Erotic postcards were pervasive in early 20th-century Spain, seeping into even the upper echelons of society, Maite Zubiaurre, a Portuguese and Spanish professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said during "Erotic Postcards: A Spanish Inventory," part of the women and gender studies program's Sexualities Lecture Series. The provocative images of women, often foreign, were common throughout Spanish households during the Silver Age, she said.
Erotica was heavily ingrained in Spanish culture until the Francoist dictatorship, in power from 1936 to 1975, eliminated such images, Zubiaurre said. All levels of Spanish society came into contact with the pornographic postcards prior to the time they fell out of favor, Zubiaurre said. Even women and children were known to view them and use them as masturbation aids, she said.
"Sexualized postcards appeared in everyday places because they were part of the everyday world," Zubiaurre said.
Zubiaurre said she aims "to help revolutionize the way literary and cultural criticism has traditionally looked at" early 20th-century Spain, also known as the Silver Age, she said.
The postcards were distributed at street kiosks and at booksstores. Wealthy clients would order them directly from manufacturers, who would send copies in discreet envelopes, according to Zubiaurre. The images were made more socially acceptable by featuring foreign women from France, Germany or North Africa, enabling Spanish women to maintain chaste appearances.
Although the Francoist regime tried to eliminate the erotica for instance, the government seal was used to cover genitalia on such art forms the images had already diffused into mass culture even beyond Spain. Zubiaurre drew upon the example of Leopold Bloom, the protagonist in James Joyce's "Ulysses," who was said to have a drawer full of racy postcards.
Zubiaurre said one of her biggest obstacles in researching the postcards lay in unearthing the photos that the Francoist regime had tried to destroy. She eventually uncovered a book on Spanish royalty containing portraits of lavishly clad kings, queens and princesses, as well as explicit photos of individuals engaging in sexual acts, close-ups of genitalia and a sequence of nuns and priests "frolicking" on sacred grounds, she said.
The book suggested a complete absence of taboo against such erotica in the period immediately preceding the Francoist regime, and she has used it in the production of her own text, she said.
"My book seeks to restore the erotic pages and do away with the royalty, but, let me tell you, it has not been an easy task," Zubiaurre said. "Writing this book has been a huge enterprise in a journey riddled with obstacles of various kinds."
Zubiaurre struggled to find an American printer willing to manufacture her book, "Cultures of the Erotic: Spain 1898-1939," due to its graphic nature, she said. As a result, it was printed in Mexico and published two weeks ago by Vanderbilt University Press. Zubiaurre's book is the first of its kind to analyze representations of erotica in Spain in the early 20th century, she said.
The lecture was the first of a five-part series on sexuality organized by the WGST program. The talks, which will continue through Fall term with visits from other scholars, are especially relevant in contemporary society, Lynn Higgins, associate dean for interdisciplinary and international studies, said.
"It's fitting to choose the topic of sexualities right now because it really is at the center of the intersection of many controversial current preoccupations, both global and national and also international of course," Higgins said to introduce the lecture. "I think it's brilliant to kind of organize the series as a kind of mini-course that will inform discussions far into the future about the directions the program might take."
The "community effort" involves supplementary lunches that allow the series' visiting speakers to informally discuss their work with students and faculty, according to Annabel Martin, chair of the WGST program.
"The spirit behind the lecture series is a community learning experience that will inform future conversations and will help shape, we are hoping, some conversations here at Dartmouth," Martin said. "We are hopeful that these lectures and these faculty-student lunch seminars will jump start a conversation of how a finer comprehension of sexuality facilitates the understanding, the critique and the reformulation of the public sphere here at Dartmouth and wherever students take these teachings into the future."
Lily Brown '15, who attended the lecture as part of her Contemporary Issues in Feminism class, said the lecture provided a new perspective on history.
"You think about the past I mean I do because I don't know much history and think that back then everybody was different and sterile," Brown said. "Now everything is pornographic and everybody does weird things. But then you look at this stuff and realize, Oh, they were just like us.'"
Nicole Gilbert MALS '14 said the talk appealed to her interest in the connection between women's sexuality and art.
"It's an interesting tie cross-culturally in how society responds to pornography," Gilbert said. "Clearly pornography has existed for a long time cross-culturally, globally. There's a good parallel between this and modern-day Playboy."
