Marilina Ross as a queer star in Spain during the transition to democracy: freedoms and anxieties around a transgressive body

Abstract

Actress Marilina Ross lived in Spain between 1976 and 1980, after being exiled from Argentina in the face of an imminent and fierce military dictatorship.The commercial and critical success of the film La Raulito (1974), released in the final months of Franco’s regime, opened the doors of the Spanish film industry for her. The image of the main character of the film, a woman of masculine appearance who fights for her freedom against multiple institutional and social obstacles, would determine her career in Spain. This article studies her stardom in this country by analysing the films in which she participated and howthe press of the time treated her, paying attention to the reception of La Raulito in Spain too. Despite her prestige and her work in the realm of art cinema, Ross’sro- les were determined by patriarchal and ethnocentric limitations, where aspects such as masculinity, foreignness or transformation were recurrent. Around her transgressive body, patriarchal anxieties can be detected: filmmakers and journalists try to relocate Ross’s body in markedly androcentric characters and narratives, often undressing it to reestablish the gender certainty that the ambiguous sexual indefiniteness of La Raulito had introduced, problematising thedominant ways of representing gender of the time.