“Él vino en un barco”la copla en las prácticas camp españolas

Resumen

The main goal of this doctoral dissertation is to study the continuity of the copla genre within Spanish queer culture, especially in practices which may be catalogued as camp for their tendency towards theatricality, aesthetic excess and a parodic questioning of tradicional gender roles. With text analysis as a methodological tool, we shall analyse a wide range of cultural artifacts —song lyrics and musical performances, as well as expressions belonging to literature, cinema, transvestite performance or contemporary art—, understood as cultural texts ladden with meaning, which allow us to trace in their thematic, formal and discursive aspects the varied ways in which Spanish song and queer and camp culture intertwine. Through said analysis we shall, on the one hand, characterise certain features of the musical genre which render it especially attractive for camp, whereas, on the other hand, we shall advance a hypothesis to explain the reasons for its pervasiveness within Spanish queer culture, from the golden age of the genre (overlapping to a great extent with the Franco years) until today. The preeminence of the feminine, a passionate sentimentality, aesthetic saturation and theatricality are some of the features of the classical corpus of the copla which explain both its connection to certain cultural forms —mainly kitsch and melodrama— underrated by the regulatory mechanisms of “good taste”, and the queer interest in the genre. The latter has a twofold materialisation: on the one hand, a dramatic vein based on homosexual subculture and its identification with the feminine and, on the other hand, a properly camp incarnation which introduces the element of humour and of “committed detachment”. While such mechanisms are particularly noticeable in Rafael de León's lyrics, as well as in performances by Spanish female folkloric singers such as Concha Piquer, Juanita Reina, Lola Flores or Rocío Jurado, stage practices of male singers as far removed from heteronormativity as Miguel de Molina, Antonio Amaya or Rafael Conde “el Titi” are a powerful demonstration of how the copla functions as a repository of and an alibi for a certain Iberian queerness. This allowed for some of these practices related to aesthetic excess and effeminacy —with occasional camp overtones— to take place even during Franco's dictatorship. Additionally, we argue that the continuity of the copla in post-Stonewall camp practices, from places of enunciation now openly queer, is owed to the genre's ability to remain articulating itself as a space for enjoyment and resistance. Whereas the copla acted as a survival strategy during Franco's dictatorship, and while this manifestation of popular culture subsumed by Francoism was later repurposed during the Spanish transition to democracy, it nowadays serves to convey a certain desire for a properly queer genealogy beyond Anglo-Saxon hegemony, as well as to celebrate those other political practices beyond traditional activism which have been overlooked until recent times.