Abstract

Through a young generation of actresses who imagined new ways of being a woman from a place of indiscipline and bodily liberation, this book invites a reconsideration of the turbulent period of Spain’s democratic transition. The history of Spanish cinema has rarely explored this creative energy, nor the impact these actresses had on society by prefiguring new, active forms of desire and provoking moral and sexual ruptures and displacements. It first examines how, often trapped in ambivalent plots and exposed to an ambiguous or overtly victimising gaze, the actresses managed to invent fleeting tactics of resistance and to shape a female star system inseparable from democratic promises and feminist struggles. It also recognises in them the desire to experience freedoms more intuited than real, as well as the radical nature of those figures of dissidence (girls, housewives, workers, artists and hustlers) who emerge as key to the new counterculture. The publication concludes with portraits of ten actresses (Ana Belén, Ángela Molina, Victoria Abril, Carmen Maura, Ana Torrent, Charo López, Amparo Muñoz, Assumpta Serna, Rafaela Aparicio and Verónica Forqué) who transformed the representation of women forever — and not only in Spanish cinema.