Sex, Drugs and Fashion in 1970s Madrid by Francisco Fernández de Alba
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: Sex, Drugs and Fashion in 1970s Madrid by Francisco Fernández de Alba Daniel Arroyo-Rodríguez Fernández de Alba, Francisco. Sex, Drugs and Fashion in 1970s Madrid. U of Toronto P, 2020. 169 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4875-0148-8. Sex, Drugs, and Fashion in 1970s Madrid, by Francisco Fernández de Alba, makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the social and cultural changes that started to develop at the end of the 1960s, and that laid the groundwork for the democratization of Spanish culture and society during the following decade. Going beyond the exploration of the political and economic consequences of the dictatorial regime after Francisco Franco's death in 1975, this study provides a new angle through which to look at Spain's recent history by focusing on popular culture and its affects. As the author convincingly demonstrates, by the time Franco dies, the majority of Spanish society was ready to put behind the mores of the dictatorship and embrace an array of cultural and social practices more aligned with Western democracies. To prove this argument, Fernández de Alba focuses on the shift of the architecture and urban planning of the city of Madrid, the development of new attitudes toward sex and gender, drug use among young people, and the development of the fashion industry in Spain. These practices go hand in hand with the development of new collective mindsets that reveal the readiness of the majority of the Spanish society "to transform youth culture, social and political life, and sex" (9). The first chapter, "Madrid: Planning the Democratic City," explores the debates on architecture and urban planning during the 1970s that took place in print media and in the social and political sphere. A guiding aspiration of this movement was to transform Madrid into "an active urban space where people would enjoy the benefits of city living" (31). Pivotal to this transformation, and following a neo-Marxist conception of urban space, was the relocation of the working class into the city from barely habitable peripheral suburbs hastily built during the 1950s and 60s. These debates informed the 1985 General Plan, which resulted in massive urban changes in Madrid. More importantly, these debates "gave citizens the sense that they were the collective proprietors of their own city and that they, and their opinions, mattered" (37), providing a model of civic engagement in a new democratic context. The second chapter "Sex: Building Plural Communities" explores the cultural and social changes that allowed a large segment of the Madrid population to overcome the dictatorship's moralistic views of sexuality and gender. This chapter focuses on the emergence of the women's liberation movement, the sexual revolution, and of more accepting attitudes towards LGBT rights and experiences. Before Franco's death, women's issues became relevant in a context in which modern and traditional behaviors overlapped. Once the dictatorship ended, there was a shift in attention to the representation of same-sex relationships and to the exploration of gender as a social construct. These representations were accompanied by critical discussions in the media that normalized gender dysphoria and sex change, and that expanded the possibility of creating a pluralistic political community more in line with the new democratic aspirations. The third chapter, "Drugs: the Burden of Modernity," discusses the access and representation of drug use during the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s. During the 1970s [End Page 213] the media portrayed a contradictory discourse on drugs that warned against its effects, while equating drug abuse with modernity. In addition, when referring to artists, the media associated substance abuse to collective freedom while attributing this practice to social and cultural apathy in the case of the urban lower classes. Regarding film representation, the author discusses the inconsistency between the intentionality and the reception of the so called quinqui films (delinquency cinema). While trying to warn the audience against criminality and drug use, these films ended up creating legends out of street criminals, such as El Vaquilla and El Torete. Moving from drug use to fashion, the last chapter, "Fashion: Democracy Prêt-àporter" explores the transformation of fashion, from the evolution and eventual demise...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".