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Abstract
This article explores the category of memory in relation to the body, sex and religion in the post-Franco transitional years through a queer theoretical framework. Focusing on Pedro Almodóvar's La mala educación (2004) and the Catalan documentary Ocaña, retrat intermitent (1978) by Ventura Pons, this work considers how the role and performance of drag and cross-dressing in both films function as a technology of memory to rethink the body as script and religion as sex. Drawing on queer theoretical frameworks, this article argues that the embodied subject in drag subverts the normative trajectories of memory and, in the context of post-Franco Spain, poses challenges to religion, politics and body, in effect, reimagining the body's relationship to memory to produce a counterhegemonic space. In other words, the desire for memory is the desire for experience, which becomes foregrounded through the affective performance of the queer and transgressive subjects present in both films.
Notes on contributor
Vincent D. Cervantes is a Ph.D. candidate in Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of Southern California, where his research focuses on gender and sexuality in contemporary Spanish and Latin American literature, film and visual art. His work on religion, queer theory and literature has appeared in several edited volumes. Email: [email protected]
Notes
1. Nelly Richard's work focuses on the contexts of memory and identity reconstruction in postdictatorship Chile. While her focus is on the Chilean context, the themes of suppression, recovery and fragmentation lend themselves to interpret the roles of memory and identity with regard to the Francoist context.
2. I use the concept of “affective performance” to describe how feelings, desires and emotions become inscribed through the medium of drag and gender transgressive performances, specifically cross-dressing and transvestism with regard to the two films. Furthermore, I employ “drag” to describe the symbolic representation and performance of the opposite gender. In the case of La mala educación and Ocaña, it describes male-bodied individuals portraying a feminine or female role. However, I engage “drag” through the lens of transitional performance, by which I mean the crossing of genders through both drag and transgender lines (which are blurred), as seen in the character of Ángel/Juan/Ignacio/Zahara, and also political transitional during this period in Spain.
3. Similar connections between these films have already been made, in particular by Ian Biddle and Santiago Fouz-Hernández in their chapter “Voicing Gender: transgender performance and the national imaginary in the Spanish cinema of the democratic era” in Screening Songs in Hispanic and Lusophone Cinema (2012). Their analysis examines “some of the ways in which the use of popular and traditional songs by transgendered performers in a selection of iconic post-Franco Spanish films impacts on cinematic, narrative and identificatory structures in those films” (30). In doing so, their work offers an important reading of gender transgression in relation to music within the appropriate sociohistorical and cultural contexts. While their empirical reading informs the background this article links between both films, the present study differs by considering the affective qualities of drag and the body as a sexual and religious narrative strategy.
4. Other attempts that have been made in connecting queerness and Spanish cultural studies have not taken up the subjects of religion and theology. Gema Pérez-Sánchez traces a queer cultural history during the postdictatorship transition but does not account for the role of religion in defining that queerness. See Queer Transitions in Contemporary Spanish Culture: From Franco to la Movida (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007). On the other hand, Alfredo Martínez-Expósito's Los escribas furiosos: Configuraciones homoeróticas en la narrativa española (1998) also traces this history, while accounting for the relationship between Catholicism and constructions of homosexuality within Spanish culture.
5. While I recognize the differences between the genre of the documentary and genre of the fictional film, I am not interested in an analysis that elaborates on these differences in film medium; rather, I take up the task of reading the performances and thematic qualities displayed through each film.
6. There are three main time markers within Almodóvar's La mala educación: (i) Madrid in 1980, in which Enrique Goded is amidst developing a new project when he received an unexpected visit from an actor claiming to be Ignacio Rodríguez; (ii) “La visita,” the fictional film within the film is set in 1977; and (iii) “La visita” sets its story in a Catholic all-boy boarding school in 1964, where Ignacio as a young boy is the object of lust of Father Manolo. These date markers help connect the films temporally to one another.
7. Pons recalls that his initial interest in the project came after a meeting to discuss the foundation of the FAGC (Front d'Alliberament Gai de Catalunya; Campo Vidal 40).
8. It is important to note that both films do take up different cultural phenomena with regard to the Spanish transitional periods after Franco's death. While Pedro Almodóvar was a key figure in the Movida madrileña, José Pérez Ocaña had little to do with. The films, however, share in similarity the role of drag and cross-dressing as cultural phenomena during these periods. This claim is by no means an attempt at a reduction of the relationship between transgender performance and the Transition. As Biddle and Fouz-Hernández argue, “it is not enough to simply equate gender transformations with a coherent political identification with the Transition to democracy and abandoning of tradition,” that is, “the numerous examples of performative transgenderism unleashed into Spanish cinema after Franco cannot be reduced to an ‘either/or’ in their relation to the Transition to democracy” (31). In short, while there are key and important sociohistorical histories that separate both projects, I am interested in these films as “transitional” films in a broader sense.
9. The concept of “performativity” speaks to utterances that promise action; it describes the quality of certain utterances to bring a new reality into a being.
10. David Halperin describes how thinking beyond erotic identities and constructions of gender enables us to think through the transgressive gender performances and instead think of the body as a site that constructs new epistemological frameworks and produces new practices of community and self-constitution (see Halperin).
11. I want to avoid essentializing the relationship between Catholicism and Spain. Spain has a long history of religious diversity and conflict over that diversity. However, under Franco's regime, practices of religions other than Catholicism were a punishable crime. In the years after Franco, particularly through the efforts of liberation movements, there was a heavy transgression of religion and response to the pains inflicted by the Church, since the Catholic Church became heavily politicized during Franco's regime.
12. The Movida was a countercultural movement that took place during the Spanish transition after Franco's death in 1975. It represented the resurrection of the economy in Spain and the emergence of a new Spanish identity – one that recognized those who were deemed outcasts during Franco's regime. The movement was characterized by the freedom of expression and the transgression of “taboos” imposed by Franco (see Vilarós).
13. In his study of queer and homoerotic narratives developing in Spain as part of a certain level of queer cultural production, Alfredo Martínez-Expósito recalls the history of Catholic influence in Spanish culture during the latter part of the Franco regime, and its influence thereafter: La influencia de la Iglesia Católica en la sociedad española entró en franco declive en los últimos tiempos de la dictadura. A principios de los años ochenta, con la publicación de varios estudios sobre comportamientos sociales, ya no puede decirse que la sociedad española esté moralmente dominada por aparato católico, y esto es algo que se deja traslucir en la vida política y en los medios de comunicación. Sin embargo, la profunda huella impresa por el catolicismo durante siglos permanece indeleble y se manifiesta en los usos y costumbres y en prácticamente toda producción cultural (109).
14. For male-to-female drag (drag queens), “tucking” refers to the concealment of the male genitals as part of the female illusion, in which the testicles are pushed up into the lower abdomen and the penis is pulled back. However, for Ocaña, tucking his penis is not part of his drag performance.
15. My thanks to an anonymous reader of an earlier version of this article for suggesting this crucial reference.
16. The 1954 reform of the 1933 “Ley de vagos y maleantes” declared homosexuality illegal, equating it with proxenetismo. The text of the law declares: Las establecidas por la presente Ley … no son propiamente penas, sino medidas de seguridad, impuestas con finalidad doblemente preventiva, con propósito de garantía colectiva y con la aspiración de corregir a sujetos caídos al más bajo nivel moral. No trata esta Ley de castigar, sino de proteger y reformar.
17. An interesting note is that Sarita Montiel was a significant figure during the Franco regime, serving as both a sex symbol for heterosexual men and an icon for transvestites.
18. By “Church,” I refer specifically to the Catholic Church, given the context of the film. But at the same time, Christianity as a whole has a long history of sexual repression.