Gender and the Transitions

Abstract

The democratization processes that took place during the last decades of the twentieth century in Southern Europe have made the transition from dictatorship to democratic system the focus of numerous studies. The extensive research done into these transitions, however, has largely overlooked questions of gender, gender identities and, more specifically, women and the LGBT population, despite the fact that various publications have demonstrated that political movements of feminists, gays, lesbians, trans* and bisexuals were instrumental in shaping a democratic political culture in countries like Portugal, Greece and Spain. This article, consequently, applies a critical perspective to reinterpret the processes behind the normative historical account of the political transitions, enhancing and multiplying the analytical possibilities. The topics examined in the article range from the genesis of movements based on new gender identities and meanings in response to the heteropatriarchal model of the dictatorships to the exclusion of these identities from the processes of openness in the 1970s because of their alleged threat to stability, political re-masculinization and the consequent gender deficit in the development and evolution of the democratic transition.