Body and Gender in ‘All About My Mother’

In his movie, All About My Mother the way Almodovar approaches subjects such as the body and gender provides us with the means to reconsider these concepts based on the phenomenon of transgender which is located at the margins. The film thus centers around the idea of acting through gender, but through a gender not placed as their ‘norm’. As Manuela says to Huma, “I can lie very well and I’m used to improvising”, and the placing of a play in the midst of all the drama and gender performances, only accentuates this idea of being a constant character in life’s screen. Desire and suffering interlink and construct a plot that soon begins to dissolve some established principles concerning the body, gender and identity in All About My Mother.

The main transvestite character in the film, Agrado, does not seek camouflage. She doesn’t pretend to be a woman. Her public affirmation is carried out by exhibiting her body exactly for what it is: a body that has been transformed, manufactured, that appears and affirms itself as a manufactured body, not a substantive, objectified body but embodiment, a vehicle and meaning of experience. The authenticity of this body, according to Agrado’s own discourse, her ‘nature’, is part of the process that manufactured it. When she says that what she has that is most authentic is the silicone, Agrado is revealing that the ‘authentic’ in her is exactly that which is the product of her creation, the intervention of her desire, of her own agency.

Agrado’s feminine breasts are not the most authentic part of her, but the lived experience of metamorphosis, inscribed on her breasts, the embodied subjectivity which is constructed by this movement towards the other. By locating herself from the point of view of the person who is structurally and politically located as the other, as a non-subject, the trans dislocates the subject position from a structurally fixed place. The embodied experience of ‘becoming the other’, while dramatizing the mechanisms for constructing difference, is also an anti-hierarchic undertaking which destabilizes the dominant politics of subjectivity.

Almodovar is not only expanding the perspective of gender and performance adeptly, but also opens a dialog between being a woman and acting as a mother throughout the film.

After Esteban’s death, Manuela goes on playing the roles in which she’s cast. She agrees to donate Esteban’s heart in a scene that literally transforms simulacrum into reality, taking the actress from the training and putting her into the role of grieving family member. After Manuela leaves for Barcelona to find Esteban’s father, she assumes the role of surrogate mother to a stage actress, a pregnant nun and, eventually, the nun’s son Esteban, and at one point, she literally finds herself playing the role of a great theatrical mother. This being a melodrama and a women’s picture, Manuela surrounds herself with a strong emotional community composed of women who are each, in their own way, also playing a role—the aforementioned stage actress; the pregnant, HIV-positive nun; a prostitute Agrado, who occupies an ambiguous position between biological womanhood and maleness; Esteban’s father Lola, who similarly blurs the line between male and female. Role-playing here isn’t a put-on, though; on the contrary, Almodovar seems to believe that for these women, as Agrado declares in the film’s unexpectedly amusing and breathtaking centerpiece, “You are more authentic the more you resemble what you’ve dreamed of being.”

In this film, womanhood, on any terms, implies a kind of acting, whereby a person effectively authors herself through performance. It is in this sense that the use of film melodrama is most effective; for the emotional excess of this film, its profound sense of loss and love, regret and possibility, provides the raw material through which Manuela remakes herself in the face of tragedy.

Almodovar turns to these critical dramas about women, about the roles that women must play, about the price and possibility of performing the role of woman, to foreground the dizzying array of issues he’s taken on here and to underscore the spirit of wicked comedy and overwrought melodrama that make his film such an emotional whirlwind. Thinking about these experiences at the margins can help us rethink the concept of gender, its limitations and possibilities, both analytically and politically.