"Eradicating Criminal Machismo": Feminism, Domestic Violence, and National Identity in Post-Francoist Spain

In December 2004, in response to a spate of murders arising from cases of domestic violence, Spain’s left-leaning Partido Socialista Obrero Español helped pass a new piece of domestic violence legislation, the Ley Orgánica de Violencia de Género (Organic Law on Gender Violence). The law proved controversial: breaking with previous legal formulations, it defined domestic violence as a crime that only men could commit against only women, and, more shocking still, it blamed the prevalence of this crime on the Spanish government. Following the death of dictator Francisco Franco, the law charged, Spain’s new democratic government failed to adequately promote gender equality, allowing the cause of the violence – a misogynistic form of masculinity, machismo, that Spaniards associated with the repressive Franco regime – to linger and tear at Spain’s social fabric.

Beyond the immediate controversy that this law engendered, its terms, and in particular its allusion to Franco’s legacy, are symptomatic of a larger struggle in contemporary Spain: the struggle to define what it means to be Spanish in the post-Francoist era.  Thus the debate over domestic violence reform reveals myriad ways that groups spanning the political spectrum, including feminists, the Catholic Church, and both of Spain’s major political parties, have invoked the specter of Francoist-era authoritarianism to advocate for a variety of policies, with an eye to the particular version of national identity they desired. In recent years, for example, Spain’s devoutly Catholic religious right has coopted the arguments of left-leaning feminists and used them to propose that a true Spanish democracy would restrict women’s rights in the name of repudiating Franquismo.

The complicated alliances, and complex negotiations, in play have had far-reaching consequences for citizens’ ability to imagine alternatives to their political and social milieu.  It is the aim of this paper to better understand this process.