Resum
The paper aims to explore the challenge presented to Basque nationalism and separatism
by male sexuality in two films by Basque film director Imanol Uribe, La muerte de Mikel
(1983) and Dias contados (1994). The two male protagonists of these films, Mikel and
Antonio, have connections to Basque separatism and to the terrorist group ETA but also
maintain transgressive sexual relations that go against bourgeois heterosexual monogamy
presided over by an elder woman or mother figure. Drawing on notions of sexual transgression
as antagonistic contiguity and complicity as posited by Jonathan Dollimore and
Slavoj ZItek, the paper argues that the uneasy position of Basque separatism as both
transgressor and transgressed gives rise to this antagonistic contiguity of which Mikel
and Antonio become the victims. Thefilm The Crying Game (Neil Jordan, 1992) indicates
that transgression of itself does not necessarily require the death of the male protagonist,
since in that film he survives. But in Uribe's two films, the equation between Basque
separatism and the bourgeois heterosexual home means that Antonio and Mikel cannot
survive a transgression that is double. The individual must die so that the Basque
community can displace the slippage between transgressor and transgressed