'Flores para Lola', an essay offering a queer and feminist perspective on La Faraona on the centenary of her birth.
Talking about Lola Flores is talking about one of the most important artists in the history of our country. With her natural talent, she managed to bring color to a black-and-white Spain that was dying under the yoke of the Franco dictatorship and, once it ended, she was able to reinvent herself and develop a fruitful career in music, film, and television until the very day of her death.
Among her achievements as a public figure are having lived an absolutely free life, including maintaining a relationship with a married man twenty years her senior and having had several clandestine abortions. And she not only sought her own freedom but also that of others: she was a great defender of the LGTBIQ+ community at a time when it was far from easy to be part of it and became an (in)voluntary standard-bearer of feminism when this movement was just the seed of what it is now.
That is why, on the centenary of her birth, this work aims to offer a rereading of her figure from a dissident perspective. Thanks to texts by authors such as Lidia García, host of the podcast ¡Ay, campaneras!; Nerea Pérez de las Heras, creator of the successful theatrical monologue Feminismo para torpes; journalist Pepa Blanes; and flamenco dancer and researcher Fernando López, among others, we will try to unravel one of the greatest mysteries given by the popular culture of this country: that young girl from Jerez who arrived in Madrid determined to conquer the world and who, although she neither sang nor danced, managed to leave her name etched in the collective imagination of a people who, no matter how much time passes, refuse to forget her.
