The discipline of the spanish subject: "Las edades de Lulú"

David Halperin has explained how modern forms of gov ernability do not discipline subjects with violence, but "actu ally require citizens to be free, so that citizens can assume from the state the burden of some of its former regulatory functions and impose on themselves?of their own accord? rules of conduct and mechanisms of control" (18). This shift describes perfectly the transition from dictatorship to democ racy in Spain following the death of General Francisco Franco, despite the myth of its allegedly "smooth and swift" transformation from a repressive military dictatorship to one of the most dynamic European social democracies. We might well find that the new liberal Spanish state made its citizens responsible for their own discipline instead of terrorizing them into submission. In Foucauldian terms, Spanish sub jects could be allowed to make their own choices in the pri vate sphere precisely because they began to police their own conduct; that is, they began to reproduce, without govern mental coercion, the state's traditional structures of oppres sion, while deluding themselves into thinking that they had freed themselves from those very structures. This essay will explore one example, the illusion of female liberation in the post-Franco era, as it is represented in the novel Las edades de Lul?, published by Almudena Grandes in 1989.