and women through the power of various gendering discourses, and these discourses have been used to strengthen the naturalized bipolar gender system, to enforce gender conformity, despite their own ambiguity. Butler informs us that the impersonations of gender, such as in drag performance, are able to reveal the instability of these fictitious binary constructions (Butler, 1997b).
As previously mentioned in Gaze, Almodóvar’s film discourse is associated with, and often described as privileging representations of non-normalized notions of femininity and masculinity in a patriarchal society. His women emphasize a staged theatricality dependent on over-the-top constructions of identity employing intricate makeovers in an elaborate masquerade, and incorporating elements of parody. The challenging reproduction of gender emerges throughout Almodóvar’s discourse in these three selected movies.
Ignacio and La Agrado.
The transgenders Agrado’s (All) and Ignacio’s (Bad) goal in life is to have a normal feminine body, thereby objectifying the female. Agrado performs femininity with the intent of passing into the essence of femininity: the perfect body and character.
Agrado’s ambitions are to be a real woman and have an “authentic” body. She says, “ It costs me a lot to be authentic. And one cannot be stingy with these things because you are more authentic the more you resemble what you have dreamed of being”.
The parodic qualities of excess and repetition used throughout Agrado’s performance thereby confuse notions of what it means, “to be real” for her, and for us spectators.
Agrado points to her subjective agency and power to become a woman, as she desires, so her reality is performatively constituted through an imitation of its own desire as the origin and ground for her imitation. Butler, talking about heterosexuality as the original for homosexuality (1993b), highlights that heterosexual identity is performatively
constituted through an imitation that sets itself up as the origin and the ground of all imitations; thus heterosexuality is always in the process of imitating and approximating its own specter idealization of itself. In this sense I argue that Almodóvar’s characters are performatively constituted through series of imitations that reflect their sources and effects. Moreover I argue that through employing production of gender as desire marked on the surface of bodies, Almodóvar’s films embody Butler’s ideas that “gender can be neither true nor false” (Butler, 1999, p. 173).
The drag queen characters’ reenactment of the established tropes of femininity also can be addressed as performatively constituted. Especially when we are aware that in Almodóvar’s diegetic practices he often casts actors from the sex that his character
will impersonate; for example, the actress Antonia San Juan plays the MTF transgender Agrado, and in Law of Desire the actress Carmen Maura plays the role of Tina a MTF transgender, in love with Ada, played by Bibi Andersen, a famous MTF actress. Agrado, Tina and Ada double cite the actresses Antonia, Carmen and Bibi, and also they form a link from Tina and Ada to Agrado and from Agrado to Ignacio. Anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance circulate in those performances, suggesting “a dissonance not only between sex and performance, but sex and gender, and gender and performance” (Butler, 1999, p. 175). Thus the performance of Almodóvar’s transgenders plays upon the distinction between the sex of the performer and the gender that is being performed, as well as the relationship between sex, gender and performance.
In Almodóvar’s films the body’s transitivity is invariably apparent. There is a preoccupation with revealing how bodies are important in the construction of gender, and the juncture in which this construction is performed on bodies. For example,
Ignacio copies Agrado and even cites some of her words such as “Looking pretty costs a lot of money”. While Agrado works hard as a prostitute to enhance her desired gender, but cannot change her sex because she depends on her penis as a working tool to survive, Ignacio, who has only done his breasts, blackmails his abuser to obtain the means to fix the face and the rest of the body. I fully support Butler’s view that “One surely cites norms that already exist, but these norms can be significantly deterritorialized through the citation. They can also be exposed as non-natural and unnecessary when they take place in a context and through a form of embodying that defies normative
expectation”(Butler, 1997b, p. 218) .
Zahara (Bad), Ignacio/Angel/Juan’s impersonation as a drag queen of his transgender brother, reiterates the need of repetition to construct his body in order to become a real woman. While learning how to impersonate Zahara, Ignacio/Angel/Juan repeats gestures, body language, and the mannerisms acted out by another drag queen who is an impersonator of Sara Montiel, a famous actress in Spain. Ignacio/
Angel/Juan introduces himself to the “unnamed” drag queen as an actor who needs help to prepare a character. The named
“unnamed” dragqueen asks him what sort of character Ignacio/
Angel/Juan has to develop, and he answers “A tranny who imitates Sara Montiel, among others”. The dragqueen immediately affirms,
“That’s me. Why don’t they give me the part?” This is a meeting between two copies in which one claims originality over another.
This is a complex meeting in which a double copy, Ignacio/Angel/
Juan, learns how to copy another one, Zahara, who is the imitation already of one of his copies, Ignacio. Almodóvar did not give the dragqueen the role of Zahara because he needed Ignacio/Angel/Juan to perform another chain of reiterations for his filmic discourse. According to Butler (1999) Drag’s parody of gender challenges the stability of identity constructions. She further explains:
In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport