Redressing the Inaccessible through the Re-Inscribed Body: In the Year of 13 Moons and Bad Education

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter

Abstract

When I looked at In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden (In a Year of 13 Moons, 1978) and La mala educación (Bad Education, Pedro Almodóvar, 2004), I was moved by their intimacy, privacy, and unconditional honesty. They reminded me of what Jean Cocteau once wrote about Rousseau and Chopin: “They washed their dirty linen en famille, that is in public…. They bleed ink.” For me, Cocteau’s comment is interesting on two counts. First, it reminds us that a piece of autobiographical art is not so much a window that opens onto the private world of the artist, but a performance that has been sanctioned or authored by the public, which in turn conceals fragments of memories that are too private to be turned into a public discourse. Second, what allows Rousseau and Chopin, and for us, Fassbinder and Almodóvar, to achieve this sense of intimacy, privacy, and unconditional honesty is the act of “bleeding” from the biological or animal body (zoē) directly into the piece of art, i.e. the continuity and inextricability between the biological body and the political body (bios). For both Fassbinder and Almodóvar, this bleeding body is built into their texts as transsexual bodies: Erwin/Elvira Weishaupt (Volker Spengler) in In a Year of 13 Moons, and Ignacio (Francisco Boira) in Bad Education. These transsexual bodies allow what is being concealed to bleed through the screen as an unsanctioned reality that has yet to be organized and imaged as a public discourse.

How do we discuss this bleeding body on a conceptual level? In this essay, I avoid articulating the bodies of Elvira and Ignacio in Oedipal terms, i.e. as sites of castration (as Kaja Silverman once did). As I will illustrate in my analysis, neither Elvira nor Ignacio constitutes a classical Freudian lack that seeks an imaginary solution in the form of a Mother or Father substitute. Instead, I borrow an idea from Frances Mascia-Lees and Patricia Sharp on body modification. For Mascia-Lees and Sharp, body modification is a form of inscription and narration, by treating the body as a “ground on which all cultures inscribe significant meaning.” If we push this idea further, besides re-affirming one’s gender identity, a male-female gender reassignment (re)-inscribes onto one’s body a trace of how we socially narrate our gender and social differences, precisely by instantiating the very myth of the originary trace (différance), i.e. the reconstructed vagina as the imaginary castration wound for the others. Hence, in the eyes of the reassigned individual, the “wound” refuses to heal because it is not a wound in the first place; in the eyes of the others, however, this imaginary “wound” insists upon bleeding, signifying and reminding their own personal traumas and subjectival inconsistencies.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationA Companion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder
EditorsBrigitte Peucker
Place of PublicationOxford, UK
PublisherWILEY-BLACKWELL
Pages118-141
Number of pages24
ISBN (Electronic)9781118275733
ISBN (Print)9781405191630
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012

Publication series

NameWiley-Blackwell Companions to Film Directors

Keywords

  • Fassbinder
  • German Cinema
  • Almodovar
  • Spanish Cinema

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