Beyond Legal Equality: Lesbophobia, Endolesbophobia and Lesbian Everyday Life in Contemporary Spain

Spain is often portrayed as an emblematic case of LGBTQ+ legal progress, owing to its early recognition of same-sex marriage and its consistently high position in international equality indices. Yet the everyday lives of many lesbians in Spain remain marked by lesbophobia, invisibility, and symbolic violence. Drawing on a ten-year feminist collaborative ethnography (2014-2024) with 254 self-identified lesbian participants living throughout Spain, and a sustained collaborative subgroup of 154 participants involved in later stages of the research, this article examines how lesbophobia persists across family life, institutions, and lesbian community spaces under conditions of formal legal equality. Building on this empirical material, this article proposes and develops endolesbophobia as an original situated analytic for naming the internalized, relational, and intra-community dimensions of lesbophobic violence, including guilt, negotiated visibility, and lateral policing. The article argues that legal inclusion does not eliminate lesbophobia, but often reorganizes it through ordinary, socially normalized, and difficult-to-name forms of regulation, silence, and self-management. Spain is often portrayed as an emblematic case of LGBTQ+ legal progress, owing to its early recognition of same-sex marriage and its consistently high position in international equality indices. Yet the everyday lives of many lesbians in Spain remain marked by lesbophobia, invisibility, and symbolic violence. Drawing on a ten-year feminist collaborative ethnography (2014-2024) with 254 self-identified lesbian participants living throughout Spain, and a sustained collaborative subgroup of 154 participants involved in later stages of the research, this article examines how lesbophobia persists across family life, institutions, and lesbian community spaces under conditions of formal legal equality. Building on this empirical material, this article proposes and develops endolesbophobia as an original situated analytic for naming the internalized, relational, and intra-community dimensions of lesbophobic violence, including guilt, negotiated visibility, and lateral policing. The article argues that legal inclusion does not eliminate lesbophobia, but often reorganizes it through ordinary, socially normalized, and difficult-to-name forms of regulation, silence, and self-management.