace for gay identity in Spain, however, one must consider that the residents of the city are not necessarily Catalan, and that Catalan identity is not the only national/regional formation at play, and in fact many authors have thematized the migration of Andalusians and Murcians, known in Cataluña as Xarnegos, to the region. As one of the two largest cities in Spain, Barcelona would also have been a preferred destination for many closeted gay and lesbian Spaniards during and after the dictatorship. Often facing a greater degree of religious and social pressure due to their avowed or possibly closeted homosexuality, these men and women fled their home towns for more accepting environs. Before the death of Franco, their migration could have been couched in terms of artistic expression, as Barcelona had an active art scene, but the important point is that they came from all over, and they often brought their own distinct cultural heritages and expressions with them.¹⁴ This diverse mixture of backgrounds and experiences contributes not only to the types of cultural expression that came out of the transition in Barcelona, of which Anarcoma is one clear example, but also to the overall sense that the gay cultural identity that began to grow out of the demonstrations and marches was not entirely Catalan.
 
The development of queer identity both intersects with the city and changes it, just as it is itself changed by the city. It is important, then, to discuss Anarcoma, not only in the context of Spanish and Catalan cultures during the Franco and post-Franco periods, but also in relation to those concepts of gay and queer space developed by theorists such as Jon Binnie, David Bell, and others. Binnie has discussed the spatial element of sexual citizenship in the city,¹⁵ noting that “we put a lot of emphasis on the city as the prime site for the materialization of sexual identity, community and politics” (167). He distinguishes the work of Henning Bech, who argues that because of their “anonymity, publicity, and visibility . . . cities enable the performance of dissident sexualities” (Binnie 167). In other words, the city allows gays to be anonymous, but also to be visible. This combination makes identification of one another easier, for romantic encounters, for example, while also providing the anonymity and freedom to begin to understand one’s own identity. “(D)issident sexualities,” then, are clearly an “urban phenomenon, with cities as the centers of innovation and transgression” (Kaur Puar, Rushbrook and Schein 384).
 
Along with the ways that migration has impacted Catalan identity, particularly as it intersects with gay identity, it is also necessary to consider how the concept of migration affects more general theories of sexual citizenship and space. The flows from one place to another are not only interactions between spaces, but also forces that alter the spaces themselves. The forces that would drive a person to leave one place and migrate to another change the destination as well as the place left behind. As Bell and Binnie put it, “these flows interact with pre-existing urban forms and urban lives-these are not erased, but reworked” (1808). Migration contributes to the continual sense of becoming that is inherent in the development of an identity; it is a process that is not unidirectional or static, but continuous, as Larry Knopp and Michael Brown explain: “this continual process very often entails obvious material manifestations of diffusion, such as residential relocation, migration, communication via mass media, and the spread of resources such as money and cultural capital” (413).
 
These movements between places and the effects that they have on the development of queer sexual citizenship are not limited only to the spaces left behind and the spaces toward which the migrant moves in search of him or herself. The “in-between” is significant as well. Again Knopp and Brown provide relevant insights:
 

Furthermore, such spatially fractured subjectivities are constituted within as well as between scales and localities (for example, in movement between home, work, bars, clubs, coffee houses, tearooms or cottages, etc.). And, contrary to the experiences of many non-queer people, it appears that such searches lead us to subjectivities that are self-consciously multiply rooted…or rooted in movement itself, rather than in efforts to fix our subjectivities in only one key place.
 

(420)

The city, then, is a space that receives migrant sexual citizens and is changed by them while it aids them in their identity formation as individuals and as a community, and one where the movement between places is significant.¹⁶

 
Anarcoma represents precisely these connections between city spaces and the expression of queer identity in post-Franco Barcelona. Pablo Dopico describes Anarcoma as,
 

[u]n personaje emblemático que no dejó a ningún lector indiferente mientras paseaba con sus zapatos de tacón alto por las páginas de El Víbora en los primeros años de la década de los ochenta, reflejando y retratando el lado más canalla de las gentes y las calles de Barcelona. Reflejos de una subcultura urbana que mostraban un costumbrismo alternativo de la vida callejera.
 

(393)

([a]n emblematic character who left no reader indifferent while she walked with her high heeled shoes through the pages of El Víbora in the early years of the decade of the eighties, reflecting and depicting the more miserable side of the people and the streets of Barcelona. Reflections of an urban subculture that showed an alternative local culture of street life.)

Here Dopico links the character and body of Anarcoma not only to the streets of Barcelona, but also to the movement between places, and along those streets. The “alternative local culture of street life” mentioned here represents the city as rooted in past traditions, but also as changed by the nascent gay community and by the presence of Anarcoma as she moves through its streets.

The spaces that Anarcoma inhabits are not only general, anonymous spaces of sexual encounter between gays (clubs, bathhouses, cruising areas), but are also identifiable Barcelona spaces where Spanish gays could congregate openly and begin to develop a sense of connection and community identity. Dopico says, in discussing Anarcoma’s world, that:
 

Todos ellos conviven en una historia en la que la homosexualidad, lejos de presentarse como un gueto marginal, se convierte en la protagonista de la trama, en lo lógico y natural, con todas sus grandezas y miserias, reflejando sus gustos y costumbres cotidianas. Tras años de oprobio y condena, los homosexuales se sacudían la vergüenza de salir a la calle y buscaban un nuevo camino de libertad y normalidad rodeados de glamour y elegancia.
 

(395)

(They all coexist in a story where homosexuality, far from presenting itself as a marginal ghetto, is converted into the protagonist of the plot in the logical and natural way, with all of its grandeur and miseries, reflecting its everyday tastes and customs. After years of shame and condemnation, the homosexuals brushed away their embarrassment to go out into the streets and looked for a new path of liberty and normality surrounded by glamour and elegance.)

On those streets that Dopico links to the “new path of liberty and normality,” Anarcoma and her friends move from one iconic space to another, which they thereby mark as gay spaces or locations tied to the new sense of gay identity, although the comic also provides visual reminders of the resistances to these developments.

 
We see an example in one sequence in which Anarcoma and her friend Mimi are enjoying a social visit in a Barcelona bar/restaurant. The panel presents a fairly typical Barcelona scene (see Fig. 3 below). There are, however, certain elements that visually code the space as gay, or at least as a space welcoming to the newly visible gay community. To the left of Anarcoma and Mimi, one man has his arm around another muscular man, and to the right of them, a man flirts with the short order cook behind the bar. These ancillary characters in the panel are gays inhabiting a space coded as neutral or as a straight space, rather than gays who inhabit a space clearly marked as gay.¹⁷ Still, another part of the panel portrays their presence as part of a broader matrix of supportive spaces that would have contributed to the growth of gay identity. On the wall behind the group, a poster clearly advertises the “Día del Orgullo Gay” (“Gay Pride Day”).
 

 

 

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Fig. 3.

Anarcoma (29)

© 1988 Nazario & Ediciones La Cúpula, SL. Used by permission.

 

 
In this world, created by presenting a series of distinct spaces on the page, Nazario chooses to set the scenes in historic bars that were frequented by the author and his contemporaries. This focus on the streets and the common gathering places of Barcelona’s gay community places primacy not only on the act of gathering itself, but also on the places in which they could and would gather. Panels depicting these spaces are often wide and show a number of people conversing with each other at once. From this frenetic display of activity, the reader gains a sense not only of social interactions in a bar setting, which are often associated with Spanish nightlife in general, but also of interactions that are queered by the people in the bar (gays, transsexuals, punks). The specific types of conversations they are having in the panel (discussing sex acts, conquests, etc.) also help to queer the space. The realistic representations of specific, named spaces of the Barcelona nightlife accompany the more generic spaces that Anarcoma visits, and which could be anywhere in the city (public bathrooms, drag cabarets, dark waterfront docks), thus creating an image both of the specific gay spaces of the city and of those anonymous ones which served a specific purpose for individuals in the developing community (cruising, nightlife, etc.).
 
In a text that sets its action in the changing world of the Catalan capital in the 1970s and early 1980s, the specific choice of referents to code the city as specifically Barcelona represents an inversion of what is ordinarily thought of as “monumental.” There are no landmark buildings or skylines, no “tourist” representations of the city. Instead, Nazario focuses on the streets. In fact, the only image of Barcelona that can be considered “iconic” is the Miró mosaic imbedded in the center of the Rambla, and it is a literal “landmark,” at street level to be looked down at instead of gazed up at, further underscoring the “life on the street” nature of Nazario’s adopted home town.
 
The ties between Barcelona in the text and the real city of the post-Franco period are not limited to its public social spaces. At times, Nazario also chooses to include historical people from his world who interact on the page with the fictional Anarcoma and her associates. Nazario’s friend Onliyú appears as the inventor of the mysterious machine that everyone in the story is searching for. Nazario’s boyfriend Alejandro attempts to seduce Anarcoma’s friend Jamfry, and Nazario himself appears in another panel, arm in arm with his friend Ocaña (see Fig. 4 below).¹⁸ These people link the text to the city and to the gay community that was in its developmental stages, due in large part to their involvement with the burgeoning gay community through their artistic and creative work. This inclusion further ties the freedoms of expression and congregation that Anarcoma and her fictional associates enjoy with the developing community of Barcelona and Spain.
 

 

 

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Fig. 4.

Anarcoma (42)

© 1988 Nazario & Ediciones La Cúpula, SL. Used by permission.

 

 
While it is important to examine the specific spaces which Anarcoma and her fellow Barcelonans, both fictional and real, inhabit, “people on the move across spaces may also be key contributors to the sexual characterization of places” (Kaur Puar, Rushbrook and Schein 385-386). This movement between and across spaces is important in this context because of the emphasis Nazario puts on the streets and on street life in the text. Here the streets are a significant space of their own. Just as the text features life inside these bars and social hotspots, it also places significance on the life outside and in between them by showing activity going on through the window of panels set in the interior of a place, or by beginning a sequence from the street and looking through the front display window into the restaurant or bar. These are not mere establishing shots, as the specific activity going on outside the spaces (other transsexuals talking, gay couples walking hand in hand, etc.) contribute to the sense that this entire network of space is somehow new and different.
 
On the streets, Anarcoma and her fellow citizens move from place to place, but not free from interactions, glances, and conversations. In navigating the city, Anarcoma seeks out clues to the mystery as well as pleasure and sexual company. In this movement, she can be seen as what Dianne Chisholm calls a “cruising flâneur,” a refiguring of Benjamin’s city dweller, who in this modern, queer context, gravitates to erotic hotspots in her movement through urban spaces (46-47). She moves between these spaces, at times seemingly for the mere sake of moving, and while doing so, she frequently participates in cruising for a fleeting sexual encounter. This more seedy element of the street experience, done in the open and visible to all, is yet another hallmark of the new sexual freedom in Barcelona and in Spain.
 
This openness and freedom are not complete, however. The newfound freedoms of Spain after Franco were not suddenly widespread and easily accepted overnight, and in Anarcoma, there is a sense of uneasiness and uncertainty that pervades the text. This could be attributed to the film noir feel of the detective stories that inform it, but there are moments that textually tie Anarcoma to its historical moment and to the widespread uncertainty as to the future of the country. One such instance occurs in a panel chronicling Anarcoma and Mimi’s movement from one bar to the next. The friends are discussing part of the mystery she is trying to solve, and Mimi says, “Después de las cosas que han pasado…A mí me da mucho miedo” ‘After everything that has happened…It really scares me’ (Anarcoma 29). This statement would only be one of a number of plot-driving statements except for the way the panel is presented. As Anarcoma and Mimi walk toward the Bar Ramblas, foregrounded in ominous green shadows are what appear to be members of the Spanish secret police, complete with the requisite, threatening dark glasses and scowls. Their presence in this panel allows for a secondary reading of Mimi’s statement, now connected with the fear and uncertainty that faced the community at this historical moment.¹⁹ It is, in fact, this sense of fear that marked this period. Moreiras Menor points out that the period of the desencanto during which Anarcoma appears is characterized by “un sentimiento generalizado de miedo surgido por el estado de incertidumbre social, económica y política” ‘a generalized feeling of fear which arises from the state of social, economic, and political uncertainty’ (61). In this, and in many other ways, the comic is an historical text documenting the testing of the boundaries amidst a fear of a return to the rigidity of dictatorship, as in Fig. 5:²⁰
 

 

 

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Fig. 5.

Anarcoma (29)

© 1988 Nazario & Ediciones La Cúpula, SL. Used by permission.

 

 
The meeting spots and streets of Barcelona in the pages of the comic provide the rhetorical space for the development of a sense of sexual citizenship on the part of gay and lesbian Spaniards in general, and are also directly linked to the figure of Anarcoma as she inhabits these spaces. Teresa Vilarós agrees that, despite the “rareza” or “strangeness” of Anarcoma, it is representative of the reality and the aesthetics of the period. She says
 

Y aunque no se puede extender al total de la población–ni siquiera a su mayoría–sí puede afirmarse sin embargo que fue este cuerpo ’emplumado’ y fluido,²¹ compuesto sobre todo de heroína, sangre y semen, el que dio voz, estilo y marca a un momento específico de la historia española reciente

(And although one cannot extend it to the total population–nor even to a majority of it–one can nevertheless assert that it was this ‘queer’ and fluid body, composed above all of heroine, blood, and semen, the one that gave voice, style, and a brand to a specific moment of recent Spanish history).
 

(183)

The spaces which Anarcoma inhabits are themselves significant in the ways they help question established norms. Anarcoma’s is a subculture of explicit, often violent sex, and within these spaces, a constant examination and reconstruction of gender norms occurs, not relying on the heteronormative model of gender expression, but instead creating a new one which foregrounds freedom of expression and sexuality as the most important forces in identity formation.²²

 
Anarcoma’s subjectivity is centered on her bodily presence, and the forces which cause the refiguring and recreating of Barcelona in the comic are also at work on the body of Anarcoma herself. Knopp and Brown tie agency to spatiality, saying: “A more queer way of conceptualizing these issues, we believe, involves thinking of ‘agency’ and ‘subjectivity’ . . . as inextricably intertwined and inherently spatial” (412). This results in a new idea of the role of the body and of the visual presentation of gender as a foundational force for the establishment of gay identity. In Anarcoma, Nazario utilizes the visual medium of comics to question, refigure and ultimately queer the expected cultural gender norms through the character of Anarcoma herself. Anarcoma is a liminal figure who occupies simultaneously two different, gendered roles. An examination of the way Nazario presents the transsexual detective in the comic elucidates much about the way gender is presented in comics and how questions of gender and gender norms figure prominently in the nascent gay movement of Spain in the late 1970s and early 1980s. A further analysis of the secondary characters with whom Anarcoma interacts also highlights this queering of the norms through the abstraction of coded images of gender.
 
Peter Brooks writes that “modern narratives appear to produce a semioticization of the body which is matched by a somatization of story: a claim that the body must be a source and a locus of meanings, and that stories cannot be told without making the body a prime vehicle of narrative significations” (xii). Anarcoma’s body is represented as loaded with meaning, a mixture between masculine and feminine without favoring one or the other. Nazario draws her in feminine clothing at all times, often in hypersexual tight skirts and fishnet stockings, but she is also coded masculine in the aggression with which she sets out to solve crime. While the traditional mainstream image of the transsexual is one of outward femininity that hides bodily maleness, Anarcoma does not attempt to hide her maleness, nor does she exclusively express exterior femininity. As the introduction says, she is “orgullosa de su respetable polla,” ‘proud of her sizeable cock,’ and in her sexual encounters is frequently the active partner (Anarcoma 10). In this way, Anarcoma not only presents a queer image, refusing to conform to one model of gender (masculinity or femininity), but she also queers what would have been the ubiquitous image of the transsexual in post Franco Spanish society. Nazario himself has described her, saying: “no es una Bibi Andersen que está ahí tratando de disimular, que todo el mundo sabe que fue hombre y que nadie sabe realmente si está operada o no está operada, funciona como mujer pero hay este misterio. En cambio en Anarcoma no había este misterio en absoluto nunca” ‘she is not a Bibi Andersen who is there trying to hide, who everyone knows was a man and that no one really knows if she is pre-operative or post-operative, functioning as a woman but with that mystery. Instead, in Anarcoma there was never this mystery’ (qtd. in Pérez del Solar 534).²³ She is neither completely male nor female, nor even traditionally transsexual. Anarcoma is truly queer, questioning identity and sexuality at a new level.²⁴ Anarcoma, then, exists as a kind of postmodern subject for whom exterior appearance and behavior are much more important than a deeper sense of self or identity.²⁵
 
The presence of Anarcoma and her role in establishing a new sense of queer cultural expression participates in a long tradition of narratives that deal with non-normative sexuality as it relates to Spanish identity. Gema Pérez-Sánchez has pointed out, for example, that in a number of texts that on one level attempt to recover queer expression, “the characterization of the male protagonists as victims is informed by the fear of being symbolically feminized, castrated, and possibly sodomized by fascism” (75). Coming out of the immediate post-Franco period, I would argue, Anarcoma wields a number of these fears as weapons, not in an exorcism of the “fear of feminization” that Pérez-Sánchez notes is present in related texts, but rather as useful tools in the recovery of agency over them: Anarcoma makes the choice to remain in a middle place between masculinity an femininity, she is an active and passive participant in sodomy, again choosing not to favor one over the other, exhibiting agency over the choice rather than fear, and, in a particularly graphic scene, she literally castrates one of her captors in an attempt to escape their clutches. With these active choices, Anarcoma exhibits control over her environment, and establishes a new model for the freedom of personal expression under democracy.
 
Anarcoma is a transsexual with an outwardly feminine appearance, but as Alberto Mira discusses, “Anarcoma sería un ejemplo de transgresión precisamente porque, a pesar de tener cierta apariencia femenina se comporta de manera viril” ‘Anarcoma would be an example of transgression precisely because, in spite of having a certain feminine appearance, she behaves in a manly way’ (438). It is this masculine behavior that most often marks Anarcoma’s masculinity. What cannot be ignored in the numerous panels showing our heroine engaging in a sex act, however, is the presence of her “sizeable cock.” It is, after all, her penis which distinguishes her from other, biological females in the comic. Her liminality as a character is due in large part to her insistence on remaining “no operada” ‘un-operated.’ Unlike many real-world transsexuals who are at varying points on a journey toward full transition, Nazario has Anarcoma choose to keep her penis, due in large part to the power it allows her to wield in a phallocentric society.²⁶
 
As Butler and others have well established, gender is a type of performance, and visuality is an important part of the process of the performance of gender. Butler writes, “Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means” (173). The fact that Anarcoma is shown displaying her penis at various times makes her penis part of Anarcoma’s gender performance. Hers is a fluctuating performance, however, changing depending on her needs and desires at that moment. While her breasts and women’s clothing represent one manifestation of gender, her display of her penis represents another, and at times both appear simultaneously, emphasizing the performativity of gender.²⁷ Her clothing too, although predominantly feminine in style, is occasionally coded visually as masculine. One particular item of clothing, the trench coat that appears to be the heroine’s favorite piece of outerwear, does this most successfully. In that it covers the outward displays of Anarcoma’s femininity and is a common clothing item for many men, this trench coat marks her as masculine, but it also helps produce the aura of the film noir detective to which Anarcoma owes much inspiration. That detective is exclusively male, so when our detective wears a trench coat, not only does it cover up her femaleness (she also tends to wear her hair up in a beret to further this outward performance of masculinity), but it also imbues her with the masculinity that is associated with the film noir detective.
 
Another way in which Anarcoma displays her gender performance of masculinity can be seen in a panel in which her sex robot, XM2, is first put under her control. He springs to attention, saying “¡A sus órdenes, mi jefe!” ‘At your command, sir!,’ thereby putting Anarcoma in the position of the male military officer waiting for the compliance of his soldiers. This masculinity is subverted by the visual representation of Anarcoma, with exposed breasts and high heeled boots, her hidden (for the time being) penis covered with undergarments. She can also be read here as a dominatrix who, although traditionally feminine, wields masculine power and control over her sexual partner; indeed the inversion of traditional gender and power roles forms a major part of the allure of this type of activity, as in Fig. 6:
 

 

 

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Fig. 6.

Anarcoma (44)

© 1988 Nazario & Ediciones La Cúpula, SL. Used by permission.

 

It may well be that Anarcoma’s masculinity is the most dramatic of the two presentations, due in large part to her outward, feminine appearance, but that feminine appearance balances out the equation, holding Anarcoma firmly in the liminal space between masculinity and femininity.

 
Anarcoma is often visually coded as feminine. Just as her maleness is displayed openly, her femaleness is similarly made visible in the frequent times she appears topless in the comic. Anarcoma’s breasts do not take the form of stuffed bras or other fabricated illusions, but are bodily markers of her femaleness, and so in seeing them (and we do see them often) the reader is constantly reminded of this aspect of Anarcoma’s gender identity. This bodily marker of her femaleness serves not only to keep the visual representation of her gender identity fluid, but also to feature her breasts as a bodily site of social transgression. Mary Douglas discusses bodily boundaries and their ties to social boundaries:

The relation of head to feet, of brain and sexual organs, of mouth and anus are commonly treated so that they express the relevant patterns of hierarchy. Consequently I now advance the hypothesis that bodily control is an expression of social control–abandonment of bodily control in ritual responds to the requirements of a social experience which is being expressed. Furthermore, there is little prospect of successfully imposing bodily control without the corresponding social forms.
 

(70-71)

So the bodily control that Anarcoma exerts through the hormone injections she uses to gain her breasts is not only a crossing of her own personal boundaries but also a symbolic subversion of societal controls over her body.²⁸

Even when wearing that favorite, masculine trench coat of hers, Anarcoma is often topless underneath, ready to shed the outward marker of masculinity and display her femaleness proudly. Most frequently, though, it is her style of dress that is the primary component of her performance of femininity, since she is often drawn in skimpy skirts, knee-high, high-heeled boots and fishnet stockings. Out with her (also transsexual) friend, the two window-shop for high heels and look at dress displays in a store window (the act of window shopping in itself can be considered feminine). They are, in a sense, looking at the articles of their artifice, seeking out the tools that will help them succeed in their gender performance. At the end of their day of shopping, they stop in a salon, a locus for bodily control: Anarcoma’s friend gets her legs waxed. All of these events taking place in the space of three panels convey the two characters’ quest for femininity. As Butler would no doubt remind us, though, if transsexuals search for femininity, it does not mean that gender construction and performance are exclusive to them. All women (like all men) perform their gender in part through outward displays of clothing and bodily control, as in Fig. 7 below:
 

 

 

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Fig. 7.

Anarcoma (55)

© 1988 Nazario & Ediciones La Cúpula, SL. Used by permission.

 

 
In another sequence, Anarcoma tries to get information out of a female associate of her nemesis, La Deisy. She takes advantage of the drunkenness of the woman to ply her for details regarding the location of a missing machine, and ultimately resorts to seducing the woman to further her quest. The scene is distinguished by the way it is presented visually. Despite the fact that the reader is well aware of Anarcoma’s sexual prowess and her “sizeable cock,” the sex between the two is visually coded as lesbian sex. They are first shown sitting fully clothed on the couch, conversing and flirting, and then in the following panel, La Deisy is shown lying down bare breasted while Anarcoma performs oral sex on her, while herself fully clothed. After the nakedness and the sex coded as either heterosexual or as sex between men that abounds in the comic, it is significant that Anarcoma is coded here as exclusively feminine, as lesbian. Perhaps it is an effort to resist traditional gender/sexual roles and avoid the expected sexual coupling of a male and a female, which might be the case if the detective were coded as more masculine here. Anarcoma does, after all, have no problem playing a more active, male coded sexual role when having sex with men. By resisting the more traditional expectations, and instead creating a panel that is coded as lesbian, Nazario maintains the tension that exists bodily in the character of Anarcoma and is reflected in her behavior.
 
Anarcoma ties the transgressive body to the changing culture and spaces of Spain. Her body is a “corporeal . . . mapping of the subject into a cultural system”; as a metaphor, Anarcoma’s fluid body comments on the norms that had constricted Spanish culture under Franco and on the forces that sought to move Spain away from its rigid past (Bukatman 49). In a nation that wanted to leave its troubled past behind, Nazario creates Anarcoma. She is an uncommon, unexpected heroine who refuses to leave the “past” of her body behind, and instead forges her own way, a new way created from within spaces that facilitate this act of creation and re-creation. The negotiations she makes throughout the text emblematize the transition which was occurring around her and her readers. The city she moves through, Barcelona, provides her with the freedom to create her own path and to carve out her own identity. Her life and adventures highlight the negotiations (of space, of regional and national identities, etc.) that the country as a whole was grappling with. However, just as Spain’s future was uncertain when Anarcoma first appeared, so the text leaves many of the questions it raises intentionally unanswered. The result of the continual negotiations, back and forth migrations, and incomplete formations in Anarcoma is a text that centers on a detective who, by the end of the story, rather than solve a mystery outright, instead leaves the reader questioning, among other things, such ideas as the visual markers of gender, gender roles, and the constructedness of gender itself.