Ferrández-Pérez, D.; Moisés Fernández Cano; Javier Fernández-Galeano e Miguel Fernández-Turuelo (2026): "Fragmented traces: Lesbianism and the Patronato`s policies of confinement in late Francoist Spain". Journal of Lesbian Studies, 1-17

Research on sexual dissidence under Francoism has often highlighted the repression of homosexual men and trans women, while the trajectories of lesbians remain underexplored. This absence has typically been explained through the notion of ‘structural invisibility’: women’s same-sex relationships were both easier to conceal and less directly targeted by Francoist legal apparatus. Yet new documentary findings challenge this assumption. This article analyses a previously unknown set of medical and administrative files attributed to the Patronato de Protección a la Mujer, an institution jointly run by the Francoist state and the Catholic Church to discipline ‘wayward’ women. The documents, originating from the reformatory Nuestra Señora del Pilar in San Fernando de Henares, include psychiatric assessments, behavioral reports, and hospital admission forms explicitly referring to lesbianism. These records reveal how female homosexuality was actively pathologized and punished, often through transfers to psychiatric hospitals. Methodologically, the paper reads bureaucratic and psychiatric language as technologies of control while also attending to the fragmentary glimpses of subjectivity and resistance preserved in the files. Small gestures –laughter during a medical exam, drawings appended to reports, affectionate bonds– emerge as traces of agency within a coercive system designed to suppress them. By situating these materials within broader transnational frameworks of psychiatric and moral regulation, the article contributes to rethinking the place of lesbian experience in Francoist Spain. Ultimately, the corpus operates as a counter-archive, destabilizing narratives of invisibility and opening new avenues for queer historical memory.