Sex on Trial: Sexual Failure, Marital Breakdown and Catholic Annulments in Early Democratic Spain, 1975–90

This article uses the records of Catholic annulment trials as a unique window into sex in twentieth-century Europe, turning to five case studies within the context of Spain's transition to democracy to uncover everyday experiences of sexual failure against the backdrop of a period better remembered for political liberalisation and cultural permissiveness. It does so by combining insights from failure studies with those from sociological script theory, focussing on surprisingly durable expectations around heterosexual sex to interrogate hidden experiences and understandings of intimacy. It argues that the ecclesiastical courts constituted ‘regimes of failure’ which gave voice to a far longer-term process of putting sex on trial. For the couples concerned, failure was not an isolated incident or inherent fact, but a deeply social phenomenon which was encountered, rationalised, and managed over the long term within a community context. Whilst these specialised cases cannot, by themselves, overturn simplistic understandings of one-way liberalisation in Spain and across Europe, they serve as a rare reminder of the ways in which the hitherto neglected phenomenon of sexual failure can operate in outwardly permissive societies, with implications for our understandings of secularisation, liberalisation, and modernity.