Black swan,white masks: Contesting cosmopolitanism and double misrecognition in a gay tourist town

Abstract

This article discusses the effects that constructions of lesbianism – generated and circulated widely throughout Anglo-American media – had on normative discourses of gender and sexuality amongst British migrants, living in the affluent coastal tourist town of Sitges, in Spain. Marketed as a cosmopolitan location par excellence, Sitges’ identity is built largely on its reputation for playing host to an internationally diverse gay community, subsequently understood to evince an atmosphere of openness and tolerance. And yet drawing on the work of Frantz Fanon (1952/1967) and Kelly Oliver (2001), I suggest that the visibility of feminine lesbianism in this context was resignified through those media images, constituting a ‘double misrecognition’, which saw all female homosexuality paradoxically become invisible at the exact moment representation was explicitly deemed to have been achieved. Far from elaborating a cosmopolitan ‘openness towards difference’, I argue that the resulting double misrecognition actually substantiated highly conservative gender norms, even as it masqueraded as the opposite.