The discourses of sexual dissidence and memoria histórica in Alicia Giménez Bartlett’s Donde nadie te encuentre
Giménez Bartlett’s novel recovers the historical figure of La Pastora, who was represented by Franco’s discourse as a diabolic monster. La Pastora is an intersex person, and she also is a maquis (guerrilla). It is this double level of marginalization as intersex and maquis that is to be studied in this essay. Through the analysis of La Pastora’s character, memoria histórica and sexual identity will be uncovered as central to Giménez Bartlett’s novel since they reveal as well as denounce the lack of space for the “other” stories of the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship. At the same time, Donde nadie te encuentre lays bare the issue of marginalization and repression in Franco’s Spain of non-normative gender and sexual identities — “dissident identities” as Raquel Osborne (2012) calls them — of any identity that does not conform to the models of sexuality imposed by Francoist discourse.