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? La mala educación Pedro Almodóvar’s La mala educación (2004) provides some useful answers to this question. In this film, narratives about the Transition and transvestism are played out quite explicitly in a manner arguably indebted to Pons’s Ocaña . As will be seen, the ‘doubled-ness’ identified in Ocaña is worked through in Almodóvar’s film via the musical play of curtailed or partial forms in
, with cotton bandanas around their heads, the women slung knapsacks over their backs and walked 20 kilometres to the village of Saas Fee from where they would complete a remarkable feat: the first Alpine cordée feminine , up the Mittaghorn, and a traverse of the Egginergrat ridge: rope climbing above 3,000 metres, including a difficult 100-metre ‘chimney’, bodies suspended over the abyss, without a male guide or escort. ‘Manless climbing’, as it was then known, was a highly subversive act and expression of modernity, encompassing subterfuge, transvestism, gender
-skirted governess’ was ‘an exercise in suppressed camp’, while Bryden saw ‘straight if muted camping: a comic performance based on recognizable masculine imitation of female mannerisms’ (as noted above, this was for Shulman ‘high queerdom’). But while Audrey and Celia could be safely relegated to a zone of comic transvestism where they posed no sexual threat, this was not the case with Richard Kay’s Phoebe. He was
other theorists, it seems clear to me that within Gender and Sexuality Studies, a hierarchy has been established which accepts that certain manifestations of gender ambiguity are more subversive than others: male-to-female cross-dressing is more subversive than female-to-male transvestism; queer subjects are more subversive than heterosexual subjects. Those who subscribe to such assumptions could learn from the work of a growing body of critics of passing, who recognise the redundancy of the subversive versus complicit debate and wonder what else passing could
, incest, monstrosity and deformity, masturbation, transvestism and transexuality, dead children, cruelty to animals, the imbibing of urine, erotic asphyxiation, vampirism, voodoo, implicit cannibalism (a rare moment of restraint), limb grafting and a plague of nosebleeds. Add nudity, some violence and gore, the occasional use of the word ‘fuck’, and an
-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (London, 1992); Rudolf Dekker and Lotte van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 1989); Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Cross-Dressed in the Pursuit of Life, Liberty and Happiness (London, 1989). 13 5287P IMPOSTURES MUP-PT/lb.qxd 14/10/09 15:12 Page 14 Impostures in early modern England On castrati, see Roger Freitas, ‘The eroticism of emasculation: confronting the baroque body of the castrato’, Journal of Musicology, 20 (2003), pp. 196–249; id., ‘Un atto d’ingegno: a
political culture of the State. As important was the legitimation drawn from the claim that the community of commoners opposed enclosure. Even where this was not the case, crowds worked hard to represent themselves as the physical manifestation of community disapproval. To achieve this objective, they drew on the common social and cultural resources. Riots were organised in the twin centres of village life – hatched in the alehouse and announced in the church. They were deliberately public and carnivalesque in character, a colouring emphasised by masking and transvestism
powerless women imprisoned by their religion. 49 Despite the signs they carry, ‘We are not political’, these loud, brave women demanding justice correct the Western image of oppressed, veiled Muslim women. 50 Most importantly, it is not the veiling of the girl that provides the narrative tension, but rather her transvestism and passing as a male. 51 Her entry into male-only spaces, such as the madrassa and the inner sanctum of the bath house, enables her to witness what women are prohibited from seeing. Much feminist film theory is built on the observation that films
motto of many closeted public figures who would neither identify with or deny homosexuality, although this is clearly not the case with Ocaña. He rejects labelling imposed from the outside and proposes some labels of his own (Mira 2004 : 458–9). Something similar happens when he engages with the notion of transvestism: although he uses drag, this is just, he claims, incidental: he just likes it (or
are notably more pessimistic in respect of the fortunes of their main characters: the immigrant/ beur protagonist remains fundamentally isolated, while the sympathetic young white French males of the first films constitute a significant new structuring absence. However, a more complex approach to questions of gender and sexuality is to be found. As noted in chapter 1 , Miss Mona tackles the topic of homosexuality, transvestism and prostitution, while