Resumen
La piel que habito trata la violencia de género en su vertiente más psico-social mediante una incursión estética en los efectos traumáticos de la lógica hetero-normativa de género. Partiendo de la fragilidad e insostenibilidad de dicha narrativa maestra, el filme exhibe 1 Annabel Martín is an Associate Professor of Spanish, Comparative Literature, and Women’s and Gender Studies, and the director of The Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth College. Working within the field of cultural studies, her research and publications pay special attention to the narratives of cultural and gender identity in contemporary Spanish culture. She is the author of the book, La gramática de la felicidad: Relecturas franquistas y posmodernas del melodrama (2005), of numerous articles on Spanish film and culture, and is currently studying the cultural context surrounding the end of ETA terrorism in Spain and the role the arts play in processes of reconciliation in her manuscript Rest in Peace: The Basque Political Contours of the Arts. Annabel Martín is also the Review Editor of Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies.
Palabras clave: La piel que habito, heteronormatividad, Louise Bouregeois, cuerpo de trapo, celda, género sexual, Pedro Almodóvar
Abstract
The Skin I Live In is an aesthetically complex incursion into the topic of psycho-social gender violence, i.e., into the traumatic effects of heteronormativity. Posited from the vantage point of the fragility and failure of this master narrative, the film exhibits the brutality of heteronormative masculinity and the violence it entails for both sexes, particularly for the individual living or forced to live a feminine identity within that sexual-normative framework. For this film, identity is about the destruction and repair of the «I’s» corporeal dimension through the exploration of the victim’s inner life, that of Vicente-Vera. Taking his cues from the French-American artist Louise Bourgeois and her studies of biomorphism, traumatic memory, fabric bodies of mixed genitalia, and spatial cells, Pedro Almodóvar elaborates an epistemology of the self that, like in the case of Bourgeois, undoes gender legibility and makes this confusion the route towards «livability.»
Keywords: The Skin I Live In, heteronormativity, Louise Bourgeois, fabric bodies, cells, gender, Pedro Almodóvar