Masculinity in the Catalan working class fiction of Kiko Amat

In five novels to date, Catalan author Kiko Amat’s first person narratives debunk official versions of the Spanish democratic transitional experience and its accompanying crises as Spain and its 17 autonomous regions shirk off the past to “celebrate” its new democratic image in Europe and on the global stage.  Amat interweaves music and semi-biographical fiction to express the disenfranchisement of Spanish working class youth at a time when dominant political and economic systems corrode the hopes of democratic freedoms into a ghetto of economic and emotional crisis. Whereas Amat’s work fits into a tradition of Catalan working class fiction, his writing exhibits a “new” male sensibility to economic and social exile from Barcelona’s bourgeois center under democratic rule. Amat’s male narrator-protagonists stem from the periphery, and are unabashed when it comes to emotion.  They express their fears and stumblings in terms of what I call an “emotional masculinity” that contrasts with the vestiges of traditional gender roles stemming out of 40 years of Catholic-Fascist-dictatorship. Frustrated with the economically and socially marginalized role they have in official Catalan national culture due to biases of class and “nationality,” they turn to Anglosaxon and American pop and punk music as a soundtrack to their obsessions with youth, adulthood, parenting, and middle age (all moments of crisis).  In conjunction, these novels attest to the multifaceted reality of Spanish and Catalan youth and adulthood in times of crisis in democratic Barcelona (1977-present), as well as to the contributions of Spanish migrant culture to the same.