Queer Temporalities in Spanish Adaptation: Temporal Drag, Counter-Archives, and Memory in Contemporary Spain

Abstract

This dissertation argues that contemporary Spanish adaptations across film and comics enact queer temporality—what Elizabeth Freeman calls temporal drag—to retime canonical texts and histories and produce counter-archives that pressure Spain’s memory regime. Shifting from fidelity to form, it treats remediation, iconization/haunting, comics grammar, and synecdoche as operations that reorganize attention and historiography. Chapter 1 reads Carlos Saura’s Bodas de sangre (1981) and Paula Ortiz’s La novia (2015) as remediations of Lorca that employ hypermediacy and immediacy through rehearsal frames, slow motion, anachronic montage, song, and recursive motifs. These devices queer straight time and cultivate an ethics of spectatorship as “distance without indifference.” Chapter 2 tracks Lorca’s afterlives as icon and specter across Ventura Pons’s Ocaña, retrat intermitent (1978), Mario Camus’s La casa de Bernarda Alba (1987), and contemporary English adaptations of Yerma. It weights the affordances and risks of iconization and argues, following Avery Gordon, that haunting is a social return compelling reckoning. Chapter 3 theorizes the graphic novel’s intermedial storytelling as a machine for temporal drag and critique. Carles Esquembre’s Lorca: Un poeta en Nueva York layers poems, letters, drawings, and archival textures to link 1929 Manhattan to the present while indicting consumerist capitalism; Claudio Stassi’s Nada mobilizes palette coding, splash pages, and deliberate anachronism to recuperate censored violence and same-sex desire. Chapter 4 reads Dulce Chacón’s La voz dormida (2002) and Benito Zambrano’s film (2011) as synecdochal, melodramatic counter-archives: mnemonic objects and erotohistoriographic sequences transmit women’s carceral/domestic histories to the present, aligning intimate loss with exhumation politics. Overall, the dissertation specifies how medium-level choices retime spectatorship and make historical pressure legible now, reframing adaptation as queer historiography in contemporary Spain. It bridges form.