¡Ni el derecho al placer me han dejado! En contra de la frigidez femenina en la Transición española

Francoism made the control of women’s sexuality one of the programmatic points of its ideology: their duty was to provide as many sons and daughters as possible to the world, who had to be educated according to the regime’s principles. In this context, where it was illegal to have access to safe methods of contraception and family planning, as well as to have a safe and legal abortion –to which was added a patriarchal conception of sexuality in which female pleasure, desire and consent were unnecessary–, many Spanish women found in female frigidity or sexual asthenia a possible strategy to have some control over their bodies and pregnancies. Based on a set of artistic, literary and activist productions, this article analyzes how feminist creators and militants from the region responded to this context by claiming the right to pleasure in Spanish second-wave feminism.