Embodiment and desire: All About My Mother and gender in the marginAbstract
This essays does a reading of Pedro Almodovar's film All About My Mother, focusing on the transvestite character, Agrado. After drawing a comparison with other films on the subject of transgendering, I discuss notions of embodiedness and the construction of the subject by placing them in the context of theories about the body in Brazilian ethnology. My purpose is to offer some elements for a reflection on the experiences at/of the margins as a way of renewing the theoretical debates in feminist and gender studies. The bodily experience of 'becoming the other' dramatizes the mechanisms that are in play in the construction of difference and can be seen as an anti-hierarchical force destabilizing dominant politics of subjectivity.
Cinema; body; transgender