Abstract
This article addresses how sociocultural discourses shape, are inscribed and are transformed in/by our bodies and body practices. We part from the repre-sentational strategies of male homosexuality in Franco’s dictatorship in Spain and nowadays. We deal with male homosexuality as lesbianism has re-mained an “invisible” topic until recent days. This analysis is based on bibliographic and archival sources and on an ethnographic fieldwork that aims to show how social identities and particularly the so-called “sexual orientation” have been and are embodied.
Bodies are locus where discourses and counter-discourses meet and inscribe; they are dynamic ele-ments whose ”itineraries” (Esteban, 2004) and narra-tives talk on etic and emic discourses on fundamental social aspects such as sexual and gender dimor-phism, inscription of identities, sexual desire and practice, sexual dissidence, power, ideology and transgression. We consider the intersections among bodies, genders, discourses and representation in determined sociocultural contexts in order to ad-dress, from a critical perspective, the historical and cultural construction of the sex/gender/sexual prac-tice system and to consider the individual, social and political perspectives of bodies.