Querying a Queer Spain Under Franco

There should be more articles in the legal journals such as Professor Gema Pérez-Sánchez's. In Franco's Spain, Queer Nation?, Professor Pérez-Sánchez has done a great service to legal scholarship in four respects. Firstly, she has written an appropriately far-ranging piece. In a discipline that has as one of its central missions the broadening of critical legal discourse, LatCrit can sometimes appear to suffer from symptoms of parochialism in its understandable emphasis on the Latina/o experience within American borders, or on the experience of its Latina/o immigrants once they have reached these shores. To be sure, this is not a problem unique to LatCrit.

However, if LatCrit takes seriously its role in the legal academe of opening up all categories (such as race, gender, sexuality, and class) to critical analysis, thereby disrupting the hegemony of fixed meanings (and it does), it cannot simultaneously confine those investigations to a North or Latin American experience. While the influence of continental philosophy on American legal theory is undeniable, with a few notable exceptions, the reverse effect seems far less impressive. Even though it is unlikely that Professor Pérez-Sánchez's contribution will single-handedly correct this imbalance, it is a welcomed example of American scholarship willing and interested in non-American affairs, and it is a credit to LatCrit for including a work such as this within its movement. However, it is perhaps of no coincidence that an Article such as this was written by a non-legal scholar.