Trans/national necronarratives: mourning, vitality, and non-reproductivity in Una mujer fantástica

ABSTRACT

This essay problematises transnational receptions of Sebastián Lelio’s Oscar-winning film Una mujer fantástica (A Fantastic Woman, 2017). Identifying a tendency to universalise and neutralise the experiences of Lelio’s trans protagonist Marina (Daniela Vega) in international reviews, the authors offer a reconsideration of the film as part of a larger body of work which they term trans necronarratives. The first part of the essay resituates the film within the longer history of trans representations in Chile. Coining the idea of the trans necronarrative, the second section elaborates on the foregrounding of death and mourning as central to the constitution of trans subjectivity. The third part considers the film’s final celebration of trans vitality in light of non-reproductivity and queer kinship formation. In the concluding section, the authors argue that the selective visibility that Una mujer fantástica brings to a white, middle-class, individualised trans subject partly explains its international success.

KEYWORDS:

• Una mujer fantástica
• trans studies
• necronarrative
• mourning
• vitality
• non-reproductivity
• Chilean cinema

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. See, e.g. Ryan Gilbey’s (2017) review in the Guardian, which references Hitchcock, The Crying Game (1992), Tracey Emin, and Almodóvar to grasp the film’s aesthetics, but not a single Chilean production or artist. Nor does the author contextualise the film with a view to Chilean society or politics.

2. Notable examples would be Tom Hopper’s film The Danish Girl (2015) or Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris is Burning (1990). Prosser (1998, 55) takes issue with Judith Butler’s well-known analysis of the documentary, arguing that her metaphorical reading deliteralises and thus perpetuates the omission of Venus Xtravaganza’s violent death. The Danish Girl differs from Boys Don’t Cry in that the real death of Lili Elbe, on whom the protagonist is loosely based, hardly played a role in the reception process.

3. This is not to pathologise trans people as patients that are in need of therapeutic help. Yet we wish to emphasise the recognition given to mourning and grief in psychoanalytic practice.

4. We provide minutes for quotations from the making-of clip; all further references to the film are to DVD chapter numbers.

5. We use the term transsexual in translation of the Spanish designation of Marina as transexual in the paratexts surrounding the film. Wherever possible, we give preference to the more open term trans, which (like the film as such) makes no assumption about the sexed body.