‘Neither male or female, just Falete’: Resistance and queerness on Spanish TV screens

Abstract

Spanish copla singer Falete is best known for his frequent presence on TV shows, which receive record ratings, and also for the jokes made regarding his appearance. Confronted with normative questions regarding gender and sexuality, Falete’s successful TV career challenges not only binary conceptions of gender but also how we think about TV spectatorship. We argue that liminal spaces, such as the one that Falete inhabits on TV, are useful for unveiling how audiences develop plural and complex forms of identifying with TV stars. Watching Falete on TV, therefore, challenges theories of gender that reify processes of identity formation and identification. In this article, we highlight Falete’s engagement with queer strategies of resistance, such as humour, reappropriation and hypervisibility to resist society’s impulse to name and fix normative identities, but also to gain the audience’s attention and sympathy.