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Despite the scarcity of female dramatists during the dictatorship, the decades since Franco's death have afforded a number of highly acclaimed female dramatists, including Ana Diosdado, Lidia Falcón, Maria Manuela Reina, Concha Romero, Carmen Resino, and Pilar Pombo (among others). The relative explosion of female participation in the theater of the eighties and nineties fostered a distinctly feminine (and arguably, feminist) perspective on love, eroticism, sex, and women's changing roles in society. The intention of this study is to focus on a specific aspect of women's changing personas on the postFranco stage - namely, homosocial relationships between women. In her dramas El color de agosto (1989) and Locas de amar (1996), Paloma Pedrero employs the erotic triangle as a tool for exploring female homosociality. The interaction between women concentrates the dramatic action on the expression of female sexuality and inverts the traditional erotic triangle. Rather than a superficial competition for male affection, the female characters discover themselves through their deliciously complex and often ambiguous relationship with each other. In both dramas, Pedrero explores a wide range of female homosociality - from friendship, to mother-daughter relationships, to homoeroticism.
The complex spectrum of homosociality is best defined in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Between Men and Epistemology of the Closet. In her own discussion of the erotic triangle, Sedgwick defines and characterizes the various forms of male homosociality. Homosociality is, in its simplest sense, an indispensable same-sex bond: "It is... the most natural thing in the world that people of the same gender. . .people whose economic, institutional, emotional, physical needs and knowledge have so much in common, should bond together on the axis of sexual desire" Epistemology 87). While this bond may include a homosexual relationship, homosociality does not require an overtly sexual union. Rather, a sexual union is one of many possible ways that men connect to form masculine identity.
The potential for sexual tension in a homosocial relationship is exacerbated within the traditional erotic triangle - that is, two men fighting over the same woman. According to Sedgwick, the battle over the woman becomes a vehicle by which the two men enjoy each other. She explains that "the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either to...