Identidad, masculinidad, y memoria: el cuerpo queer en la obra de Pedro Almodóvar

The Francoist Regime in Spain was a dark period marked by national isolation, oppression of marginalized people, and repression and formation of latent desires. Specifically, the Regime realized queer oppression through legislation, medicalizing queerness as a psychic abnormality and seeking to ‘reeducate’ queer people through institutionalization and torture. However, the Regime’s contemporaneous glorification of the male figure and hunger for dominance paired with this very phobia of queerness created the space for homosexual desire to percolate. These queer desires would be unleashed during the Transition to Democracy and the appropriately named ‘Años del Destape’ as part of a countercultural revolution that would be reflected in all cultural aspects. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate how the cinematographic works of Pedro Almodóvar are exemplary of this subversive transitional time in Spanish history and unearth many of the changes in Spanish identities while reflecting some of the core tendencies of the Francoist regime with respect to queerness: medicalization, misogyny, phallocentrism, narcissism, and hegemonic masculinity. Furthermore, the Almodóvarian landscape manifests the shifting nature of queerness by creating a dichotomy between portrayals of specularity and tactility (akin to the paradigm created by Barbara Zecchi) and confounding expectations for gender and sexuality. As an auteur, Almodóvar fuses his own life with his films to produce metacinematography and distort the confines of creator and creation as well as his own queerness in a way that is analogous to Spain and its own identity.