Countercultural Splinters, Cultural Metamorphoses and Artistic Differences in Post-dictatorship Portugal

Abstract

The article examines the trajectory of Paula Ferreira, a pioneer of Portuguese underground culture and the first woman to own a comic bookshop and to create a fanzine in Portugal, situating her activity in the post-dictatorship period of the late 1970s. Adopting a socio-historical approach, the article explores how Ferreira established herself as a cultural agent within a field marked by gender inequalities and by the invisibility of underground culture and countercultural movements. Methodologically, the study draws on a semi-structured interview and a narrative reconstruction of Ferreira’s trajectory, articulating individual memory with its wider social context. The article highlights the role of urban spaces, informal networks, and alternative cultural economies in the emergence of new forms of youth subjectivity in a country that had only recently emerged from a dictatorship and remained dominated by cultural traditionalism and a broader closure towards Europe and the world.