BORDER EPISTEMOLOGIES: LOOKING AT ALMODOVAR’S QUEER GENDERSAND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR VISUAL CULTURE EDUCATIONByBELIDSON D. BEZERRA JRB.A., Universidade de Brasilia, Brazil, 1989M.A., Manchester Metropolitan University, U.K., 1992A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OFTHE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OFDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHYInTHE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES(Curriculum Studies)THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIAApril 2006©Belidson D. Bezerra Jr, 2006AbstractThe everyday practices of contemporary art education from grades K- 12 are markedby the neglect of the cultural experience of film and the disregard for issues of gender aswell as the concealment of issues of sexuality. So it is in the confluence of visual culture,queer theory, art education and film studies that I posit my inquiry. I explore theoreticalframeworks for understanding how we look at queer representations of gender and sexualityin visual culture, particularly focusing on Pedro Almodóvar’s filmography and its impact forthe teaching and learning of visual culture in higher education and in secondary schools.The organizing questions are: How do Pedro Almodóvar’s film representations ofqueer sexuality and gender inform contemporary art education theory and practice? In whatways is the utilization of border epistemologies relevant for understanding representations ofgenders and sexualities in Almodóvar’s films? How does it inform art education practices?Also, this study fills a gap in the emerging critical literature in art education because, as astudy focusing on queer visual representation and border epistemologies, it will considerintersections among these specific sites of knowledge, and such studies are rare in the field.I adopt alr/tography and queer theory as my major frameworks because they allowfor a transdisciplinary flow of spaces and places in which to engage in dialogue withnumerous areas, disciplines and fields of study. The thesis suggests that queer discourses canassist visual culture education to embrace the study of visual representation of social issues -specifically gender and sexuality- as an instrument of critical pedagogy. Further, thesediscourses confuse and provoke entrenched notions about art, representation, and commonsense by continually changing concepts of gender and sexuality, thus encouraging11pedagogies of confrontation as opposed to assimilation and uncritical reproduction. Thesediscourses suggest how one might define and establish visual culture education practices,while encouraging interactions between viewer and objects of vision. A discussion of thesediscourses provides tools for visual culture educators to study cultural domination whileempowering and enabling students to become critical producers of meanings and texts asthey resist manipulation and domination.111Table of ContentsAbstract iiDedication viiAcknowledgements viiiDevouring: Explaining terms to art educators xiFilm studies glossary xiQueer studies glossary xviChapter 1.Rummage: Introductory notes on bricolage, alr/tography and everyday 1practicesbricolage 1A/r/tography 3Intertextuality 4Everyday practices 5Chapter 2. Opening: First taste 8Organization 9Chapter 3. Interminglings 17Sublimity: Border epistemology 17Transparency: Art education and visual culture education 18Aloofness: Art education and issues of gender, sexuality, and morality 29Resonance: gender and sexuality in my visual culture pedagogical practices 39Affinity: Almodóvar’s queer films and cultural education 44Chapter 4. Emplacements 49Dwelling: Visual culture and visibility 50ivDisruption: Queer and visual representation 55Reinstatement: Inlvisibility, and queer theory. 61Mapping: Queer borders, memory, absence and emplacements 64Chapter 5. Liminalities 73Routes: Traveling with local and non-local communities 73Nomads: Syncretism sexuality and language 80Sublimity: Post-Occidentalism: Latin American Post-colonialism 86Appetite: Anthropophagy and the devouring of Post-colonialism 93Curiosity: Locating queer theory in Brazil 96Chapter 6. Derivations 106Labor: Artography and border epistemology as forms of epistemological inquiry 108Compulsiveness: The visual and text within artistic and scholarly production 112Contamination: From a/r/tographical practices to visual 114Effort: Queer theory and research 123Unpredictability: Gathering information 128Chapter 7. Gaze 134Unoriginality: Introducing Almodóvar’s critical approaches to films 134Absorption: Almodóvar expliqué aux enfants 136Loss: Queer gender between spectator and object of vision 145Chapter 8. Dressing 158Overdub: Introducing Bad Education, Talk to Her and All About my Mother 161Overdye, overhaul, and overfill: Analyzing All That Bad 167Overeat: Dying Almodóvar 177vChapter 9. Unruliness 179Irony: Almodóvar’s queer genders and their pedagogical moments in classroom 179Inconsistency: sexuality and visual culture education in context 189Gain: Imagining pedagogical approaches to Almodóvar’s queer discourses 192Chapter 10. Embodiments 199Hallucination: Critical pedagogy and Almodóvar’s genders and sexualities 199Fragrance: Pedagogical approaches: Queer film and visual culture education 205Rumor: Implications for visual culture education 209Chapter 11. Deliverance: 21511. 1 Noise: Border epistemologies informing visual culture education 21511. 2 Discretion: Last inferences 217References 227viDedicationI dedicate this thesis to:Queer borders, queer, thinking, and pedagogy.Educators concerned with developing visual culture education.All transgenders who carry on living.Those who have thought about knowledge and power.The orixás of Bahia de São Salvador, but particularly Iansã and Shango.The reality of cinema.All critical thinkers.Emflia Soares and Belidson Dias, my dearly loved parents.My companion, Phillipe Raphanel.All authors cited in this thesis.Others.viiAcknowledgmentsA number of people have helped me to make this thesis possible and so deservethanks. My unbounded thanks go to Pedro Almodóvar and Augustin Almodóvar who madethis thesis possible. The person to whom I am most indebted is Graeme Chalmers who hasbeen a great source of knowledge, understanding, encouragement, and assistance. Specialthanks go to my committee members, Rita Irwin, Peter Dickinson and Helen Leung, whodedicated themselves to critically engage with my work and provided me with a vast arrayof advice, references, and interpretations. I particularly want to acknowledge scholars whowere my teachers at UBC and others whom I met in doing the research: Valerie LeeChapman, Lisa Loutsenheiser, Munir Velani, Karen Meyer, Kit Grauer, Jean Barman, AnnaKindler, Janice Miller, and Susan Pine. I want to acknowledge Jenny Peterson, LyonelLacroix, Jacqui Gingras, Annie Smith, Monique Fouquet, Hartej Gill, and Susan Sinkinsonas my friends and colleagues who worked with me and shared friendship and intellectualconversations.Among those who alerted me to relevant materials and pointed me in important newdirections I thank Fernanda Selayzin, Denilson Lopes, Felfcia Johanson, and Sneja Gunew. Iwould also like to express gratitude to Ana Mae Barbosa, Geraldo Orthof, Cathleen Sidki,Lygia Sabóia, Suzette Venturelli, Sylvio Zamboni, and Ana Vicentini who gave me initialencouragement and provided meticulous support. I thank my students in the courses ofGender and sexuality in contemporary art at the Universidade de Brasilia, and in Processesand methods of art at the University of British Columbia for the perceptive conversations,criticism, and comments that helped me to form and restructure aspects of this thesis.viiiThis thesis owes so much to so many people but among them I would like tohighlight the continuous work of Sueli Silva and Sandra Lopes of the CAPES Foundation,and Marta Helena of the University of Brasflia (UnB), who attentively looked after myscholarship and leave of absence processes. I am grateful for the total cooperation andenthusiastic support I have received from Paloma Buendia e Diego Pajuelo of El Deseo SA,Universidad de Castilha La Mancha, Centro de documentacion Pedro Almodóvar. I amthankful for the concession of copyrights from El Deseo SA, Jasbir and Balbir Sidhu, andMario Cravo Neto, and for the donation of my family’s private photo collection. All imagesin this thesis besides my own belong to these individuals, foundations and archives.I am exceedingly grateful for the total cooperation and enthusiastic support I havereceived from many institutions and I want to give special thanks to the CAPES Foundationof the Brazilian Ministry of Education, and the University of Brasflia Foundation for thefinancial support supplied to me by both over the last 4 years; and also the University ofBritish Columbia, which provided me with a vibrant, understanding and intellectuallystimulating environment.I am deeply indebted to Steve Bridger for insightful comments and proof readingskills. Special thanks also go to Brian Kilpatrick and Robert Hapke, technicians of theCurriculum Studies Department (CUST), without whose dedication and patience I wouldnever have been able to develop the necessary skills to subdue high technology.Acknowledgments are also due to all CUST staff, Hinnerk Schmidt, and Giséle Ribeiro whoalso provided me with diligent technical support.Thanks to my parents and siblings who relieved pressures and for taking my frequentphone calls. Also I am grateful to Zezito, Salete Soares, Lica Dias, and Cidinha who helpedixme indirectly to achieve this realization. I express thanks to my extended family of choice inVancouver: Julio Reboucas, Dawna Holas, Keith Wallace, Vick Sharma, Susan Low,Laiwan Chung, Gayle Raphanel and Guy Immega. Special thanks go to my personal friendand PhD colleague Patricia Keen, without whom I would not have survived in Canada. Ihave been blessed by having a friend like Flavio Martins whose dedication, friendship,patience and loyalty nourish my work. I thank Marcela Holanda, Anna Amelia de Farias,Clarice Veras, Jailton Pontes, Felipe Varela, Clara Barreito, Tita do rego Silva, and LiaKortcham for sharing love, humor, and the highs and lows.I offer my final and deepest thanks to Philippe Raphanel, who has been at my sidethroughout this project and whose love, endurance, support, and humor made up much of thebest of my life in Canada.I also acknowledge that in 2005, part of chapter 1 was published by Imaginar-Revista da Associaçao de professores de expressão e comunicação visual, Portugal, asExplorando Pedro Almodóvar entre arte-educaçao multicultural, cultura visual e teoriaqueer [Exploring Pedro Almodóvar in the context of multicultural art education, visualculture and queer theory]. Also in 2005 a version of chapter 5 was published with thecollaboration of Susan Sinkinson by the International journal of education & the arts, 1(2)as Film spectatorship between queer theory and feminism: Transcultural readings. Parts ofchapters 1 and 3 are in press as a book chapter of Ana Mae Barbosa (Ed.), Confluenciasinternacionais [International confluences], São Paulo: USP press, as teoria queer e o ensinoda cultura visual [Queer theory and visual culture education }. All translations, both ofdialogues from the films and of secondary material in French, Portuguese and Spanish, aremy own.xDevouring: Explaining some terminology to art educatorsSince this thesis mainly reflects on film studies and the subjects and concepts ofqueer theory that are not widely recognized, accepted and used in art education practice, Ipresent here a limited glossary of key concepts employed in this thesis. Based on myexperience as an art educator for the past fifteen years, I strongly believe that thisintroductory explanation of terms will facilitate the reading of this thesis by my chiefaudiences: secondary visual culture educators, and higher education professors and teachersdelivering foundation courses in art schools or involved in teacher education programs. Ihave structured it in two parts: film terminology and queer studies terminology. Note thatthe statements below are generalizations because scholars use these same concepts to meandifferent things.Film Studies GlossaryAudience- a group of people who engage with media, including films, television,and radio. The audience serves as the basis for spectator studies.Auteur - in film criticism, a director who so dominates the film-making process thatit is appropriate to call her/him the auteur, or author, of the motion picture. The auteurtheory holds that the director is the primary person responsible for the creation of a motionpicture and thus imbues it with his or her distinctive, recognizable style.xiCinematography - the art of motion picture photography, which involves cameras,film stock, and lighting.Classical cinema - a style of filmmaking that privileges clarity of narrative.Characters drive the plots, and continuity editing ensures events’ seamless progressionCult movies - strange, quirky, unusual, or surreal films with a “cult” following. Theyhave outrageous characters or plots which are often considered controversial. They are rare,hard to find and are usually watched over and over again by their admirers.Diegesis- in film, the narrative that includes all the parts of the story including thosethat are not actually shown on the screen, such as events that have led up to the presentaction, people who are being talked about or events that are presumed to have happenedelsewhere; in fact, all the frames, spaces and actions not focused on visually in the film’smain narrative.Editing - the process of arranging shots into scenes, sequences, and, ultimately, afilm. Film grammar is defined as follows: A shot is a single continuous recording made by acamera. A scene is a series of related shots. A sequence is a series of scenes that together tella major part of an entire story, such as that contained in a complete movie.xiiFilm noir — genre of films with a grim, urban setting that deal mainly withmysterious and violent passions in a downbeat way, featuring shady characters including theclassic femme fatale and the malicious villain.Film representation - how films assign meaning to what they depict, such as socialgroups.Genre- a French term meaning subject or category; refers to a group of films withsimilar characteristics such as plots, themes, or styles.Kitsch- art that is considered an inferior copy of an existing style. Kitsch is said tobe a gesture imitative of the appearances of art and it is most closely associated with art thatis sentimental, self-pitying, or maudlin. It is often said that kitsch relies on merely repeatingconvention and formula, lacking the creativity and originality displayed in genuine art.Melodrama- as currently used a mildly pejorative word meaning drama primarilycharacterized by sensational plots with dark subject matter and blatant emotional appeals toconventional sentiment, but which is typically distinguished from tragedy by having a happyending. When melodrama is used in the pejorative sense, it is usually because the critic feelsthat the sensationalism of the plot lacks realism, or that the characters are stock heroes andvillains with little room for characterization.xiiiMice-en-scene - the elements depicted in the film frame, including lighting,movement, setting, and costuming. It literally means “staging” - the way in which theelements and components in the film are arranged and encompassed by the camera, or theterm usually used to denote that part of the cinematic process that takes place on the set, asopposed to montage, which takes place afterwards.Montage - the juxtaposition of material (successive shots, or items within a shot) tosuggest meaning. That is, a series of short shots edited together to create a certain emotionaleffect or the art and technique of motion picture editing in which contrasting shots orsequences are used to effect emotional or intellectual responses.Narration - the various means by which the events of the plot can be placed beforethe viewer. Also used of voice-over narration, a technique particularly associated with thefatalism offilm noir.Narrative - the story line in a film: the structured series of events, linked by causeand effect, that provides the film’s plots.Neo-realism - connected with movement out of the studio, shooting on reallocations, sometimes the absence of a script andlor non-professional casts- all designedsimultaneously to cut costs and increase the impression of spontaneity.xivParodic film - comedy that satirizes other film genres or classic films. Such filmsemploy sarcasm, stereotyping, and mockery of scenes from other films, inconsequentialviolence, and the obviousness of meaning in a character’s actions.Slasher film — a sub-genre of the horror film genre. Typically, a masked, psychoticperson stalks and kills, in a way that is graphically depicted, teenagers or young adults whoare away from adult supervision (and typically involved in premarital sex, drug use, or otherillicit activity).Spectatorship- involves theorizing about the spectator and the nature of the viewingexperience. According to Mayne spectatorship is not only the act of watching a film, butalso the ways one takes pleasure in the experience, or not; the means by which watchingmovies becomes a passion, or a leisure-time activity like any other[.. .j For spectatorship isnot just the relationship that occurs between the viewer and the screen, but also andespecially how that relationship lives on once the spectator leaves the theater. [...j Filmstudies tells us that the difference between experiences of spectatorship is not so much thatone is art and the other isn’t, but rather that one kind of spectatorship is “critical”, engagedas it is with the relation between memory and duration, gender and address; while the otheris not. One kind of spectatorship makes me think and reflect, while the other makes me actout and forget (1998, pp 2-7).xvQueer Studies GlossaryBisexual- an individual (female or male) who is attracted to and may form sexualand affectionate relationships with both men and women. However a person does not haveto have a relationship to be bisexual and the term does not presume non-monogamyButch— a person who is masculine or dresses that way regardless of sex or genderidentity. It is usually applied as a sub-identity of lesbian, gay male, or bisexual.Closeted, in the closet — having a concealed identity, as expressed in the phrase“coming out of the closet”. It refers to a person who wishes to keep secret his or her sexualorientation or gender identity. Being “closeted” refers to not disclosing one’s sexualorientation. “Coming out” is the process of first recognizing and acknowledging non-heterosexual orientation to oneself and then disclosing it to others. Outing (from “out of thecloset”): Publicly revealing the sexual orientation or gender identity of an individual whohas chosen to keep that information private.Crossdresser - a general term for anyone who dresses in clothes that are usuallyconsidered by society to belong to the opposite sex (including female impersonators, shemales, and gender benders, as well as transgendered people)-- but not necessarily connectedto sexual orientation. Cross-dressing is done for a variety of reasons, includingentertainment, sexual gratification,, or the desire to make a political statement against therigid gender roles demanded by our society.xviDrag performers- entertainers who dress and act in styles typically associated withthe opposite sex (drag queen for men, drag king for women). Not synonymous withtransgender or cross-dressingDrag queen - A gay man who cross-dresses and often uses exaggerated stereotypicalfeminine mannerisms for the entertainment of himself and/or others.Drag king— female-bodied or identified performance artists - usually lesbians ortransmen - who dresses in masculine “drag” as part of their routine.Fag/Dyke/Queer- terms frequently used of homosexuals as insults by homophobicpeople; however they are being reclaimed by some gay and lesbian people who feel that byusing them positively, as part of their daily language, they can make the expressions becomenon-threatening.Feminine: possessing qualities conventionally characteristic of women:conventionally believed to be appropriate for a woman or girl.LFemme- displaying feminine or effeminate dress and behavior regardless of sex orgender identity, or a sub-identity of lesbian, gay, or bisexual based on feminine oreffeminate dress and behavior.xviiFTM - acronym for “female to male.” A transgendered person who at birth or bydetermination of parents or doctors, has the biological identity of female but a genderidentity of male. Those who have undergone surgery are sometimes described as “post-opFTMs” (for post-operative). See Gender identity and Intersex.Gender- is expressed in terms of masculinity and femininity. It is a term to describethe socially constructed differences between men and women, referring not only toindividual identity and personality, but also at the symbolic level, to cultural ideals andstereotypes of masculinity and femininity and, at the structural level, to the sexual divisionof roles in institutions and organizations.Gender identity- an individual’s emotional and psychological sense of being maleor female, but not necessarily the same as an individual’s biological identity.Gender queer (or genderqueer)- a person who redefines or plays with gender, orwho refuses gender altogether. A label for people who bend/break the rules of gender andblur the boundaries.Gender role- refers to characteristics attached to culturally-defined notions ofmasculinity or femininity.Gender-variant / gender non-conforming- displaying gender traits that are notnormatively associated with the person’s biological sex. “Feminine” behavior or appearancexviiiin a male is gender-variant as is “masculine” behavior or appearance a female. Gender-variant behavior is culturally specific.GLBT - gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered. Acronym used in politics In order tochallenge old concepts about homosexuality, GLBT people have been actively promotingunderstandings of their identity as healthy, ordinary, common, open-minded, unprejudiced,virtuous, responsible, controlled and cool.Heterosexual privilege - a term which acknowledges that heterosexuals assume fullrights to act out their sexual identity in society, e.g., to talk about it, brag about it, showpictures of their significant others, while homo- and bisexuals cannot do so without fear ofacts of homophobia.Heterosexual assumption - the assumption that everyone is heterosexual unlessotherwise indicated.Heterosexism- the institutionalized assumption that everyone is heterosexual.Heterosexual- someone who is physically and emotionally attracted to people of theopposite sex. Heterosexuality is commonly believed to be inherently superior to andpreferable to homosexuality or bisexualityxixHomophobia- fear and hatred of homosexuals; often exhibited by prejudice,discrimination, harassment and acts of violence.Homosexual - someone who is physically and emotionally attracted to people of thesame sex. Many homosexuals prefer the terms lesbian or gay.Institutional oppression - institutional arrangements of a society used to benefit onegroup at the expense of others, illustrated through the use of language, media, education,economics, religion, etc.Internalized homophobia- the experience of shame, aversion, or self-hatred inreaction to one’s own feelings of attraction for a person of the same sex. Lesbians, gay men,and bisexuals who are socialized in our homophobic society often internalize negativestereotypes and develop some degree of low self-esteem and self-hatred.Internalized oppression - the process by which a member of an oppressed groupcomes to accept and live out the inaccurate myths and stereotypes about the oppressedgroup.Intersex - people born with sex chromosomes, external genitalia or an internalreproductive system that is not considered standard for either male or female. Parents andphysicians in the past usually have determined the sex of the child, resulting in surgery orhormone treatment. The existence of intersexuals shows that there are not just two sexes andxxthat our ways of thinking about sex (trying to force everyone to fit into either the male boxor the female box) is socially constructedLesbian- the preferred term for females who have sexual relationship with females.LGBT— acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender; often intersex andquestioning (or Queer) are added: LGBTIQ.Masculine- relating or belonging to men and boys rather than women and girls.Men who have sex with men (MSM)- a term often used when discussing sexualbehavior, it is inclusive of all men who participate in this behavior regardless of how theyidentify their sexual orientation. The acronym MSM is conventionally used in medicalliterature. Also used: Women who have Sex with Women (WSW).MTF - acronym for “male to female.” A transgendered person who, at birth or bydetermination of parents or doctors, has a biological identity of male but a gender identity offemale. Those who have undergone surgery are sometimes described as “post-op MTFs”(for post-operative). See Gender identity and Intersex. LIN.B. many transgender personsobject to the use of this term as it suggests that one has moved from one unambiguous sex toanother and therefore upholds a false binary.xxiNorm- standard pattern of behavior: a standard pattern of behavior that is considerednormal in a particular society.Openly gay/lesbian: as a modifier, “openly” is usually not relevant; its use shouldbe restricted to instances in which the public awareness of an individual’s sexual orientationis germane. Examples: Harvey Milk was the first openly gay San Francisco supervisor.“Ellen” was the first sitcom to feature an openly lesbian lead character. “Openly” isprefened over “avowed,” “admitted,” “confessed” or “practicing.” ElPerformative —a form of speech in which the issuing of the utterance is also theperformance of an action. Judith Butler applies the theory of the performative to theproduction of gender, arguing that gendering is a reiterated performative process that beginswhen someone says of the newborn: “It is a girl”.Queen: originally a pejorative term for an effeminate gay man. Still consideredoffensive when used as an epithet.Queer: originally a pejorative term for gay, now reclaimed by some gay, lesbian,bisexual and transgender people as a self-affirming umbrella term. Used in this way, queermeans sexually dissident, but not necessarily gay. Many gays, transsexuals, bisexuals andeven heterosexuals whose sexualities do not fit into the cultural standard of monogamous,heterosexual maniage have adopted the “queer” label.xxiiQueer theory: becoming visible in the late 1980s, political critique of normative andputatively deviant categories of sexual and gender identity, later absorbed by academia.Sexual orientation- the physical and emotional attraction of someone whether topersons of the opposite sex, same sex or both. Three forms of sexual orientation are labeled:heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual.Straight - heterosexual; describes a person whose sexual and affectional attraction isto someone of the opposite sex.Transgender- umbrella term refering to people whose biological and genderidentity may not be the same. This can include preoperative, postoperative or non-operativetranssexuals, female and male cross-dressers, drag queens or kings, female or maleimpersonators, and intersex individuals. Many individuals prefer to be called according totheir own specificities such as transsexual, drag queen or king, and intersex. Some peopleuse the term to mean a transcendence of binary gender systems altogether so that theyidentify as neither of a pair of opposites.Transsexual- people who were born with a mind and soul (female or male) and abody (male or female) which do not match. Transsexualism may be treated under medicalsupervision. Transsexual individuals can be of any sexual orientation.xxiiiTransvestite- those who get erotic (fetishistic) or emotional pleasure fromoccasionally wearing clothes of the opposite sex and who feel compelled to do so. Most aremale, heterosexual, and many are married. A recently coined term, bigendered, is analternate term for transvestite which more accurately describes men who are comfortablewith their assigned gender role most of the time, but occasionally feel a need to express theirfeminine side.Sources : (“The cult movies web ring”, 2005, “Cult Movies: The #1 guide the thewonderful word of horror, slasher, vampire, cannibal, monster, zombie, sci-fi and fantasy”,2000, “Culture queer: Glossary of queer terms”, 2005, “Encyclopedia Britannica online:Film”, 2005, “Encyclopedia Britannica online: Queer”, 2005, “Erratic Impact- Queer terms:Better know what you are saying”, 2005, “The Northern Concord”, 2005, “Positive images:Queer terminology “, 2005, “Reality films: Documentary resources and review”, 2002-2003,“Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Film”, 2005, “Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Queer”,2005)xxivCHAPTER 1Rummage: Introductory Notes on Bricolage, A/r/tography and EverydayPracticesBricolageFrom the application process to the final writing of this thesis I uncompromisinglyconsidered this research project as a reproducible painting, a book, a visual artifact, an epainting, consequently the reader is referred to the accompanying e-book. I have beenpainting since I was ten years old, and my living vocabulary and grammar primarily derivefrom it; but if nowadays the presence of painting in my life abounds, it was exactly itsabsence that made me start the practice of bricolage. Let me explain: in my earlier life in theNortheast of Brazil, painting was a far-off cultural activity mainly accessible by referencesto it on bi-dimensional graphic artifacts of visuality such as books, magazines, journals, andelectronic media, a replication of itself. Now, looking from my current standpoint, I do notimagine that the insufficiency of the “reliable”, “material” and “truthful” painting objectswere a crucial impediment to me engaging in painting. On the contrary, because I wasutterly seduced by painting’s allures, and needed to have some tangible tactic to work with, Imanaged to include that absence through concepts of reproduction, imitation, simulation,iteration, and borrowing as dynamic new strategies to create visual representations, newunderstandings, and meanings which ever since than have been shaping my paintingpractice.1As a result, I constantly combine disparate and pre-existing elements from otherimages into new visual representations. Thus, to create, I have to continuously collectrepresentational components, such as pictures, photographs, and clips; and then cite,juxtapose, and distort them. In other words, I do not start from a clean slate (tabula rasa),but rather try to alter selected material cultural artifacts into new cultural products, assistedprimarily by electronic media. Besides, I develop the arrangement of paintings through a setof procedures, layering glazes of paint over others and always leaving open windows toreference the covered layer, in order to disturb ideas of spatial relationships. The imagesbecome overloaded with different marks, drippings, edges, borders, frontiers, and marginsthat are arranged to seduce, surprise and to emphasize painting and its effects. As a resultthe paintings are extremely flat like copying images, and the materiality of painting in themis barely visualized by its reference. These paintings are an ongoing, open-ended act thatonly allows brief closing stages when they are exhibited.Accordingly, my artwork has aimed not to make a simple commentary on, or even acelebration of painting; on the contrary I seek to understand if I can produce meaningfulvisual representations using references, citations, excerpts, borrowings, and appropriationsas the basis for my work. Consider that these appropriations essentially address my troublewith the uncertainty of the image and its tendency to attract new meanings like a blotter, avampire, a cannibal. So as an anthropophagic artist/research/teacher, I establish my mostimportant methodology on the appropriative manifestations of joining together references tomy visual representations and texts, and artists and scholars’ visual representations andwritten texts. This is the starting point and here I acknowledge this thesis as one of my livedpainting practices.2Air/tographyThe point I am trying to make is that deliberately invoking my painting practices isdirectly related to my aim to open up areas of investigation within the art education field.This thesis looks at the everyday intersections of film representation of queer gender andsexuality, and art education, particularly focusing on the viewing of the cinematographicwork of Pedro Almodóvar and how it informs contemporary art education. Then, I considerhow my own artwork, and my practices as an art educator have shaped the possibility tointerweave, knit, associate, and above all cut-and-paste notions of identity, representation,pedagogy, queerness, visuality, spectatorship, and cultural borders into this research project.As a result of these previous considerations, I wholeheartedly embrace alr/tography, an arts-based research method, and adopt queer theory as my major theoretical approach. It shouldbe mentioned that by weaving in and through the identities of (a)rtist, (r)esearcher, and(t)eacher, alr/tography infers a coming together, a bordering interaction, and an always-floating movement involving image and word (R. L. Irwin, 2004).Queer theory concerns itself with questions of visibility; it repeatedly takes thevisible as a term of political representation and presents varied possibilities of interpretation.By showing us that sexuality, sex, and gender are social constructs, thus mutable andshifting and not always symmetrically aligned, queer theory opens up new approaches fortreating sexuality and gender as subjects in order to disrupt concepts of normality.Effectively alr/tography and queer theory allow me a transdisciplinary flow of spaces andplaces in which to borrow, contravene, traverse, dialogue, misconduct, and sleep around in3shameless relationships involving cultural studies, art education, film studies, and visualculture studies, which in their own practices embrace bricolage as well.IntertextualitiesIn this respect, I would like to insist that in this project the convergence of seeing,writing and knowing makes my research practice an alr/tographical one, in which myartistic, pedagogical and scholarly practices ambiguously employ perception, imagination,and intuition, the concrete and the abstract, through conceptual and controlled ways ofknowing, in order to produce anew. As well, by redefining references into other citationsand citations into concepts, perhaps my artwork and my research can be called opportunistic,devious, cunning, imitative, or even innovative: I am persuaded they are influentialalr/tographical instruments for making and redefining meanings, and a significantpedagogical experience. Hence it should be mentioned that I am not claiming nor am Iinterested in any concept of originality in the practice of appropriation and bricolage: I amwell informed that both are longstanding techniques. Marcel Duchamp’ s artistic practicesinitially informed me about intertextual borrowings for the purpose of textual construction,but it was Tzevtan Todorov (1990), Julia Kristeva (1983, 1994) and Roland Barthes (1999)who taught me that texts’ referentiality articulates our everyday existence and that nothing isoriginal, because each text is related to other texts. Later I was encouraged and informed byJacques Derrida’ s notion of the bricoleur’ s practice: the fitting together of elements thathave been left undecided by hegemonic institutions and knowledges to shape newarrangements and concepts (Derrida, 1987). And, as it is for many contemporary scholarsand artists, the impact of these theories is still felt in my everyday practices.4In a contiguous argument Kincheloe and Berry (Kincheloe & Berry, 2004) contendthat crucial to bricolage is the importance of intertextuality, the concept that all texts obtainmeaning not simply from their association to material reality but from their link to othertexts. Kincheloe draws attention to bricolage ‘s emphasis on the connection between aresearcher’s reading and the social location of personal narrations. As Kincheloe puts it, theunderstanding of intertextuality makes bricoleurs always aware that readers and narrativeslive in points of traverse, or intertextual axes; and consequently they constantly affect oneanother and any attempt to make meaning of any research act. Kincheloe also shows that thetask of the bricoleur is to uncover the invisible artifacts of power and culture, to refusestandardized modes of knowledge production, to acknowledge that he is transgressive, andalso admit that human experience is defined by uncertainties. Kincheloe further contendsthat bricolage, rejecting normativity and in its critical concern for social justice, tries tounderstand the knowledge and ways of knowing of “non-Western” peoples, and the forcesof domination that affect the lives of individuals from race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnic,and religious backgrounds outside prevailing power institutions. Therefore the bricoleur isaware of deep social structures and the complex ways they play out in everyday lifeEveryday practicesFar too much is contained in this introductory note but in order to facilitate thereading of this thesis let me just make some last comments on the usage of concepts of“everyday life”. There have been many understandings of everyday life, but here the chosenand most important concepts for this research are derived from Paulo Freire, Michel deCerteau and Judith Butler’s notions of practices of everyday lives.5Freire’ s emphasis on being where the people are, understanding their contexts andexistences, and increasing awareness (conscientizacão) of the representations of everydaylife, is key for any project of transformation and an essential constituent of his criticalpedagogical approaches (Freire, 1985, 1999). Freire adds that the traces of so-called “highculture” carry structures of domination as they surface in confrontation with the culture ofdaily life; thus, he claims, everyday life (cotidiano) is a space of permanent conflict andcontradiction (Freire, 2004a, 2004b). And so should be schools, which are required toaddress visible or hidden problems present in relationships between students in theireveryday experiences (Freire, 1999). Besides, the flow of the everyday life is the materialcondition in which each person develops her existence through a continuous process ofrereading, and these revisited material conditions acquire the form of the social cultural life(Freire, 2003, 2004a). Such a reading of everyday life is of course meaningful for anypractice in contemporary art education that seeks a social reconstruction.If Certeau (1988) moved his attention from objects to actions that people performwith these objects, Butler (1999) offered different forms for imagining our dailyperformances of identity concerning gender and sexuality norms and the binary ofmasculinity and femininity. By doing so, Butler translates the everyday life in a significantactivity to possible understandings and transformations of social differences. Also, theculture of everyday life is a space that informs the spectacle of gender and sexuality in ourculture, and youths make passionate use of bricolage from their everyday life as an attemptto autonomously construct and re-enact their perception of these issues. Thus, an arteducation practice that highlights the visual representations of everyday life is a significantpedagogical experience because it provides a myriad of opportunities to embrace a diverse6vision of culture which not only resists uncritically receiving visual representations butencourages critical viewing as a practice that develops imagination, social awareness and asense of justice.Wrapping upAccordingly, what follows is a scholarly endeavor, a living inquiry understood aspainting, a bricolage, and an a/r/tographic undertaking. This thesis has been assembledexclusively from the visual artifacts of my everyday lived experiences over the last six yearsincluding assemblage, a métissage of words, texts, and images, references to my paintings,collages and photographs, photographs of other visual artists’ work, visual imagery fromAlmodóvar’s films, and copyright free images available on the internet. Thus, I ask you towelcome my provocations to disturb notions of scholarship and knowledge making in arteducation, and mingle with the dialogical and pedagogical possibilities that they incite.7CHAPTER 2Opening: First TasteThe everyday practices of contemporary art education from grades K- 12 are markedby the neglect of the cultural experience of films and the disregard for issues of gender,principally masculinity, as well as the concealment of issues of sexuality. Although thesituation has improved in higher education chiefly in the visual studies area, teachereducation programs are still somewhat deficient. So it is in the confluence of visual culture,queer theory, art education and film studies that I posit my inquiry. I explore theoreticalframeworks for understanding how we look at conception and reception of queerrepresentations of gender and sexuality in visual culture, and its impact for the teaching andlearning of visual culture in higher education and in grades K-12. This thesis looks atconnections between film representations of gender and sexuality and art education,particularly focusing on Pedro Almodóvar’s filmography. The conducting questions were:How do Pedro Almodóvar’s film representations of queer sexuality and gender informcontemporary art education theory and practice; and in what ways does the utilizationof border epistemologies become relevant for understanding representations of gendersand sexualities in Almodóvar’s films, and thus inform art education practices? Also,this study fills a gap in the emerging critical literature in art education because, as a studyfocusing on queer visual representation and border epistemologies, it will considerintersections among critical pedagogy, art education, film studies, queer studies andpostcolonialism, and such studies are rare in the field.8OrganizationThe structure is a division into ten chapters: Opening: First taste, interminglings,“emplacements, liminalities, derivations, gaze, dressing, unruliness, embodiments,deliverance, in this order.opening: First taste.This chapter explores the interconnections among art education, visual culturerepresentations, visual culture education, critical pedagogies, and film studies. I argue thatart education is embarking on a radical change towards visual culture education, anddeveloping new practices that provoke displacement of rigid notions of spectatorship, imageanalysis, ways of seeing, issues of positionality, epistemology, power, identity, subjectivity,agency, and everyday life.interminglings.Interminglings provides an overview of the historical relations of art education andvisual culture education; looks at the interactions of the visual culture education with issuesof gender, sexuality, curriculum, and morality; explores possible connections between visualculture education and film studies, specifically with Almodóvar’s cinematography.In this chapter it is asserted that issues of visuality, gender and sexual representationand knowledge are central to debates about our everyday life. Given that we live in amultifaceted technological world where images for our information and knowledge are anessential commodity (Debord, 1995) it is vital that students become aware of how and whythey are attracted by an imagery of everyday life (Duncum, 2002c). Following Mirzoeff9(1998a, 1998b) I add that developing new analytical approaches toward ways of seeing is akey challenge facing most, or perhaps, all scholarly disciplines but is a crucial issue forcontemporary art education. Then I describe historically how art education has beenembracing visuality in the practice of everyday life, and in what ways it is experiencing aturn towards visual culture, identified as “visual culture education”. In addition, I explorethe fact that if the study of visual artifacts has been slightly increasing in art education, thisprocess of attributing meaning in how we see visual culture representations does not seem tobe taken into account in most art education curricula (Duncum & Bracey, 2001). Thus, it isnecessary to briefly review the roots of art education and current practices, from theprivileged art forms in curricula suggestions of fine arts, music and drama, to the neglectedforms of expressions such as film (See Barbosa, 1978; Efland, 1990; Stankiewicz, 2001).Art education curricula at K- 12 levels lack film representation and discourse, and theseseldom enter the art education curriculum at university and secondary school levels. Whenthey do enter secondary and postsecondary school levels, it is restrained by the disciplinaryconstraints of visual studies, fine arts, media education, and new technologies.Moreover, I adopt a stance that is not only concerned with the visual and thetechniques of visual inquiry, but with all sensorial forms of communication: attention is notgiven just to the visual observable facts and artifacts, but also to ways and diverse contextsof viewing and representing the cultural practices of the past and present, young and elderly,dominant and subaltern, and so forth (Shohat & Stam, 1994).In this chapter I make the point that if visual culture education embraces all art formsof everyday life for inclusion in the curriculum including film, it is essential that we learnmore about specificities and implications of these fields for teaching and learning: film is10not a mere reproduction of the ways in which painting, drawing, or even video have beentaught and learned.Through this thesis, I consider many points of actual or potential convergencebetween visual culture education, queer theory, alr/tography and Almodóvar’s films.Though they converge, they often diverge and enact a politics of difference which I identifyas a border epistemology that provokes me/us as artist/teacher/researchers to locate my/ourstances.emplacements.This chapter supplements interminglings, also depicting key definitions that shapethis study. It succinctly presents relations between visibility and visual culture byconsidering intersections of queer theory and visual culture studies as nourishment sites forqueer visual representation. Finally, this chapter highlights connections among queer,borders, memory, absence, and emplacements.In emplacemenst a study of current relations between visibility and visual culture isrestricted to film representation. This allows for a focus on particular kinds of filmrepresentations in the construction of our everyday culture and popular memory, and theideological and rhetorical work they do. Also it looks at the social issues presented andrepresented in films, as well as the oblique reflections they can give rise to, through theirproduction, circulation and reception.Moreover, in this chapter I examine how queer subjectivities and their modes ofvisual representation have earned the reputation of being visibly complex, dangerous, orcontroversial. In order to look at this situation I draw from queer theorists who discuss11invisibility or “non-visibility” as well as visibility, as forms of representation, and who lookfor traces of meanings “within” or “without” the queer culture. Queer subject invisibility andvisibility are always complex, signifying a need for or a lack of specific images and codes,but also a deficiency of interpretive practices. As a result, I discuss how the quasi-absence ofcinematic language informs characters/modes of address/cinematography as queer withoutembodying unconscious stereotypes.Furthermore I give attention to transgender, or “queer genders”, as sites of visibility,memory, and location. By being “undecidable” creatures, absent and present at the sametime, transgenders now have to be imagined as much as to be seen. Thus, I explore thenotion that they depart from a different point: queer genders see and live gender andsexuality through a concrete bodily mode as much as a perspective of memory, desire andfantasy. Queer theory has exposed sexuality, sex, and gender as unsteady relations, andsexuality as not easily categorized by the sexes of its practitioners, analyzing sexuality andgender as outcomes of social and individual memory, and as superb social cultural structuresopen to great possibilities of arrangements among biological, cultural, philosophical, andpsychological definitions and articulations. Consequently, I explore queer gender as a meansof altering cultural values, to rethink masculinity, femininity, and sexuality.liminalities.As result, lirninalities focuses entirely on border epistemologies concepts, derivingfrom Latin American post-colonial thinking, and emphasizing transculturalism, postOccidentalism, anthropophagy, and the state of queer theory in Brazil as movements ofdecolonization of knowledge. They also serve as spaces from where I can articulate my12conversations since I consider myself belonging to that flow of geo-cultural locations. Iexplore border epistemology as a search for other spaces for the production of knowledgeand the possibility of non-.hegemonic modes of thinking. To adhere to border epistemologyis to move alongside and beyond the categories shaped and imposed by the prevailingWestern epistemology. The main concepts of border epistemology are explored as they arepresented by Mignolo (See, 1993, 1995a, 1995b, 1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2002)who claims there is a possibility of thinking from different spaces, which finally breaksaway from Eurocentrism as the exclusive epistemological perspective. Border epistemology,as an activity of decolonization of knowledge situated on the subaltern, encourages thedevelopment of an “other thinking”, displacing the binaries self/other and center/periphery,and provoking a displacement of rigid notions of spectatorship, image analysis, ways ofseeing, issues of positionality, epistemology, power, identity, subjectivity, agency, andeveryday life.derivations.Examining the interconections of queer theory and a/r/tography as borderepistemologies and forms of epistemological inquiry, I explore the influence of métissage inalr/tography as its organizing principle of subjectivity formation through the reconciliationof identities of artist, researcher and teacher, and the notions of artistry, inquiry andeducation. I also explore queer theory’s hability to und the effective normative features ofidentities and genders because it blurs the borders between the different authorities thatemphasize and support the organization of normality. I argue that alr/tography and queertheory are processes of dynamic flow that de-normalize regimes such as gender, sexuality,13theory, practice and disciplinarity. Thus, alr/tography and queer theory function astransdisciplinary interpretive and creative tools implying a dialogue of disciplinaryknowledge that creates new hybrids, which are different from any specific constituent part.In addition, I look at the role of visual representation, the practices of visual creation andviewing, and visual awareness for transdisciplinary practices of alr/tographical inquiry.gaze.In the chapter entitled Gaze, I introduce, and dig into, Almodóvar’s filmography andhis modes of enunciation, explore notions of queer spectatorship, and consider how and towhat extent queer representations of gender and sexuality shape or are shaped by spectators.I argue that Almodóvar’s work plays very different roles in constructing and disruptingconcepts of sexual and gender identity. I also explore the fluidity with which he blursboundaries of feminine and masculine representation, posing a critique of identity thataffects and dislocates normative representations of gender and sexuality. Almodóvar’smovies constitute an intense body of work that negotiates issues of national identity,historical and cultural consciousness, popular culture, social diversity, media andtechnology, social structures, and representation of class, race, gender and sexuality. Hiswork is often inscribed under the banner of pop/trashlcamp/kitschlslasher culture, andgenerally described as a mixture of comedy, melodrama, and suspense. Almodóvar hasfrequently injected his own self-portrait into his films, exploring not only broad issues ofidentity, but also his own cultural, racial, gendered, classed and sexual identities.14dressings.Dressing is substantively and metaphorically a changing room in this thesis. Itexhibits the story lines of Bad Education, Talk to Her, and All About my Mother; givesmeaning to these narratives, offers bandages to protect or succor our offended souls fromthem, and flavors our understanding of visual representations of gender and sexuality. In thischapter I explore Pedro Almodóvar’s discourses as constructing and disrupting concepts ofsexual and gender representations. I argue that his cinematic representations oftrans/gender/sexuality dislocate the various ways of seeing them, trouble interaction betweenviewer and object of vision, and offer a disruptive critique of the naturalness of masculinityand heterosexuality in our contemporary society. I look at this fluidity with whichAlmodóvar’s films soften boundaries of feminine and masculine representations, posing acritique of identity that affects and dislocates normative representations of gender andsexuality, challenges spectators to confront the position from which they look, and impelsthem to a level of consciousness of the act of looking.unruliness.In this chapter, I explore pedagogical approaches to Almodóvar’s queer genderdiscourses as an experiential conduit to a critical pedagogical practice in visual cultureeducation. I describe and explore two pedagogical moments I have experienced usingAlmodóvar’s queer gender imagery in classrooms. Also I raise the possibility oftranscultural approaches to viewing Almodóvar’s films. And I suggest pedagogicalapproaches to Almodóvar’s queer discourses.15embodiments.In Embodiments I draw upon queer theory to look at Almodóvar’s films in relation topedagogical perspectives; I explore Almodóvar’s cultural representation as a site of conflictand negotiation that gives rise to critical pedagogical developments, new pedagogicalapproaches, and inquiry about the possible usesand conflicts of queer representation invisual culture education. I argue that Almodóvar’s films generate spectacular narratives ofvisual imagery and that those involved in education are ought to understand the impacts andimplications of his filmic representations in our everyday life and in our pedagogicalpractices. I further assert that it is important to examine films in relation to crucial issues ofvisual culture education: the social studies of race, class, gender, sexuality and so forth. Inaddition, I propose possibilities of making this statement practicable and point to futurealr/tographical research on this topic.deliverance.In this chapter I provide an overview of the implications that border epistemologiessuch as transculturalism, alr/tography and queer theory hold for use in visual cultureeducation; and finally, I suggest further topics and studies concerning the examination ofsocial issues in visual culture education16CHAPTER 3InterminglingsIfyou hold a stone, hold it in your handIfyou feel the weight, you’ll never be lateTo understandBut ifyou hold the stone, hold it in your handIfyou feel the weight, it’ll never be too lateTo understand...If you hold a stone, Caetano Veloso 1971Sublimity: Border EpistemologyDuring my lurking around Almodóvar’s representations of queer gender andsexuality, I have been deeply driven by Walter Mignolo’s notions of border epistemology.Mignolo conceives border epistemology as an argument for the geopolitical diversity thatarises from a subaltern perspective, and as a form of lived inquiry, a reading that happensfrom the outside, inside and inside out of limits (2000a, p. 40). Border epistemology pointstowards a different kind of power, a multiple one which is largely transdisciplinary andsignificantly open ended, since the aim is to craft new forms of analysis, not only tocontribute to already established systems of thought. Mignolo’s notion of borderepistemology (his preferred term is border thinking), as he claims, emerges from the localhistories of Spanish and Portuguese legacies in the India Occidentalis (current LatinAmerica); it does not surface from a universal abstract genealogy that can be traced back toPlato, to some enlightened philosopher or some prominent contemporary theorist, to global17designs. The concept of border epistemology, indebted to Ribeiro’s notion or “barbariantheorizing” (See Ribeiro, 1968, 1971), emerges from the conditions of theorizing from theborder and is undoubtedly theory from/of the subaltern, but not only for the subaltern;subaltern theorizing is for the whole planet (Mignolo, 1998a). Hence, the rise of borderepistemology assists in raising new sites of thinking in between discourses and disciplinesand in between dialogues. Thus, border epistemology as an activity of decolonization ofknowledge situated on the subaltern encourages the development of an “other thinking”,displacing the binaries self/other and center/periphery, and provoking a displacement ofrigid notions of spectatorship, image analysis, ways of seeing, issues of positionality,epistemology, power, identity, subjectivity, agency, and everyday life.Accordingly, the reason I initially invoked border epistemology is because I considerthe shift from art education to visual culture education to enable a materialization of queertheory and alr/tography as new ways of knowing that can assist me in understandingAlmodóvar’s representations of queer gender and sexuality as forms of borderepistemologies. In order to grasp these articulations, I will provide brief descriptions ofinteractions between art education and visual culture, visual culture and visibility, queertheory and in/visibility, art education and issues of gender, sexuality and morality, visualculture education and film studies.Transparency: Art education and visual culture educationI initiate my description of the relation between art education and visual culture byasserting the importance of seeing aspects of visual culture education’s short-livedtrajectory. During the early 90s, the field of art education was beginning to perceive the18relevance of visual culture for pedagogical and curriculum matters. Despite initial attemptsby art educators to grasp the omnipresent visual culture, it was only in the mid-90s thatincreased discourse appeared, in the writings of a few scholars (e.g. Bolin, 1992; Duncum,1987a, 1987b, 1997; Freedman, 1994, 1997). However, Chalmers (2005) claims that the1 960s were significant foundation years for the recent developments of visual cultureeducation in art education. In the same article, Chalmers informs us that the most consistentattempt to introduce visual culture within the art education curriculum happened in the1960s through the seminal works of Corita Kent, Vincent Lanier, and particularly June KingMcfee, who provided sustaining ideas that are, more than ever, having an important effecton today’s art education practices. By looking at art as a social study, and concerning herselfwith understanding the possibilities of teaching, methods and justifications for the study ofvisual culture, McFee anticipated contemporary art education, argues Chalmers (2005, p.10). However, he reasons that the art educators at that time did not immediately accomplishan instrumental perspective for the field, and did not develop agency, “because they failed toacknowledge that, despite the ‘youth culture’ of the 1 960s, most who were teaching in theschools became teachers in the relatively conservative 1940s and ‘50s” (2005, p. 6).Moreover Chalmers reminds us that the study of visual culture in the 1960s createdopportunities to get rid of distinctions between high and low cultural forms that wereseminal for the theoretical developments of the “new art history”, and the materialization ofvisual culture studies.And it is just now, as recently as the last five academic years, that the field has seenthe appearance of works that dissect aspects of visual culture and education. This literatureexamines the intersection of visual culture and art education (e.g. Anderson, 1990; Congdon19& N., 2002; Duncum, 2002b, 2005; Emme, 2001; Freedman, 2003; Garoian & Gaudelius,2004; Heise, 2004; Hicks, 2004; jagodzinski, 1997a, 2003; Keifer-Boyd et al., 2003;Kindler, 2003; Krug, 2002; Noble, 2002; Pauly, 2003; Ryan, 1999; Smith-Shank, 2002; G.Sullivan, 2003a; Tavin, 2003; B. Wilson, 2003).Visual culture, as an emergent transdisciplinary and cross-methodological field ofinquiry that studies the social construction of visual experience, is still extraordinarily fluidand needs to be approached cautiously. Yet, in spite of the contentions around it, there islargely an understanding that visual culture emphasizes the everyday experiences of thevisual, and thus moves its attention away from the exclusive notions of high art to embraceas well the visual representations of everyday existence. In addition, by denying boundariesbetween elite and popular art forms, visual culture takes as its objects the artifacts,technologies and institutions of visual representation, which is conceived here as “a sitewhere production and circulation of meanings occur and are constitutive of social andhistorical events, not simply a reflection of them” (S. Hall, 1997, p. 15). Then teaching andlearning of visual culture, visual culture education, does not erase high art from curriculumbut rather approaches it from an inclusive perspective in which different forms of visualculture production can be understood through non-hierarchical categories. Visual cultureeducation poses unasked questions, and visualizes possibilities for education in general thatmight never be in focus anywhere else. This occurs because it leads to critical consciousnessthat engages in social critique as its primary dialogue, which leads to understanding, andthen action. The best word to describe this process is “agency”, a critical awareness thatleads to informed action to resist processes of domination in our everyday lives. Visualculture education, open to new and diverse forms of knowledge and promotes understanding20of hidden means of oppression, rejects the culture of positivism, accepts the idea that factsand values are indivisible, and above all that knowledge is socially constructed andintrinsically related to power. Accordingly, visual culture education encourages passiveconsumers to become active producers of culture, revealing, and resisting in the process, thehomogenizing structures.The force behind this focus of visual culture on a broader notion of the visual and ofvisuality seems to be one of the key elements for understanding the hesitation of arteducators’ full engagement with it. Historically, at least from the early twentieth century tothe early 90s, art curricula were steeped in the elements and principles of design and theideals of high art, or conversely, in a regime of children’s expressiveness and spontaneity;thus, formalism, which is embedded in the principles of design and a strong constituent ofModernism, became the strongest paradigm of the field (Barbosa, 1991, 2001; Duncum,1990; Efland, 1990; Hobbs, 1993). I stress that Modernism, by adopting the concept of anindependent art object and the objective existence of aesthetic values inherent in the formalproperties of the art object, emphasizes that art objects must stand alone and that aestheticvalues and experiences should be verifiable. So Modernism separated the viewer (thespectator) and the addresser, author (creator) from this autonomous “object”, the artwork.Thus, high art was valued for its own sake, and all other forms of visual representationwhich have utilitarian function were diminished. But things change, and according toThomas Kuhn (1970) paradigms change in disorderly ways, far from the neat logicaldialectical syntheses of the historiographical perspective of modernist theories; paradigmsare not monolithic nor homogeneous with respect to time and place -- they experienceradical changes.21Because of this conjectural situation, I among many other scholars consider that arteducation is embarking on a radical change towards visual culture, and developing newpractices. Currently, art schools and art education programs are facing the need to challengethese prevailing modernist, formalist notions and begin to explore the experiences ofeveryday life. Art educators are required to discuss and understand why art educationcurriculum in general has emphasized the valuing of students’ art making and the viewing ofhigher culture rather than balance the curriculum with a critical understanding of visualculture representations of everyday life.During the 90s, and predominantly in North America, there had been efforts todiscuss, promote and implement what was described then as the new art education,contemporary art education, or even, postmodern art education - broadly found inDisciplined-based Art Education’ (DBAE) and multicultural education2.Undoubtedly, inthis period there were some changes in art education programs that were becoming morecommitted to an exploration within media beyond the traditional painting, sculpture,ceramics, printmaking, drawing and textiles, to include aspects of cultural studies and artcriticism. Nevertheless, this recent turn into visual culture was genuinely challenging the arteducation community. A debate has been generated to ascertain a nomenclature that betterembraces the complexities and needs of an art education that promotes visual culture; andamong them the most common terms so far have been: visual culture education, visualculture art education, visual culture studies, visual culture pedagogy, material and visualculture education, material culture education, material art education, and visual & signifyingtexts education (VASTEducation). In this thesis the privileged term is “visual cultureeducation”, meaning the processes of education that promote visual culture, including all22forms of visual expressions erasing obsolete concepts of high or low art, kitsch, bon chicbon genre, media, publicity, and so forth.The literature available in visual culture education tells us that the visual cultureeducation undertaking “should” focus on the project of modernity and emergent practicesfrom the sixteenth century to the present, but it seems that most visual culture educatorshave been focusing largely on mass media as a form of cultural production. Thus, because Ifind it unfeasible to separate contemporary cultural experiences from past understandings,practices and knowledge, I include in my concept of visual culture studies all culturalexperiences of any subject matter, from any place, space, and time, as long as they are notconceived under a binary thinking of high/low art.Duncum (2002c) asserts that progressively more art educators are using the termvisual culture instead of art; and regardless of their vague concepts of visual culture, theyhave been recognizing that modernist concepts of high art and popular art have been effaced.He affirms that we are living in a complex visual technological world where images havebecome the most essential commodity for our information and knowledge; therefore,students need to understand how and why they are seduced by an imagery of everyday life.However, Duncum explains and highlights that visual culture is not only concerned with thevisual, but with other sensorial forms of communication, although the visual phenomenonconveys all other forms of interactions; visual culture aims its attention not only at the visualobservable facts and artifacts, but also at ways and diverse contexts of viewing andrepresenting, and its mediation. However, it seems that, if awareness concerning the study ofvisual artifacts has been slowly increasing in art education, it is not noticeable in arteducation curricula. Some features of visuality address issues of how we gaze at, are gazed23at by the world, how we constitute and are constituted by viewing processes that areparticularly relevant for the formation of knowledge, and how visuality entices discourses,and reveal a need for further explorations of concepts of cultural representation. Expandingthis case further, Freedman (2003) promotes the teaching of visual culture in art educationpaying special attention to viewing, interpretation, and construction meaning throughimages. Freedman writes:The difference between production and viewing contexts is critical and can influencestudents learning. The arts of traditional cultures are recontextualized when viewedin contemporary contexts. And yet, differences between contexts of making andseeing have not generally been given attention in curriculum. Images are now oftenseen without the context of their original intent and juxtaposed with previouslyunrelated imagery that provoke associations created by this new context. The variousmodes of reproduction that enable viewing on a large scale are productive in thesense that they invoke the creation of a new object each time an object is reproduced.(p. 90)In Freedman’s proposition lies an important approach which calls attention to viewing andmaking within art education curricula, critically analyzes visual culture, highlights thecognitive characteristics of contiguous interactions between viewers and the viewed, andexplores how we construct images at the same time that they construct us.Duncum and Freedman bring to light the need to acknowledge diverse contexts andcontiguities of viewing and representing, and in this process art education becomes aninstrument of critical pedagogy in which intents, purposes, interpretations, influences andthe power of visual representations provoke a critical social reconstructionism. In apragmatic sense, I only think of and use the term visual culture education to mean a criticalpedagogy, which neither suggests nor promotes a specific unified, instructionalmethodology or particular curricular content. Instead, visual culture education is understoodmore as an endeavor rather than a method, and as a flexible set of concepts for educators use24in acts of liberation and justice. Undeniably, through practices such as intertextuality andintergraphicality3(Freedman, 2003, p. 121), visual culture education challenges thecategorical understanding of fine art (high art)’ s uniqueness, reappropriates it, and heightenshigh art by integrating it into the visuality of everyday practices. Consequently, perceivingvisual culture education occurring as an understanding of cognitive processes betweenproducer and viewer in everyday life, asks us to consider imagery with an array of socialissues affecting student notions, concepts, beliefs, values, appreciations, and so on. Thus, thecritical study of representation in visual culture is capable of engaging art education with thepraxis of social justice.Nevertheless, more than a few art educators clearly do not see visual culture aspresented here, and they argue that shifting their focus of interest of teaching and learningfrom high art to visual culture will replace the study of art with social studies. Importantquestions arise in this divergence: Should students be exposed to visual culture? Or shouldthey be exposed only to fine arts? Why? Should traditional masterpieces of fine art bestudied as part of the study of visual culture? Some art educators contest the visual cultureeducation’s activities, practices and endeavor, want to “save” art education as a discipline,and fear that visual culture will replace art education’s current aims and purposes (e.g.Heise, 2004; Silvers, 2004; Peter J. Smith, 2003; R. Smith, 1988, l992a, 1992b; van Camp,2004). The scholars who confidently state their reservations about visual culture educationare Louis Torres and Michelle M. Kamhi, who are the editors of Aristos: An online Reviewof the Arts, (see Kamhi, 1995, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005; Torres, 1991, 2004, 2005a, 2005b).Both scholars argue that visual culture studies have no place in art education because theydo not clearly articulate an understanding of what art truthfully “is”. Tones and Kamhi25further infer that visual culture treats art as if it had no distinctive nature or value at all, andthat philosophers and scholars have reduced the concept of art to an overwhelming focus onartifacts. In the articles cited above, it is argued that visual culture studies completely engulfart education because their object of study draws upon the context of the whole of culturebut ignores the essential qualities of the fine arts. Torres and Khami insist that visual cultureeducation disregards essential differences between works of fine arts and other types ofcultural artifacts, and emphasizes abstract social and political issues at the expense of moreconcrete personal experience of fine arts. Furthennore, they eloquently assert that visualculture studies’ approach to understanding, interpretation, and making meaning lays stresson politicized issues that divide society, such as questions of race, class, gender, andethnicity.Moreover, many art teachers allege they are not equipped to deal with thecomplexity of contemporary cultural sites, and interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary ortransdisciplinary practices, because they have not been trained (Cited in Duncum, 2002a).Aguirre (2004) affirms that visual culture education downgrades art making by privilegingthe analysis and understanding of art, also by challenging the univocality of art and thatvisual culture education coerces art educators to neglect a viewpoint of study based onaesthetics to relocate itself within the cultural studies field. Some other art educators such asBauerlein (2004) more radically argue that the movement towards visual culture is aninvasion, a contamination that will come and go like a seasonal fashion because it is based in“mischievous”, “promiscuous”, “narrow-minded”, and “arrogant” practices and featuressuch as the extensive use of borrowings, the flexibility of choosing disciplines without26plumbing their depth and without expertise, and an over use of visual culture as an aestheticstudy.Even those who support visual culture education acknowledge the need for furtherinquiries and adjustments. Desai (2005) agrees that it is in the translation of visual cultureconcepts in arts classrooms that the challenge lies for an implementation of visual cultureeducation. Also, Freedman, a critical advocate of visual culture education, proposes morestudies and research to address changes in issues of meaning and interest in visual culture,the didactic characteristics of visual culture, curriculum leadership and institutional change,and connections between new theory and policy. A Past President of the National ArtEducation Association (NAEA), Stankiewicz (2004) presented her art education strategicplan at the national conference in which the primary goal would be to focus resources onadvocating the importance of student learning in the visual arts to a wide variety ofconstituents. Stankiewicz, working from Eisner’s ideas (2002) affirmed that there are manyart educations; there are distinct versions of art education operating at the same time, and arteducators should stick to one or more different approaches to art education, such asdiscipline-based art education, visual culture education, creative problem solving, artseducation as preparation for the world of work, the arts and cognitive development, usingthe arts to promote academic performance and integrated arts. However, it is important topoint out a few concerns. As much as I assent that art educators should implement differentpractices and choose approaches based on their personal and social contexts, it is importantto remember that visual culture education is neither opposed to, nor a strand of, arteducation. Besides, above and beyond Eisner’s “visions” (1976, 2002), I believe that visualculture constitutes visual culture education not as an adjacent element of any of Eisner’s27visions for art education, but as a key element to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct arteducation. The problem I find with most suppositions and critique that visual cultureeducation lacks rigor, methodology, stability, and strength is the fact that uncritical binarythinking is sustaining this questioning. Thus I argue that neither “art” (whatever it means) isopposed to visual culture nor is social studies. By now, it should be well known, or at leastacknowledged, that visual culture education is a shift of paradigm from a modernist arteducation to a post-modernist art education; and does not involve the dialects of binaryopposition.To establish its values, art education as a discipline always focuses on aims and typesof knowledge and uses different means or methods to achieve these aims and knowledge;and by doing so it establishes a paradigm, which is essentially a set of understandings,beliefs, values, experience, methods, knowledge shared by scholars and practitioners of thefield, who set forth agreements about how theories and problems of the field should beunderstood. When older, prevailing models or paradigms can no longer adequately explainall the observed facts, paradigm shifts occur, and are generally punctuated by intellectuallyradical positions in which another replaces one conceptual worldview. It is pertinent toremember that paradigm shifts do not occur all the time: they are extremely rare and it takestime for such a shift to take place and be recognized (See Kuhn, 1970). Therefore what wehave been hearing lately in the art education field is just a buzz of dissentient voices ofinfluential scholars who do not see how art education’s current attitudes, practices,worldviews, and approaches are able to address the contemporary contexts and content ofsociety. Therefore they have been meeting, gathering information, discussing, debating, anddialoguing to promote this radical paradigmatic shift. It is beyond the scope of this thesis to28demonstrate how this shift has been occurring but the shift did not start this decade, but along time ago through the work of influential scholars in North America and elsewhere. Ifart education has taken more than four centuries, since the birth of modernity in thesixteenth century, to establish its paradigm, visual culture is just beginning to ascertain itsvalues, beliefs, understanding, and practices.Aloofness: Visual Culture Education and Issues of Gender, Sexuality, Morality andCurriculumI have identified the issue of cultural morality in art education, understood here as a“virtuous stance” for education practice, as a significant subject that affects art educationtheorizing and practice. I strongly believe that this claim is a relevant constituent of thisinquiry. By analyzing representations of queer gender and sexuality, I put forward thatunderstanding these visual systems has a theoretical and practical impact for visual cultureeducation, and an ethical impact as well. Thus it is important to analyze this assertion inview of the historical shift from art education to visual culture education and as regards theirunderstanding, acknowledgment and inclusiveness of gender and sexuality issues.At the beginning of the twenty-first century art educators are still creating anddelivering art education curricula in our schools predicated largely upon procedures andpractices reaching back to the nineteenth century, which still stick to morally accepted viewsof art, art education and their purposes. Within education, there is an insufficiency of formaldiscussions around sex, sexual identity and sexuality other than in the context of moral andmedical discourses. This is quite astounding given the emphasis on sexuality and selfexploration in the existing contemporary visual culture representations. However, from the29foundation of art education in North America, at American universities in the beginning ofnineteenth century, and throughout the whole century, the study of art was consistentlyperceived as a practice to instill morality; and initially, particularly, drawing was perceivedas a moral force mainly because of the influence of Romanticism (Efland, 1990, pp 69-73).The self-expression art pedagogy from the beginning of the twentieth century, which stillthrives in current art education practice, made art educators lose contact with most of thesocial issues of everyday life.However the “reconstructionist stream”, informed by Dewey’s ideas, suggests thatart is more than individual experience and knowledge but is also a means for changingindividual life and society, producing embryonic possibilities for reconnecting art andsociety. jagodzinski (1997a) informs us that an American art education sanction of the senseof sight as a privileged space for teaching and learning only began in the late 1920sinfluenced by the technological and institutional origins of television, the establishment ofsound in the movies, and the use of mass-media artifacts. That attempt to bring visuality intoart education initially indicated a protracted turning away from the mechanical drawing thathad pervaded art education before then; but what seemed to be a critical undertaking of artand everyday life took a different turn because art educators rejected “visual culture” and“turned to the Western canon of art focusing on the tradition of “great works” so that moralsmight be taught in the schools” (1997a, p. 17). jagodzinski asserts thatParents especially on the Moral Right, and pro-censorship liberals[groups] havemade violence on television and film a key issue in their claim that the moral fabricof society is deteriorating. Children have to be protected from such “evil” and from“irresponsible” working-class parents who allow such viewing to go on. Despite theunanimous and overwhelming evidence by media researchers over the past quarter ofa century that there is no direct causal relationship between the amount of violencewatched and subsequent violent behavior these special-interest groups havecontinued to pressure the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications30Commission (CRTC) to set some regulatory code of standards which ensure thatexcessive television violence is being curbed. (1997a, p. 40)More recently, conceptions of multicultural education as a foundation for developingcurriculum encouraged us to reevaluate notions of morality, excellence, racism, and historiesof social reconstructive pedagogy. There has been an acknowledgment by leading scholarsinterested in social theory such as Michael J. Emme, Graeme Chalmers, Patricia Stuhr, EdCheck, Dipti Desai, jan jagodzinsk, Elizabeth Garber, Doug Blandy, Kristin Congdon, RitaL. Irwin, Karen Kiefer-Boyd, Laurie Hicks among others, that social discourses concerningsexuality, gender, race, class, disability, aboriginal cultures, aging are fairly imperceptible inart education because cultural, political, and economic systems elevate some images,concepts and theories above others. In this respect, since the early 90’s a large number of arteducators (Cahan & Kocur, 1996; Congdon & N., 2002; Desai, 2000, 2003, 2005; Duncum,2005; R. L. Irwin, 1995, 1998; R. L. Irwin et al., 1997, 1999; jagodzinski, 1997a, 1997b)have also regarded this inclusion of cultural diversity as extremely relevant for anepistemological shift towards a critical art education, and as laying the fundamentals for theshift toward visual culture education. But for at least the last 20 years, a reconceptualizationof art education has been formally advocated to embrace these invisible others and one ofthe earliest voices to call attention to these issues was Chalmers (1996) who noted that:The curriculum needs to be reformulated so that it emphasizes the unity within ourdiversity, showing that all humans make and use art for fairly similar reasons. But,unfortunately, there are issues such as racism and sexism that absolutely require us toimplement approaches in which art making and learning become ways to participatein social reconstruction.” (p.4.5)This is also well illustrated by the work of Kenneth Honeychurch and Ed Check (Check,1992; Honeychurch, 1995, 1998) who so far have produced the only two theses in NorthAmerica articulating art education through queer theory, and gay and lesbian studies.31Honeychurch (1998) highlights that in the mid 90s sexuality was rendered invisible, largelyexcluded from discussions of difference in art education; there were no in-depth studieswhich addressed the representation of gays and lesbians in programs of visual art; andfurthermore, there was a lack of gay or queer content matter and expertise within arteducation curriculum, and a strong negative reaction from art educators and educationalmanagement against queer experience in programs of visual arts. I consider that since then,nothing seems to have changed, unless we consider exceedingly modest activities andprojects scattered over the world. Check (1992) informs us that despite these histories ofinvisibility becoming increasingly apparent, heterosexuality remains the privileged norm inAmerican culture and is represented as natural and ordinary. Therefore queer subjectsbecome at best tolerated in schooling, but methods to negotiate queer sexualities in arteducation theory and practice are discarded. As Check explains:The fields of art and art education both deny and perpetuate the biases ofheterosexuality. The idealization of the heterosexual in society and art perpetuatesspecific values and norms and permits an ideological dominance by groups whichactively discriminate against those with less power. For example, art historians, arteducators, and art critics have represented themselves as conducting sexuallyundifferentiated, politically and economically disinterested and objective studies inart. Artists are omitted from discussions, have their work or lives distorted to serveother interests, or are simply ignored. (p. 99)Moreover, Check affirms that schools legitimate the authority, biases, and prejudices of thisdominant heterosexual, white, male-biased culture (p. 99). Thus, the established use of alanguage masquerading as “good” art education (meaning here: decent, respectable,excellent, first-class, civilized, adequate reasonable, acceptable, straight), by teachers whoare mostly uncritical of their social contexts and contents, maintain the universal truths,privilege and posture of patriarchalism and sexism. More important are Check’s remarksthat if, as a result of the impact of gender and sexuality on issues of visual representation, art32educators in higher education have been increasingly including artists whose work has beentrivialized by history, curriculum, and so forth, this does not mean that the scholarship ofqueer, including issues of identity and voice, positionality, power, control, imitation,masquerading, performativity, spectacle and representation, has been created or at least wasable to disrupt art education normativity in academia or elsewhere. In addition, Check addsthat there is a lack of information in academia to assess the impact of the inclusion of thesequeer representations in secondary schools, and in educational guidelines and policies.However, this implied indifference to queer representations is not peculiar to theresearch and teaching practices but is also ubiquitous in the theorization of the field. Forexample, the Handbook ofResearch and Policy in Art Education (Eisner & Day, 2004) doesnot mention the words “sexuality” and “sexual” in its entirety. The closest terms that appearin the Handbook are “sexism” and “sexually charged artworks” which are placed in thecontext of interdiction, censorship, banning sexually dangerous and violent images frommuseums (Lankford & Scheffer, 2004) and condemning sexism in elementary art school(Mathews, 2004). In a handbook with almost 900 pages, this “lack” is a concretecorroboration of queer sexuality’s invisibility in art education theory. Also Mathews (2004)asserts that before conducting any analyses in art education issues it is imperative toacknowledge that the field of art education is a gendered one in which females as thedominant researchers in the field, fail to see the overall context of art education as aninstitution “designed by females, run by females,for females” (p. 285). So according toMatthews, the constructed imaginary of a supposed masculine domination in the field doesnot seem to inhabith a male body; the phallus is with the women.33Nevertheless censorship has a long history in art education. Having in mind ahistorical perspective I again delve into jagodzinski’s accounts, above cited, of theintroduction of visual studies in American art education as a privileged space for teachingand learning, in the late 1920s (jagodzinski, 1997a). He argues that the shift did not occur atthe beginning of the last century because of morality and censorship. jagodzinski’ s accountis relevant to my argument that art education institutions conceal gender but principallysilence sexuality. Art education is permeated by censorship now and in the near past. Theinstitution of art education excludes representations of troubled genders as well as those whohave different sexual preferences.Emery (2002) draws attention to the “fact” that many contemporary works of art andart practices are “violent, sexually explicit, disgusting and psychologically disturbing” andtherefore likely unpleasant to youngsters (p. 5). She consents to the “fact” that art educatorsincluding “controversial” work for study run the risk of distressing parents, principals andcommunity. Art educators fear that students will replicate the contentious images they areviewing at home and in the community. But how can art educators ascertain when and whyan artwork is obscene, or controversial? How is censorship lived in art education practices?In what ways is it produced and disseminated? How can art educators pretend to have powerover what other human beings should see or not? Is the role of art educators to promote thisrepression?In the course of these musings I recalled the popular notion that students, as a group,are in need of protection since they are a susceptible audience. However Barker suggeststhat the focus on children as a needy, vulnerable audience group is a “canny emotional ployto win support for increased censorship” (cited in Brooker & Jermyn, 2003, p. 52). This34narrow concept of students as passive helpless youngsters, vulnerable to the harmful effectsof visual culture does not acknowledge the power of the interaction between viewers and theobjects being seen; and does not accept the power of the imagery of our everyday lives toinfluence students notions of identity, awareness of social issues, and cognitivedevelopment. I must acknowledge that more research is needed to deconstruct theseprevailing practices in art education. For although art educators seldom ask these questions,when facing difficult artworks they choose to avoid challenging conversation in the art roomby leaving contentious artwork out. Based on this “ingenuous” suppression art educatorsoften use a limited range of artists drawn from only some localities, and they seldom employother possible art, artists and localities.Added elements within this discussion are the circumstances when invisible subjects’sexualities (students’ and/or educators’) are rendered visible in the educational setting. Toexplore these issues further I highlight Garber’ s (2003) reiteration that gender and sexualityequity remains a problem in schools. Garber reveals that some classroom environmentsencourage students to talk about some aspects of themselves, but not others; it is morearduous for students to engage race, sexuality, and class particularly when paired withgender (p. 56). And the outing of educators and their relationships with students are not evenaddressed in the literature available in art education. Following Garber’ s arguments,Lampela (2001, 2005) notes that gay and lesbian students often experience harassment,intimidation, and alienation in classroom situations. Constituting the majority, heterosexuals,mostly women, in art education classes are more interested in discussing sexuality in termsof their male/female relationships and relegating other forms of sexual relationships to themargins (Cosier & Sanders, 2005). These individuals often argue that those “touchy”35relationships are too difficult to understand. So the conservatism that exists in schoolsintensifies censorship.Cosier and Sanders (2003), building upon the work of Garber, Desai, Honeychurchand Check who critically address issues of censorship, have been advocating within theNAEA a critical thinking in which all art educators are encouraged to include racial, andsexual diversity groups, to: articulate their history, existence, and positions; eradicatelimitations that separate art from social reality; reconsider what is included in thecurriculum; understand queer artists, educators, and gay and lesbian sexualities; includequeer concerns within the curriculum; push themselves beyond their comfort zones;reconceptualize connections between global and local thinking; question representation ofrace, gender sexuality and class; unpack oppressive practices; dissolve the concealingfeatures that cover queer issues; and increase the amount of partnership and scholarship thatsupport queer studies (p. 16).Nevertheless, despite the efforts of Lampela, Cosier, and Sanders to prepare a terrainfor a more inclusive visual culture education, I consider that too much emphasis is placed onhow to incorporate, include, and fit gay and lesbian artists into the curriculum. My critiqueis based on the information presented that manifests fixed notions of sexual identities andpractices. The model here is clear: paradoxically the inclusion of fixed concepts of genderand sexual identities, instead of promoting diversity, assumes notions of normalization. Bystressing these fixed identities, art education practices are converted into a ghettoizedspace/place in which minority sexual groups of art educators use artworkfrom minoritysexual groups mainly for minority sexual groups of students/audience. My position here isas political as cognitive, since I consider that the most crucial and radical point to be36included in the curriculum is not the fact per se that artists/art are gay, lesbians,transgendered, or bisexual, but the modes of interpretations, reading and analyses of genderand sexual representations originated from a subaltern standpoint. Not that I am against theinclusion of any form of visual representation, but I think that by only focusing on thediversity of gender and sexual identities art educators are often unable to interpret the socialrelations that produce them. I believe that the production of invisibility in the field is aninherent part of its historical construction: we need to distinguish and consider its origins,experiences, and practices as we critique art education.I strongly consider that the queer undertaking of constantly disrupting fixedidentities is much more inclusive of all genders and sexualities and more suitable for theinclusion of the study of gender and sexuality than the suggestions resultant from gay andlesbian studies. Thus, put another way, a queer theoretical approach to the art education fieldaccepts all sorts of visual representation, but at the same time it shifts the educationalpractice away from any fixed concepts it may entail such as sexuality, gender, race, class,and so on.It might be useful at this point to draw briefly on the work of Check, Deniston, andDesai (1997) who insist that sexuality, class, and race are often discussed in abstract termsthat do not represent lived experiences. The themes of the last two paragraphs set the stagefor discussions of issues of moral visibility and non-visibility in art education presented byDesai. Desai (2003) states that “The multicultural [art education] discourse remainsdeafeningly silent about sexual diversity” (p. 151). As Desai puts it, the inclusion ofsexuality in art curricula suggests that homosexuality, is the primary difference upon whichart educators have been focusing upon. This, she states, ignores the crucial junctures of37sexuality with race, ethnicity and gender, among others, that art educators should befocusing. Supporting this argument and taking it further, Desai (See Brooker & Jermyn,2003; Home & Lewis, 1996; jagodzinski, 1997b; Purpel et al., 1995) reaffirms the need toplace sexuality in the common core of a multicultural art education, since according to her,multicultural art education has so far been failing to properly address issues of sexualdiversity.By drawing on queer theory to discuss the place sexual diversity has withinmulticultural art education, Desai, (2003) points out that sexual diversity issues are criticalfor art education in a moment in which discourses on difference are just becominginstitutionalized, for example in multicultural art education; and she also encourages aseeking out of concepts of culture more inclusive of the extreme complexities and issues ofsociety. Thus if art education exercises an understanding of culture associated with power,the production, consumption, and appreciation of visual culture artifacts possibly will beunderstood within historical and social contexts. Art education cannot ignore the significantcontributions of queer theory to changing the ways we think about culture, by outing,bordering, dispersing and decentering notions of culture, reconceptualizing sexuality,disassembling gender and sexual categories, and deconstructing heteronormativity. Thisnotion of culture recommends interdisciplinary art education curricula that not only promoteseveral readings but also encourage learning to read the socially produced silences regardingsexual narratives and the effects of those silences on how we come to understand them inour everyday lives. Finally Desai concludes that, if art education is to be taken seriously itshandling of issues of sexual diversity need to be examined critically and its own discourseviewed in terms of the usefulness or limitations of its concept of culture.38I agree with Desai that art education needs to study critically its own discourse, adoptconcepts of culture that include a constant and contextualized analysis of the relations ofpower and knowledge, and consider the contribution of queer theory to the field. However,in this thesis I am less interested in concepts of fragmented and restricted multiculturaleducation practices within art education, named “mainstream” and “reconstructionist”multicultural art education; I would rather consider the process as a growing dialogue ofalteration spreading from art education to visual culture education. Moreover it is extremelyimportant to contextualize my practice and my standpoint as a Latin American art educator,which is informed primarily by a moral panic of class and gender, in contrast to NorthAmerican art education censorship and moral panic, related to sexuality, race and the visualarts (Britzman, 1995, 2000; Kumashiro, 2001; Lampela, 1996, 2001; Pinar, 2000; Talburt,2000; Talburt & Steinberg, 2000; Tierney, 1997, 1999).Resonance: Gender and Sexuality in my Visual Culture Pedagogical PracticesNow, with the intention of situating myself within my own interactions with arteducation curriculum, visual culture education, and visual representations of gender andsexuality, I recount these following narratives.In 1993, I was cross appointed as an assistant professor in visual arts and arteducation at the Visual Arts Department of the Art Institute of the University of Brasilia(UnB), Brazil, given that my background bridges these two domains, and my interests hadfor quite some time been focused in contemporary art, cultural and critical theory, visualstudies and art criticism. I immediately became particularly interested in art education associal reconstructionism and worked, as an ad hoc researcher, on aspects of multicultural art39education’s policies and notions of curricula development for the University of Brasilia.Since I began teaching courses for the teacher education program (art education program) aswell as for the program to develop artists (fine arts program), my main concern has been toinclude the reading of gender and sexuality representations in contemporary fine arts, massmedia, material culture, and their implications for a critical pedagogy.After many efforts within the university community to render visible the need toacknowledge those issues within curriculum and in aspects of research and services to thecommunity, my most important achievement was to develop and deliver some electivecourses within the visual studies curriculum component in 2000-2001. Through thesecourses, we provided each other, the students and I, with a larger scope of ways to look,interpret, and retell gender and sexuality representations, and afterwards transform them inpedagogical multi-possible tools for specific situations in school-based practices. The mainobjectives were to analyze how contemporary art discourse constructs, organizes andcirculates notions of gender and sexual identities and to inquire into how and why theteaching of visual arts and art education programs deemphasizes gender and sexuality topics,and into what ways we can look for approaches in which gender and sexuality prompt adiscussion around issues of representation, power and culture in art education. These courseshad a great impact on my pedagogical experience and on students’ critical learningprocesses. Their offerings provoked a change from elective to compulsory course status inthe visual arts department curriculum. At that time I was unaware of the urgency thesequestions had within the Brazilian educational system and in other educational systemselsewhere. To delve into these questions it was necessary to begin a PhD programme.40These questions have been haunting me ever since and I have never stopped thinkingabout them. But the struggle to negotiate the academic community has taken a long time. Itwas four years before I successfully introduced objects from everyday life, mass mediaartifacts and objects made by fine artists, into the teacher education program; I tried similarapproaches in courses of cultural theory and aesthetics. To my surprise and frustration, Inoticed that there was very little interest in the study of other spaces, places, and cultures;and through different media, only specific forms of knowledge were valorized. Hierarchieswere maintained. Moreover students were not willing to embrace the knowledge of arteducators as an epistemological space, as a living productive inquiry into their arts practiceas educators. Knowledge has a power structure: it is a remote entity identified as educationor/and art norms. Idealistically, I wanted to subvert these institutional arrangements, and inorder to do so I would need to identify the structures that favor certain groups and ideas andexclude others, and determine what constitutes the official authorized knowledge. I learnedthat the first step in overcoming these binary propositions- art/material culture, artist/arteducator, art/education - is to contest these dichotomies and their naturalness andacknowledge that they reflect and protect typical power structures in educational settings.Furthermore, if these binaries have been historically, culturally, socially constructed theycould also be undone.Several curriculum theorists have highlighted the relevance of enlarging ways ofknowing and incorporating issues of sexuality, gender and queerness in education (Barker,2003; Brooker & Jermyn, 2003; Freedman, 2003). By following their writings and rereadingmy practices I realized how some forms of knowledge are subjugated because theyimplicitly or explicitly threaten hegemonic power and privileges in the educational setting.41Hegemonic power is understood here as the process of dominating or controlling groups ofpeople so that they unconsciously assent to and participate in their own domination. I cameto see how art educators in the Brazilian context, by being subjugated over a long colonialhistorical perspective and time, had lost their sense of connection with their own concepts ofnation, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, and also of other cultures, which are crucialelements of one’s identity. They are rendered invisible because they had not been allowedby curriculum.Therefore art educators, teachers, researchers, learners seen as subalterns in positionsof power decision, but lacking critical thinking, are unable to develop agency. The uncriticalteaching of arts reproduces the emphasis on the art of high culture by glorifying certain artobjects, authorizing what counts as proper aesthetic experience, certifying certaininterpretations of art history, and placing them at the top of a resolutely assured hierarchy ofaesthetic value which devalues other art objects and art histories. The dynamics of culture indifferent contexts are nonexistent in the uncritical art education curriculum; hegemoniccultures are not confronted, and curriculum is not provoked to make visual cultureexperience, practice and interpretation wide open to other experiences. Instead of beingforged from the values, knowledge, skills and care of close communities, an uncritical arteducation is an experience of reiteration of visual arts curriculum as an affinnation of art,education, and art education canons.As stated before, art education paradigms are shifting and it is becoming commonpractice that art educators, together with students create knowledge, as they engage criticallywith representations of their everyday life. Despite my initial experience of theunwelcoming response to those courses, and thinking through what was “absent “ or42“without”, I started to strongly believe that visual culture educators could concomitantlyteach, research, make art, and think, through visual culture education. However, in order toachieve these goals art educators/students need to engage with critical thinking andpedagogies and look at the power relations within educational practices as pedagogical andpolitical acts. Therefore, a few years later I reintroduced issues of gender and sexuality intwo courses of Contemporary Art History, but intertwined with issues of race, class,community, disability, identity, age, and so on. Although the main topics were gender andsexuality the other themes were crucial supplements for the teaching and learning process.Also, I changed my pedagogical procedures by allowing and asking students to continuouslyarticulate critical ideas about the class content. I realized that if we want to change aspects ofart education practice and promote broader understanding of and implications for visualculture education as a useful approach, it would be necessary to adopt new frameworksconcerning notions of power and knowledge, and critically discuss issues of representationof race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, age, etc.Although a few years ago there was not taxonomy for what we currently call “visualculture education”, I was interested in any art pedagogy that privileged the treatment ofsocial studies over aesthetics. The arts have encouraged social issues in the curriculum but ithas been through visual culture education that art educators and students, together, areexpected to shed light upon critical issues in society. Additionally, in visual cultureeducation particular emphases are laid on the construction of the contemporary citizen,making cultural diversity become relevant to the teaching and learning of the arts. Thisexpands reflection about art concepts, the role of visual culture, visual representations, andartists in different social contexts. Hence, visual culture education’s roles are to promote43respect and acknowledgement of social difference, to encourage transcultural understanding,to acknowledge and understand cultural diversity, to allow pride for cultural heritage, toraise questions on ethnocentrism, cultural stereotypes, prejudices, discriminations, racismand sexism, to examine dynamics of culture in different contexts in order to developconsciousness, and to question the dominant culture in order to make visual cultureexperience, practice and interpretation more flexible.Affinity: Almodóvar’s Queer Film and Visual Culture EducationI focus here on Almodóvar’s queer representations of gender and sexuality in film inrelation to visual culture education. Notoriously that films occupy an advantaged positionwithin visual culture, but for moral, ethical, technical, and concealed reasons the arteducation field has been determinedly neglecting this outstanding pedagogical apparatus. Aswell, I must stress that a few scholars point out that the process of seeing in film studies, andin general, in which viewers make meaning of imagery is more interactive and dialogicalthan previously considered. Hence artists, researchers, and teachers as creators engage inintensive interpretive bricolage and so do readers, including students, who are capable offragmenting and reconstructing visual artifacts, and dialoguing and fighting with the creatorsfor their values, meanings, and implications.Accordingly, that is why it should be mentioned that I have elected Almodóvar’sfilms to study, because his particular filmic representations of gender and sexuality provideme with an excellent opportunity to examine the pedagogical potential of the meaningsproduced by the interaction among the viewer, the object seen, and the producer. In addition,Almodóvar’s films present a complex web of intertextualities conciliating and establishing44dialogues among incongruous films, books, plays, paintings, and formal elements of cinemain order to create and deliver an array of representations of gender and sexuality, whichmake available plenty of space for examining their pedagogical assets. From an open-minded position Almodóvar makes extensive use of bricolage to dismount and reinterpretmodels, to use quotations, distort references, transpose, intermingle, and endorse a métissageof many historical modes and cinematic genres. Furthermore, one of the most consistentfeatures of Almodóvar’s work is its autoreferentiality, as he insinuates his life history amongfragmented representations in his films. Bricolage, intertextuality and autoreferentiality areimportant concepts for art education practices.However, especially significant for this study is the fact that queer representationsand masquerades of gender and sexuality are openly manifested in most of Almodóvar’scharacters and cinematography; thus his creative world describes incredibly intertwinedsituations which are created by means of a fluidity of aspects of gender’s and sexuality’splaying out in the human experience. The intricacies of Almodóvar’s cinematicrepresentations of gender and sexuality, the various ways of seeing them, and the interactionbetween viewer and object of vision, trace the definition, establishment and development ofa critical pedagogy. Implicit in this context as a focus on the relationship between the viewerand the object/subject being viewed, spectatorship is an essential component of filmicinterpretation because it is put forward as an understanding of ways in which queerrepresentations and viewing add to interpretive practices in visual culture education, andinfluence the dialogue with critical pedagogies.As was stated before, despite cultural expressions intermingling in film as essentialplayers from concept to finished film (employ acting, singing, photography, visual45production, graphic design, text production, music, industrial design, interior design,fashion, historical research, editing, dancing, just to name a few), art education curriculumhas been neglecting the potential of this space of immense knowledge and culturalexchange. As stated by jaggodzinski (1997a):I assume that the one of the crucial aims of visual culture education is to allow aninquire if the idealization of the modernist gaze should be neglected, moreover whatwe can learn about the new expressions of video, film, television, internet whichwould help us to better understand the changed conditions of making and viewingculture. Rather than a “gaze aesthetics” we must reorientate our perceptions towardsthe “glance,” a recognition that our viewing habits in an electronic age are scans,glimpses of images, quick blinks that may brought immense benefits intodecentering the Great Western Tradition for all those who have. Here the place ofLI the viewer comes into play: How is the viewer’s relation to the artwork prescribed?What is hidden from the viewer’s own viewing? To understand their culturalLI productions is necessary to adopt a whole different paradigm for art education. Ibelieve that art educators based on the context of viewing/reading can uncover thepreferred and privileged meanings of art texts; text analysis can get at the way amedium organizes the subject positions of perception for its effects. LI Art educatorscan become more involved in the responses young people have to the viewing ofpopular television shows and film as well as to their visual rewriting and recreating.(p. 188)However, even an art educator committed to the context of “viewing/reading” should beaware of the intricacies involved in the construction of subjectivities. A unified viewingsubject that identifies with the camera and the actors on the screen has been the focal aim ofHollywood film narratives. And in this case the univocality of the reading/viewing processneeds to be critically addressed. Film is a powerful instrument for understanding culturalrepresentations because it provokes an enticement of discourses, an intense social discussionof its meanings. I must confess that I have always been attracted to the circulation of imagescreated by moviemakers and images visualized by spectators, critics, students, scholars, etc.In this study, I am particularly interested in the meeting point of Almodóvar’s discoursesand gazes into a world of imagination and the world of spectators feelings, thoughts and46positionings as pedagogical strength, particularly concerning explicitly queer visualrepresentations of gender and sexuality.ConclusionThe purpose of this chapter has been to explore the interconnections among arteducation, visual culture representations, visual culture education, critical pedagogies, andfilm studies. I bring it to a close insisting that art education is embarking on a radical changetowards visual culture education, and developing new practices that provoke displacementof rigid notions of spectatorship, image analysis, ways of seeing, issues of positionality,epistemology, power, identity, subjectivity, agency, and everyday life. It is generallyunderstood that art educators and students make knowledge as they engage critically withrepresentations of their everyday life.Despite the fact that most art education practices exclude filmic representations oftroubled genders and contentious sexual preferences, I believe that visual art education canand must critically study its own discourse, adopt concepts of culture that include a constantand contextualized analysis of the relations of power and knowledge, and consider thecontribution of feminist and queer theory to the field. In order to fight the prevailingrestrictions and censorship existing within art education institutions, visual culture educatorshave to accommodate a more transdisciplinary approach to the production and circulation ofknowledge in the field, and thus accept and learn more about interconnections of manydisciplines, contents and contexts and what they can offer to their practices.Moreover the principles of visual culture education shift the arrangement from theart object to the context of the viewing audience, thereby provoking a powerful pedagogical47potential to show how viewers are framed as subjects, and how artifacts inform and formthese subjects at the same time as they are read, reread, produced and reproduced by theviewer. The statement has an interesting echo in film studies that is elicited by newpositionalities which challenge established concepts of inscribing the subject positionthrough a narrative with just one point of view, that is, the spectator as a perfect copy.Moreover this shift endorses film as a powerful instrument for understanding culturalrepresentations, because it provokes an enticement of discourses, problematizes therelationship between producer/object/consumer, and incites an intense social discussion ofits meanings.48CHAPTER 4EmplacementsIn the short-shelf-life American marketplace of images, maybe the queer moment, ifit’s here today, will for that very reason be gone tomorrow. But I mean the essayscollected in this book to make, cumulatively, stubbornly, a counterclaim against thatobsolescence: a claim that something about queer is inextinguishable. Queer is acontinuing moment, movement, motive - recurrent, eddying, troublant. The word“queer” itselfmeans across -- it comes from the Indo-European root - twerkw, whichalso yields the German quer (transverse), Latin torquere (to twist), English athwart.Titles and subtitles that at various times I’ve attached to the essays in Tendenciestend toward “across “formulations: across genders, across sexualities, acrossgenres, across ‘eersions.” (The book itself would have had an “across” subtitle,but Ijust couldn’t choose.) The queer of these essays is transitive -- multiplytransitive. The immemorial current that queer represents is antiseparatist as it isantiassimilationist. Keenly, it is relational, and strange.Eve Kossofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (foreword, 1993, p. xii)In interminglings I offered general ideas of past relations between art education andvisual culture education; suggested interactions of visual culture education with issues ofgender, sexuality, curriculum, and morality; and looked at links between visual cultureeducation and film studies. In Emplacements I assign positions and give a picture of keydefinitions that shape this thesis. Essentially, I briefly present associations linking visibility,invisibility and visual culture; reflect on intersections of queer visual representation, queertheory and visual culture studies; and finally emphasize connections among queer, borders,memory, absence, and location.49Dwelling: Visual Culture, In/visibility and Representation visual culture, representation,and in/visibility.Here I am less interested in discussing issues of visual representation using the terms“vision” or “visuality” since both seem to carry more absolute concepts of the sense of sight,than “visibility” and “invisibility”, my preferred terms, which allude more to contiguousactions of becoming visible/invisible; in other words: to be present by being able to be seenor concealed. There is a considerable body of work that informs us that in present daysociety discourses on visibility dictate the dynamics of contemporary culture (e.g., Barbosa,1991; Brea, 1998; Burnett, 1995; Dias, 2005; Duncum, 2001; Dyer, 2002b; Emme, 2001;Mirzoeff, 1998b).Adding to this debate, Dyer (2002b, p. 89) states that this saturated world of imagesis soaked in sexuality. Following these ideas we might say that representations of sexualityare insidiously ‘present’ in our everyday lives. My point is that visibility and sexuality areconnected with unrestricted spaces and emplacements that reach all of us. Free fromlimitations, boundaries, or restrictions, susceptible and vulnerable, visibility exists as asubject open to questions and interpretations, completely obvious, spread out and unfolded.Visibility is habitually presented as a wide-open weave. Accordingly, visual culture is themeans that generates visibility through a ceaseless flow of images and visual representationswhile the general public continuously makes its experiences visible (Seidjel, 2005).However, there are growing uncertainties about visibility presented in this way. Thatis in part because images can be effectively employed to appreciate, be aware of, andunderstand the world, but simultaneously, they can also be used to eschew or disavow oureveryday lives. Thus, it is necessary to acknowledge and interpret images’ capability of50generating a potentially infinite range of meanings and functions, and additionally inquireabout what at the same time is made visible (present), and what is rendered invisible(absent) in one image (Derrida, 1982).I disclose that my stance toward in/visibility, which has been evidently influencedby Derrida’s (1993) concepts of troubling paradoxes, is one of accepting undecidability,which cannot conform to either polarity of a dichotomy and seems to be neither present norabsent, or alternatively it is both present and absent at the same time. Derrida (1973b, 1981,1982) describes undecidability as a resource that can no longer be included within binaryoppositions; it defies and displaces such oppositions without ever constituting another term.Undecidability points to what can by no means be utterly reconciled or dominated; it isambivalent because it comprises the element in which opposed extremities are incompatible.Also Derrida (2001) often insists that the condition of a possibility is the same condition asthat of its impossibility, thus by analogy both mis/re/presentation and in/visibility aresituated in the space of undecidability just like other tropes such as ghosts, zombies,vampires (death/life), cannibals (eat others/being eaten by others), drugs (medicines/poison),and so forth. Therefore, the reading, interpretation, or understanding of the binarypresent/absent provokes the need to develop new politics of perception that take account ofvisibility and invisibility at the same time: that is, in/visibility.My Foucauldian analysis is that we are currently living in a realm of regimentedperception. This dominion seems to be sustained by the power necessary to produce anddisseminate images and visual representations as in/visibility, and this control imposes howthey should be seen, read and understood. It is necessary to point out that here I am referringto visual representations as “presentations” that obey social and cultural codes and51conventions, and I trace Dyer’s claim that visual representations mediate, as a relationalprocess, our social reality and images (Dyer, 1993, p.3). In visual representations images donot mirror their roots but transform them according to visual codes that are to a certainextent separated from and supplementary (extra and auxiliary) to those sources (Derrida,1973a). Consequently these social processes have an effect on representation’s visual codesbut are also influenced and altered by them. Thus representations articulate not only visualcodes but also the social practices and forces which cause them, through which we interpretthe world.Note that from the beginning of this thesis I have distanced myself from debatesabout the ideological authority of ocularcentrism, which privileges vision over the othersenses and enforces the idea that seeing is equivalent to knowing reality, the truth of theworld. Of all the senses, vision has been generally taken to be the paradigm for perception,but lately, critiques of visibility are making us rethink visuality as constituted primarily byvision. Regarding this issue I follow Shohat and Stam who state that the visual is never pure;“it is always ‘contaminated’ by the work of other senses (hearing, touch, smell), touched byother texts and discourses [...]“ (1998, p. 45). Despite my interest in the “visual”representations of gender and sexuality I believe fully that in the process of perception,reception and interpretation of the world the visual is just another point of entry into amultidimensional world of intertextual practices. Sight is only one of the several means ofexperience; thus seeing does not equate to knowing. I mention this because in this thesis Iam concerned with visual representations, yet my own interests are to some extent areconcerned with dialogical openings among spectator, screen and meanings, an approach to52visual culture that establishes conceptual links of in/visibility with texts, sounds, smells,touches, and tastes.We need new ways to approach visual representations in our everyday lives. ForDerrida, a sign, representation, word, can only name another sign, representation, word. Asign stands for something that stands for other things that are traces of other things and thereis no steady position, we never arrive at an end, and as there is no base, nothing is to beknown with assurance. Sarup (1993) explains:Den-ida argues that when we read a sign, meaning is not immediately clear to us.Signs refer to what is absent, so in a sense meanings are absent too. Meaning iscontinually moving along on a chain of signifiers, and we cannot be precise about itsexact location because it is never tied to one particular sign. Now for Den-ida, thestructure of the sign is determined by the trace of that other which is forever absent.This other of course is never to be found in its full being. Rather like the answer to achild’s question or a definition in a dictionary, one sign leads to another and so onindefinitely (p. 33).Such a reading makes me understand and employ “representation” as a concept, to movefrom an ocularcentric connection with truth to a model of representation that in its limitlesspossibilities of producing meanings is an operation of power.Representation has been generally defined as substitution, imitation, a compensationfor an absence, and a repetition of presence but it is not an impartial “entity”. Hence there isa need to understand representation in order to translate the relations of power andknowledge, because there is no such thing as a subject that exists aside from “powerknowledge”. This theory has origins in the work of Michel Foucault (1972, 1978) who tellsus that power is related to knowledge and visual perception, but power is not attached toknowledge as an intense topography of what is avowed; instead it is a “will to knowledge”,an element of desire for obtaining knowledge. I reason that Foucault is less interested inassigning meaning to visual representation than interpreting what it does, what it performs53or what is performed upon it. After all he states that representation is a product of power(Foucault, 1972). I am compelled to think that his ideas serve not only to understand themeanings encoded within and to interpret a work’s implicit content; instead, to considerrepresentation not simply as expression, but as a manifestation of power, as an essentialelement of social practices of segregation, differentiation, assimilation and regulation.screening human geographies, in/visibilities through visual culture education.At every nanosecond, visual culture lets us know that we are watching the surfacingof a new social, cultural, economic, political world order. Moreover, screen and mediaphotographs are images that carry the in/visibility of the encounter among the many othersin this mondialization and globalization of culture (R. Ortiz, 1994). A quasi-univocal visualculture makes us believe that we are now in the process of developing, nurturing andcontrolling a worldwide society and that the concept of “community has come increasinglyunglued from geography” (Robins, 1996, p. 7). But I also recognize that geographical andcultural stances do not transform so quickly; and restrictions, borders, liminalities,intermingling, entanglements, will linger as essential issues in the placement ofin/visibilities: the visual culture.I acknowledge that my discussion of in/visibility, gender and sexuality is not merelya matter of extending or opening up the canon/curriculalnorm, but rethinking the flow ofrelationalities of the production and circulation of representations around the world becausehistorical configurations of power and knowledge generate an apparent unevenness withinrelativization. Thus, independently of discourses on visual culture, subaltems, those living in54postcolonial and neocolonial spaces, and minorities all over the world, ubiquitously still findtheir own self-perceptions strongly shaped from a comprehensive, internalized, dominantpoint of view, the gaze of the prevailing colonizer’s power.Disruption: Queer and RepresentationThe terminology used in this thesis regarding gender and sexuality is represented assuch: “homosexuality” stands as a construction of the medical, judicial, religious andeducational discourses developed over the project of modernity; “gay”, “lesbian” “bisexual”and “transgender” (GLBT) are positioned as indicating those involved in the cultures andpolitics of identity during and after the liberatory movements; and “queer” is located as acomprehensive term associated most particularly with lesbian and gay subjects who resistmodels of stability and any fixed sexual and/or identity category, and propose to disruptthese positions of normativity (Jagose, 1996).Historically, the image of homosexuality has been marked by in/visibility ofhomosexuals in visual culture as well as in public policy making; and it continually has beendepicted as psychological disarray, deviant, twisted, unreliable, compulsive, and obsessive.GLBT’ s political strategy of cultural visibility emerged at a point in history, in the late1960s when “identity”, as a theoretical framework of reference, was in the process ofcrumbling due to the politics of differences disseminated by French poststructuralistthoughts. Yet, in spite of that, GLBT, particularly through visual representations and mediacoverage, improved the visibility of their concerns in the community and managed todevelop a strong and efficient social representation that connotes the emotional, cultural,social and erotic lives of same-sex desire.55And then along came the queer project. According to Creekmur & Doty (1995) theexpression “queer” has become an “attractive and oppositional self-label that acknowledgesa new cultural context for politics, criticism, reception-consumption, and production” (p. 6).Queer representation can be seen as a political act, a public avowal of agency since it is thepreferred term by activists who are oppressed by the heterosexual normalcy,“heteronormativity”, and who reject traditional gender and sexual identities. Approaches forthe visibility and embracing of queer gender and sexuality within social institutions troublethe existing foundations of heteronormativity, and raise uncertainties about the landscape ofcategories, terminologies, nomenclatures, partitions, and vocabularies.Several authors (e.g., Burnett, 1995; Kleerebezem, 2005; Rogoff, 1998; Seidjel,2005; Shohat & Stam, 1998; Wienkel, 2005) assert that in/visibility raises a constant tensionbetween entanglement and disentanglement. Drawing from this excitability I have to relatethese issues of in/visibility of queer representations to visual culture; and also relate theserepresentations of queer genders and sexualities to a debate that recently has beenundertaken concerning the mapping of queer borders through concepts of memory. Hence Isuggest that, to consider intersections of queer theory and visual culture studies as sites fornourishment of queer representation’s in/visibility, it is necessary to highlight connectionsamong borders, memory, absence, and locations. In view of these issues, I find myselfenmeshed in understanding meanings of in/visibility through the experience of seeing,looking, gazing and watching queer representations of gender and sexuality in wide-rangingcultures and subcultures alongside and within my own lived experiences.Due to established accounts of discrimination and censorship earned byhomosexuality and gayness, queer subjectivities and their modes of visual representation56acquired the reputation of being visibly complex, dangerous, or controversial. In myinterpretation some queer theorists have been suggesting the consideration of invisibility, or“non-visibility”, as well as visibility and in/visibility as forms of representation, and thesearch for traces of meanings “within” or “without” the queer culture (See, Dyer, 2002a; D.E. Hall, 2003; See, Hawley, 2001; Llamas, 1998; Morland & Willox, 2005; Mufloz, 1999;N. Sullivan, 2003b; Sáenz, 2004). In addition, I emphasize that the in/visibility of queersubjects is highly structured, indicative of particular images and codes, and requires explicitinterpretive practices, which sometimes are not widely available or simply do not exist.Much of the argument I am making regarding in/visibility of queer representationsrevolves around the trans/gender/sexual space, the trans-across-gender-sexual geography,that is, queergenders or genderqueers (I use these terms interchangeably), as the privilegedforms of analysis, understood primarily as sites of in/visibility, memory, and location. Here,the transgendered appear as the most crucial symbol of queer sexuality and become themeans to challenge the others, since they make visible a queerness that exposes a crisis ingender and sexual identity categories. Thus trans develops into a relentless disruptivemovement between sexual and gender identities. Hence trans is the favored category ofanalysis in this thesis since it troubles and clearly transgresses issues of gender andsexuality, and disorders any social organization that is traced through patriarchal rule.Besides, and extremely important, Almodóvar’s film representations depend unreservedlyon queergender bodies for their reality.Queer visual representation is usually seen as having the capacity to insult publicsensibilities and thus promote destabilization of moral standards that support society. Queerrepresentation is argued to be intolerable for mainstream society because it is mainly57typified as homoerotic, obscene and pornographic. Historically, the censorship of queerin/visibility is a real issue and it is part of an enduring process of suppression of queerculture (Waugh, 1995). That is the reason for a consistent moral panic that queer visualrepresentations are sufficiently powerful to obliterate the authority of heterosexuality. Butaccording to Stychin (1996):Proponents of these arguments implicitly accept the social construction of bothsexuality and the nation state, in that each is capable of a radical reconstitutionthrough cultural means. Nor is there any attempt made by the critics to question therelationship between the messages intended by the artist and the meaning receivedby the audience or to acknowledge the possibility of multiple, contradictory or ironicreadings of any representation. (p. 154)Habitually meanings of queer representation relate to subjectively contingent images. Itseems that we do not perceive representations in their specificity because we are so used toseeing images and attaching tags to them that we hardly ever look deeper. The marker queeris brought out to fix interpretation, in spite of the fact that queer representations render amediated reality that is no more than images. After all, the power in the construction ofmeaning does not lie only in the maker, representations, or audience, but in the interpretivenegotiations among them. Any representation is more than merely a reproduction of thatwhich it represents: it contributes to the construction of reality for what is present and absentof the original thing. A queer representation presents no guarantee of the existence of anaccurate depiction and reflection of an absolute, perfect, integral queer.inserting myself into queer theory’s representations.It is beyond the scope of this thesis to explore in depth queer theory’s theorizationand its heated debate in academia. Here I intend to present some acknowledged mainconcepts of queer theory and how they will impact on my work. But before I commence I58muse on the spaces from which I can speak. It is an intense effort to examine and makein/visible queerness, queer and queer theory within the location of my thesis, and in order todo that it is important to be acquainted with where I come from so as to discern the course ofmy considerations. My conversation starts from my cultural positions and how those informthe development of my notions regarding this topic. I consider that queer and queer theoryare at once meaningless and significant to me. All the relations of significations of the sign“queer” are different to me due to my geocultural locations as a Latin-Brazilian-American. Iwant to explain here that I have been informed of queer but not shaped by the queerhistorical contextualization attached to hateful, offensive, aggressive, derogatory adjectives.I feel partially emotionally detached from its regulation and investments, and I generally use“queer” and queer theory as tokens, as indicators, signs for those who defiantly flaunt theirself-identify as queer and those who have no desire to conform to any sexual and gendernormalcy and by identifying as queer, critically develop agency.My own lived experience as a ‘post-occidental/colonial’ subject as an artist, teacherand student (see next chapter) in British and North American educational institutions, whichfor the colonized are the most valued form of instruction, granted me access to these culturesand the sub-culture and meanings of the queer subject. Poststructuralist thought bound myearlier educational foundation in universities and fine art schools in Brazil and in England. Itis from the limitation of this formation and these points of view that I reflect on queer theoryas an American response, a local interpretation, and a comprehensive enlargement of Frenchpostructural thought which consistently had been investigating relations among identity, sex,gender and sexuality. Moreover, although queer theory has been drawing from severalbodies of French theory, but mainly from Foucault, Lacan and Derrida, its works are barely59known in European (with the exception of the English speaking countries), and LatinAmerican academies.Over the years, these interrelations and the permanent dialogue between cultureshave been informing and influencing my critical analyses while feeding my unrelentingfeeling of bewilderment, the sensation that my work did not relatively fit within developingtheoretical positions. My foreign education disrupts my understanding and interpretations ofearlier experiences at “home”. Latin languages do not contain any corresponding term for“queer” or “queer theory”, nor have they corresponding terms for “gay” and “transgender”,only for lesbian and transsexual. In these geo-cultural locations, the preferred term torecognize and translate queer is fluid sexuality (sexualiteflottant, sexualidade fluida)4. Iposit that this is essentially because sexual and gender identities are not universalconstructions; they are historically and culturally specific; they diverge to a large extentfrom what is acknowledged as sexual or gender identity in Anglo-American cultures.Moreover, I follow Khayatt (2002, p. 493), who, speaking from an Arab position, assertsthat these geocultural locations “fail” in producing vocabulary and finding categories toembrace the queer difference. Khayatt argues, and I have the same opinion, that it is lessabout cultural belatedness and more about the fact that the concept of compartmentalizationitself is foreign and/or less insidious to Arabs and Latins, for example, than to other cultures.Then, the in/visibility of queer is unveiled when it is not determined; the absence of a nameor a category appears to suggest a subject who is white, middle class, Euro-North American.Therefore, I believe that ‘queer’ cannot be translated to other geolocations without arelational conversation. So issues of remembrance, inclusiveness, reflexivity, race, ethnicity,culture, age, weight, history have been aspects of my use of queer theory.60Reinstatement: In/visibility, and Queer TheoryMost of the initial literature on queer theory drew attention to the conceptualizationof the term, and shaped it as amorphous, vague, ill defined, slippery, shifty, and inconstant(See Abelove et al., 1993; Cleto, 1999; Foster et al., 1997; L. Gross & Wood, 1999; Jagose,1996; Klages, 1997; Seidman, 1996; N. Sullivan, 2003b). Queer theory, following severalfeminist theories and some of the principles of gay/lesbian studies, rejects the idea thatsexuality and gender are essential categories determined by and judged according to ethicalprinciples of those who are socially allowed to speak and normalize, for example these inthe natural sciences and the sacred institutions of education, police, judiciary, and religion. Imake this point because it is necessary to acknowledge that queer theory, at least as aconcept, is primarily concerned with any and all forms of sexuality and gender, and itexpands the scope of its analysis to all kinds of “behaviors”, and also it claim that all sexualand gender behaviors, all concepts connecting them to identities, and all kinds of normativeand deviant sexuality and gender, are social constructs.Based in its complex and diverse theoretical positions, queer theory was initiallyunderstood as a continuous process because it resists normalization, a fixed visibility, apermanent image, and a homogenous representation. As a strategy queer theory criticallyengages with normativity to disrupt it; hence it is constantly under scrutiny from within andwithout, in order to avoid any appearance of normalization. Queer theory’s politicalcommitment is specifically to the unknowability, the non-identifiability, of its own identityin the future. One of the main reasons why queer theory is considered an eternal becoming isthat it draws heavily from Foucault who asserts that the creation of norms is the fundamental61act of repression, that regulation itself is the problem (Foucault, 1973, 1978, 1995).Following Foucault’ s claim, queer theory maintains that any coalescence of the non-normative produces regulation, and then it loses the power to disrupt normativity since itbecomes ruled and normalized itself.More recently there is a delicate turn in queer theory from a queer subject to sharedlifestyles. For example, Halberstam considers that queerness is detached from sexualidentity and is more a “way of life than ... a way of having sex” (Halberstam, 2005, p. 1).Morland & Willox reassert that queer theory is not about identities but about actions andways of living that surpass the notion of identity; it is about shared lifestyles linkingdisparate groups with exceedingly disparate lives and sexual practices (Morland & Willox,2005, p. 3). Thus queer analysis facilitates us to understand the “lived realities and day-today activities of diverse individuals today, whatever, their sexual identity might be” (D. E.Hall, 2003). Consequently queer forms of theorization, such as political and culturalorganizations and critical academic production, make provocative links between sexualityand gender and everyday lives; and it is a living inquiry that questions the norms of societyin its day-to-day practices.Nevertheless, queer theory as a dynamic critical theory is under permanent criticismand self-criticism. Furthermore, I am fully aware that for many scholars the category ‘queer’did not work because it seemed to flatten the very diversity it professed to acknowledge.‘Queer’ embraced differences while not quite coming to terms with issues of power that areintrinsic to each sexual category included under the rubric ‘queer’ as it intersects with race,gender, class, disability, and so on. For many the inclusive queer theory conceptualization isa fictitious concept that does not accept “all” queer--races, ethnicities, classes--and also62erases lesbian, bisexual and transgendered specificities. Furthermore, it is becoming morewidely known that despite queer theory’s claim that it embraces all forms of sexualities andgender including heterosexuality, many transgender and intersex people reject the ‘queer’label. In spite of the fact that most of the key literature in queer theory was produced bywomen, lesbians, and transgender (inlvisible), as I stated earlier there is an implicit(in/visible) characteristic of male, white, middle class, upper class, rich, urban, fit, thatpervades the constructions around queerness.Furthermore, despite the increasing number of publications of queer theory it is stillquite difficult to find resources that directly deal both with issues of queer theory and issuesof economy, geo-cultural positioning, education, disability, race and class. Queer theoryrenders in/visible these subjects despite recent efforts by several scholars. Accordingly,given all these factors, it is untenable to think of queer theory as it is at the moment, unlessprocessing it through an intellectual devouring that produces theoretical and practical waysof knowledge within queer theory, and is capable of appreciating those categories anddifferences.In spite of all these dissentient statements about queer theory, I adopt it because Irecognize its appeal as a contested category; and it continues to retain, at least in my caseand in this thesis, an ambivalent meaning, one that is inclusive and, at the same time, onethat over and over again arrives at a range of complex social locations. Thus I believe thatthe power of the term ‘queer’ is in its implied multiple locations; even if I have only alimited way into the term.63Mapping Queer Borders: Memory, Absence and ArrangementIn this segment, my main focus is on memory as in/visibility and inferred ascategories of space, maps, geographies, borders, migrations, representations, anddisplacements in the context of film and queer representations. The intensity of discourseson memory that cross boundaries characterizes contemporary culture worldwide; andspecific discourses on memory such those on as traumatic, haunted, forgetful andrematerialized memories may be useful to understand hidden spaces such as queerrepresentations. There are several points I am interested in pursuing and I begin byillustrating some of my ideas through this fragment of Lopes’ book the man who loved boys(2002), as he puts it:I only wanted to write something so simple and direct to make you happy, but I onlycan think of texts and images that have already been done. My feelings are in songs.My desires are in scenes of films. My dreams are literary. I want to strip off butalways find the pose, mannerism, and artifice, the writing. Life does not suffice,unless as a performance. I lift the dress up a little. Softly I go down the stairs.Happiness, only happiness. Halfway down the staircase. I continue to go down thestairs. The right foot is moved up. The right arm rises. The head proudly elevates.Now it is the moment (2002, pp. 75-76). [My translation]Paraphrasing Lopes, I would like to assert in a confessional mode that I, like him, havealways felt that if I had a soul, it would have to be a trans/gendered one. Trans/gender lessas a bodily and rational formation and more as a contextual and relational experience thatcrosses geographies, maps, desires and emotions, and transverses our gender and sexual lociof enunciation. Lopes’ quote aids me to contextualize trans/gender in the vein ofundecidability as presented by Derrida in one of his several deconstructive efforts to exposehow dualisms have always been troubled. As I acknowledged earlier, I adopt the idea oftrans/genders as undecidable to counterpoint the common notions of transgender as aninability to act, as confusion, interruption: a pathetic state of indecisiveness, desexualization.64I prefer to acknowledge the transgender gender and trans/gender as a suitable provision forand possibility of acting and deciding.Therefore, trans/gender5as a site of inlvisibility, by being undecidable now has to beimagined as much as it has to be seen. The reason for invoking in/visibility is thattrans/gender subject formation is some way distant from a normative gender or sexuality,since it springs from different perspectives. Trans/gender sees and lives gender and sexualitythrough a tangential, corporeal, material and forcible angle; it always conveys awareness ofpersonal and social formation, and heightens the perception of memory, desire and fantasy.Consequently trans/gender builds constructs of memory based on the reality that sexuality,sex, and gender are not a steady relation, and that sexualities are not straightforwardlycompartmentalized by the sexes of their subjects. So memory, similarly to sexuality andgender, as social cultural structure, is wide open to a vast number of organic, cultural,educational, theoretical, and emotional definitions and articulations. In fact I stronglyconsider that queer gender’s undecidable opening spaces depend directly on the role ofmemory as a means of altering social cultural values to reinvent and re/present masculinity,femininity, heterosexuality, homosexuality, and so on.At this point, to further develop and facilitate the understanding of the subjecttrans/gender as undecidability I bring to life fragments of memory of one movie’s charactersthat “trans/genderly” impressed me. That memory is also a key constituent for theinterpretation of Almodóvar’s All About my Mother: Blanche Dubois, in A Streetcar NamedDesire6.I draw attention to the fact that few characters have had such an impact in myunderstanding of relations of power in representations of gender and sexuality, as didBlanche. The initial scene in which Blanche arrives at the train station, is helped by a boyish65sailor, and literally takes a streetcar called “Desire” keeps resurfacing again, again andagain. I wonder why this scene often resurfaces and not others. Why does Blanche hauntme? Is it because she appears ghostly through the smoke of the train? Is it because when Ifirst saw her in the movie I “felt” and “knew” that she was a trans/gender, or to some extentundecidable?One obsession is the fact that Blanche during all her tribulation exhibits overtlyambiguous reactions of self-importance, dignity, fulfillment, pleasure, pride, rudeness,impropriety, perturbation, and arrogance in being socially and sexually a stranger. As one ofthe best examples of a masquerade of femininity, Blanche’s feat of existing inside a space orout, or both at the same time, opened up infinite possibilities and enormous power for myunderstanding of trans/genders. Blanche is presented as a self-doubting, disturbedindividual, and on the other hand she is the individual who is the symbolic power andchallenge to Stanley Kowaiski (Blanche’s brother-in-law) in matters of authority. Deployingthe reading of a heterosexual framework, the symbolic phallus, as socially naturalizedinstrument and sign, means male generative powers; and in this case Kowaiski isrepresented as possessing the phallus (womanlBlanche). By being the phallus, Blanchecannot have it but according to Butler a queer disruption of this normative reading makesBlanche come to stand for the phallus’ power (1993a, pp. 57-91, 1999, pp. 101-135).One might say that since Blanche’s character is so fractured by conflicting andcontradictory desires and needs, there are no comprehensible binary positions in hercharacter related directly to gender and sexuality. However, again I see Blanche occupying arole in which she has conditions and possibilities of acting and deciding; she repeatedlydeclares herself as woman, projects masculinity, restates femininity, reiterates66heterosexuality, hides her husband’s homosexuality and transgresses all these spaces inconstant performances of trans/genders. That is, trans/genders as the suitcases andbelongings of a nomadic gendered and sexualized traveler. Whether this assertion isacceptable or not, my interest at this point is to bring luggage as an inlvisible trope to furtherconsider Blanche’s trans/gendering, displacement, and fluctuation (flottant). Here I amindulging in Rogoff’s (2000) use of luggage as a trope which aims to reflect on thearticulation of the complex daily negotiations of positioning geo-cultural subjects. Sheasserts that the privilege of luggage as going away, melancholy, and leaving “does notacknowledge the daily processes of movement, memory, of learning new things, ofrepressing new knowledges, of forbidden nostalgias and of material exchanges and culturalcirculation” (Rogoff, 2000, p. 37).For this reason luggage perceived as a multiple marker of memory, nostalgia andaccess to other histories, should be detached from its relation with a concrete past, anostalgic trace. That is, luggage is to embody mobility rather than torpor. Moreover, Rogoffasserts that luggage circulates across cultures but is always lost, it is inaccessible, it is awithout. That is, Rogoff uses luggage as an effort to graphically represent a new discernmentof geography as a “form of being without which is not a form of negation of existingsubjects and methods, nor a form of lack” (Phelan & Rogoff, 2001, p. 34) [Italics added].For Rogoff, without is a geopolitical of personal displacement, social exile, andautobiographical traces. So the notion of being without is not one of being at a loss, ofinhabiting emptiness, of not having anything, but rather an active, daily disassociation in theattempt to clear the ground in order for something else to become apparent.67And it is through thinking and unthinking luggage that Rogoff perceivespossibilities to critically analyze visual culture, its hidden structures, the invisible powers,seductions, and numerous transgressions, and processes of marking and making visible thosewho have been included and those who have been excluded. Sometimes luggage performs asan allusion for the unreachable lost home/gender/sexuality, and acts as a focus of theirmemories. In many visual representations of trans/gender the luggage contains the mostsignificant assets; and in this luggage, trans/gender do not keep garments and outfits buttheir personal belongings and effects, their lives. Each bag, closed or open, is cartography ofmemory, and trans/gender must preserve the right to keep, leave, give, send, or explode theirbelongings. Some never unpack their suitcases, but some - just like myself - tend tooverpack, because I am not always sure I will ever come back, ever.I brought luggage into this discussion because the narrative of A Streetcar NamedDesire and its preoccupations with sexuality, gender, madness, alcoholism, and class arethemes that Blanche carries literally and metonymically in her luggage. Also because thisfilm is directly linked to the narrative of Almodóvar’s All About my Mother, which I willdiscuss in Dressing. In view of this concern I initially return to A Streetcar Named Desire’sdirectorial mode which sets out the film in a way that Blanche’s luggage is always located inthe central space of the screen--and especially in the most dramatic scenes. At this juncture,I encourage you to follow me in a brief description of Blanche’s luggage.When she arrives in New Orleans, Blanche holds her own luggage, a round femininehandbag. Carrying her luggage on the streets she enters her sister’s house. A few days later,the remaining luggage arrives— large trunk, chests that need to be carried by two extremelyheavy masculine men. Before Blanche can even open her trunk, Stella and Stanley68(Blanche’s sister and brother-in-law) open it. Stanley excavates Blanche’s luggage, invadesher privacy to see and only finds signs of femininity and richness. Blanche sees her opentrunk and mocks, “it seems that my trunk was exploded”. Stanley quickly answers, “Me andStella helped you unpack”. “Everything I own is in that trunk”, asserts Blanche. Sometimes,Stanley sits on top of the luggage to articulate his embattled masculinity. Blanche andStanley carry Frenchness and Polishness as haunted luggage of class, racial and ethnicmemory. In the rape scene the trunk is a central device, a source of hyper-femininity fromwhich Blanche tries to seduce Stanley in order to avoid the sexual assault. Blanche packs togo away. But she does not know where she is going. Blanche leaves for a mental hospitalwithout any luggage but her handbag. And then she hears, “the luggage will follow soon”.In addition we must consider that Blanche’s luggage - read trans/gender- is not onlywhat is represented by the film but also how it was constructed by the filmmaker andre/presented by the spectator/audience. For example, the mode in which Stanley’s scenes ofcontinuing pillage of Blanche’s luggage are represented turns them into amusing acts withno sense that they are indicators of cruel violence. Invested in learning further about the roleof spectatorship in the construction of the trans/gender Blanche, Gross (2004) has beenanalyzing the experience of seeing A Streetcar Named Desire and exploring spectatorship infilm, in video (from the play), and in the theatre. According to Gross, Blanche carries theintense luggage of being amusing to the audience as a result of complicity between Stanleyand the spectators; the audience reads Blanche’s sexual desire and persona as comiccharacteristics. In contrast, Stanley merges a fetishized body and aggressiveness thatpromote audience identification with him, males and females; thus the audience69identification with Stanley over Blanche is less one of gender identification thanidentification with the dominant over the disempowered. As Gross (2004) further adds:There is an ugliness to this tendency to side with Stanley in productions of AStreetcar Named Desire, in which the arrogance of male heterosexual power isunleashed against a struggling, desperate creature who, as Nicholas Pagan hasastutely pointed out, is neither simply a woman nor a homosexual man in drag, but acharacter who is constructed through references both to femininity in both forms ofwomanliness and male homosexuality, making it impossible to confine Blanchewithin a single gender or sexuality. As such, American normative masculinity,asserting the primacy of men over women, and heteronormative families over“perverts”. (pp. 79-80)Gross’s reading reveals how the play can reflect extremely repressive sexual and genderpolitics when aggressive heteronormativity forcefully triumphs over and contains queerness.Nowadays it is evident that A Streetcar Named Desire directly confronts binaryattitudes toward masculinity and male behavior, and to femininity and female behaviors,seeking to depict the difference and diversity of men/woman and masculinities/femininities.Besides, these days the readings of Blanche as trans/gender dispute what it is that reallyprevails in that narrative: the stasis represented by the safeguarding of the decayedheterosexual institutions, or the mobility heightened by the trans/gender subject.Undoubtedly through Blanche’s luggage, the conversation between heterosexual andhomosexual, public and private, bourgeois and destitute, discloses Blanches’s furtive roles;her secrecy is forced out of the closet and punished by the mighty institution of masculinity.Thus, memory and forgetting are indissolubly linked to each other in Blanche’s characterwhose hidden memories, as they haunt her, are at the same time invited to surface and yetkept concealed. By analogy I take the opportunity to call to mind that luggage, memory, andtrans/gender are intrinsically related to the movement across places and spaces. For the lastdecades, key theorists of colonialism— pre-post-new (See Bhabah, 1994; Gunew, 1993,702004; Spivak, 1999) have frequently given emphasis to the haunting of occult histories intheir investigation of postcolonial places, spaces, and bodies; and have argued (throughFreudian theories of repression and recovered memory) that psychoanalysis plays a key rolein understanding this process. But this is another long story that I will not develop in thisthesis.ConclusionIn Emplacements I assign positions and give some key definitions that shape thisthesis: In/visibility, re/presentation, trans/gender and luggage. In/visibility is conceived as anoperation that alludes to contiguous actions of becoming visible/invisible, to be present bybeing able to be seen or concealed. Re/presentation is an articulation not only of visualcodes and conventions but also the social practices and forces which cause them, with whichwe interpret the world. Trans/gender is the queer means to challenge others, since it makesperceptible a queerness that exposes a crisis in gender and sexual identity categories.Luggage is perceived as a multiple marker of memory, nostalgia and access to otherhistories, it carries the concept of mobility and circulates across cultures and subcultures.Also in Emplacements I present associations linking in/visibility, visual culture andsexuality.I consider that it is necessary to acknowledge and interpret images’ capability ofgenerating a potentially infinite range of meanings and functions, and additionally I inquireabout what at the same time is made visible (present), and what is rendered invisible(absent) in one image. Furthermore I argue that discourses on visibility in contemporaryculture inform us that the world is saturated with images of sexuality; and this visibility has71been constantly associated with restricted spaces and censorship. Moreover I discussinteraction among queer, and queer theory, and visual representation. I stress that thein/visibility of queer subjects is highly structured, redolent of particular images and codes,and requires explicit interpretive practices, which sometimes are not widely available orsimply do not exist. I discuss the fact that if queer theory became visible as political critiqueof anything that falls into normative and deviant categories of sexuality, gender and identity,and has been under ongoing reassesment, I still find it a temporarily useful implement formy thesis. Finally I emphasize connections among queer, borders, memory, absence, andlocation through the concept of luggage.The luggage routes of Almodóvars’ films are my starting points to displace conceptsof seen and unseen in the trans/gender space. The blurring of the boundaries between thecharacters in A Streetcar Named Desire and their exchanges concerning representations ofmasculinity and femininity have had a huge effect on my own perception and memories ofthe masquerade of gender and the pretence of sexuality: it foregrounds my own processes ofidentification and disidentification within the fractures of sexuality and gender inAlmodóvar’s visual representations of trans/gender. In this chapter I present general ideasabout queer, queer theory and representations. I further develop in Liminalities the situationof queer theory in the Latin-American space. In Derivations I explore concepts of queertheory such as performativity, citationality, reiteration and closeting. In Gaze I explore therelations between Almodóvar’s films, queer theory and spectatorship. In Dressing queertheory will be employed to support the analysis of Almodóvar’s films. Finally inEmbodiments I relate queer studies with visual culture education.72CHAPTER 5LiminalitiesRoutes: Travelling with Local and Non-Local CommunitiesSo complex is the process of imagination and memory that it seems that we can onlylook at/see/understand/interpret categories such as remembering/disremembering throughmanichean positions of articulation. I see a strong and likely convergence of theconversation about imagination and memory with Post-colonial theories, subaltern studies,Latin American studies, visual culture education, and queer theories. Thus in this chapter ismy look at the locations from where I speak at the same time that I seek to understand andvisit spaces in between colonial/post-colonial, being/becoming,remembering/disremembering and seeing/seen. I look at the lyrics of Black andWhite/Americans:I took my baby on a Saturday bangBoy is that girl with you; yes we’re one and the sameNow I believe in miracles, and a miracle has happened tonightBut, ifyou’re thinkin’ about my babyIt don’t matter ifyou’re black or whiteThey print my message in the Saturday Sun, I had to tell them I ain’t second to noneAnd I told about equality and it’s true either you’re wrong or you’re rightBut, ifyou’re thinkin’ about my babyIt don’t matter ifyou’re black or whiteIfyou’re thinkin’ of being my brotherIt don’t matter ifyou’re black or whitePoor Americans are in the night ofLouisianaEnglish tourists were mugged in CopacabanaThose juvenile delinquents still think they were AmericansSpanish tourists are detained, by mistake, in the Flamengo SquareRich Americans no longer walk in HavanaAt the Carnival, American faggots bring the AIDS virus to Rio de Janeiro73Organizedfaggots of San Francisco managed to control the propagation of this wickednessOnly a potential genocidal — wearing a cassock, necktie or apron - can pretend he does notsee that the faggots - being the prime group-victim- are in the situation now to lead themovement to deter the dissemination ofHIVAmericans are very much statisticiansThey have obvious gestures and limpid smilesThey have eyes ofpenetrating brightness which go deep into where they gaze, but not intotheir own depthThe Americans represent a large share of the existing happiness in this worldFor Americans white is white, black is black, and the mulatta is valuelessFaggot is faggot, male is male, woman is woman, and money is moneyIn this way they gain, negotiate, lose, grant, and conquer civil rightsWhile here, down under the equator, the undefined is the regimeAnd we dance in such a stunning way whose secret not even I could possibly know.We are between pleasure and tragedy; between monstrosities and sublimityAmericans are not AmericansThey are the old human beings arriving, passing, and crossingThey are typically AmericansThe Americans feel that something has been lost; something was broken, it is breaking. [Mytranslation]Black and White/Americanos— Caetano Veloso, 1991 on Michael Jackson’s song Black andwhite. UndefinitionBy reading these lyrics, I hear Jackson’s song carefully deconstructed by Veloso’sinterpretation, I hear the different notes and silences, I see, imagine, and remember events,concepts, places and people; I can smell the good aroma of Copacabana’s beach and theappalling scent of Flamengo Square, and can touch the multitude of gay and mulatto bodiesin Rio de Janeiro. The whole body is involved in the process of seeing, and we enter into aspace of agency in which recollection, remembrance, apprehension, affection, repugnance,melancholy, and pleasure, among others, allow us to give meaning to this lived experience.By delving into some scenes presented by Veloso, I assume positions of identification withsome of the memories they have left in me, but at the same time they are reminders of what Ihave been forgetting, disdaining or omitting.74An analogous trajectory can be effortlessly traced on the focus of the attention andanalyses of this research into the visual queer gender representations of the Spanishfilmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. My own sense is that I bring to my studies the continuouslyremembered and concurrently forgotten spaces of enunciation of the queer Spanish andIberian-American visual cultures and the silenced and hidden discourses of sexuality invisual culture education and curriculum. The Iberian Peninsula’s location, as a borderland ofcivilizations, people, races, faiths and religion, accounts for most of the historical andcultural richness of Spain’s queer sexualities7.This site of interest renders, to a certainextent, the benefits of the conversations of the Luso-Hispanic visual culture education ofEurope and the Americas. Hence, the need to understand queer studies’ circulation and to beaware of the ways in which visual queer representations and discourses have beentransculturally disseminated, understood and attributed. These foci of Almodóvar’s visualculture simultaneously confer visibility on the flows of ideas, concepts and visualrepresentations that affect the cultural construction of queerness, and provokeresponsiveness of queer visual culture and education in the Iberian-American location andelsewhere.Herein lay the principal questions of this research: How do Pedro Almodóvar’sfilm representations of queer sexuality and gender inform contemporary art educationtheory and practice? In what ways is the utilization of border epistemologies relevantfor understanding representations of genders and sexualities in Almodóvar’s films, andhow can they inform art education practices? What kind of agency and queersubjective mediation are those that surface from a critical interpretation of queervisual representations? How do liminal spaces, between text and viewer, queer75gender/non-queer-gender work as interpretive models for a critical and activesubjectivity in visual culture education?I must acknowledge at this point that despite the fact that I will not necessarily beable to “fully” answer these questions, I am not anxious about it, because I see thedevelopment of this research as a living inquiry and as an opportunity to create spaces forthe articulation of innovative questions about visual culture education. Here, I am notsearching for truths, just for contingent realities. What is more, I embrace the fact that theseinitial research questions have been acquiring new meanings and incorporating other issuesand uncertainties at the progress of each research step. Informed by hermeneutical cyclesmodels these initial research questions recur over and over again, impelling themselvesforward to provoke new interpretations and understandings. With each return to thesequestions they derive new interpretations, or possibilities of interpretation. I am receptive tobeliefs that there are no foundational pieces of knowledge, just interpretation; and if all isabout interpretation, which is about meaning and understanding, “reality” is only accessibleto us in terms of how we understand and interpret it. However, before I enter into a directconversation with these questions, allow me to move to essential acknowledgments.My lived experiences as an artist, student, researcher and educator in Brazil, Europe,and North America indisputably frame and account for my particular awareness in visualculture education. I am conscientious about the fact that the landscape of my imaginaryidentity, which is grounded and shaped as that of an urban whitened middle-class male,endows me with advantages that allow me to pass less problematically through all thesespaces and across the discursive boundaries of visual culture, education and queer studies.Nonetheless, these same institutions and discourses that have privileged me have also76marked and excluded the ethos of my localized sexual experience, formation and fluididentity. Moreover, embedded in my nomadic experiences there have been coexistingmultifaceted and conflicting relationships of social privilege and economic, political andcultural marginality. Therefore, I consider it my responsibility to assess critically theparticularities, continuities and discontinuities of cultural studies, critical pedagogy andqueer theory, and examine their asymmetrical relations of power and privilege in order tointerpret and deconstruct them.The spirit I am engaging in through my inquiry compels me to say that in everyattempt at mapping my locations I find only imaginary itineraries. I have been travelingmetaphorically and literally all through my life, and cannot effortlessly grasp in my memoryfixed settings of cities, houses, or even a home; but I vividly and fluently recall spaces inmovement and objects in transition; and often find myself inhabited by trains, cars, chariots,boats, libraries, theatres and airplanes. My early reminiscences are of crossing rivers, lakesand ponds; films, books; paddling in small wooden boats, riding horses made out of bones;flying dragons; and racing donkeys and Jeeps to reach or leave the arid, barren land thatcharacterizes much of the inner poor Brazilian north-eastern Sertão.At some point in my early childhood, my family moved permanently from theinterior to live in the tourist-oriented city of Natal. Thereafter, while tourists occupied thecity on summer and winter holidays, I would go back to the interior and intensely explorevarious sexualities and pleasures existing in that environment. Early on, I learned that sexualpractices that took place locally could be considered quite differently in larger socialconfigurations: every trip back to Natal was a crossing over not only from the rural to theurban space but between different systems of sexual cultures, from silenced to silencing77sexualities. Parker informs us that strong interaction of different systems of same-sexrelations marks the cultural organization of homosexuality in the Brazilian northeast.Because of these encounters, silencing sexualities tend to be the cosmopolitan contemporarymodes of understanding same-sex relations; and the silenced are the long-establishedstructures of experiencing sexual desire and constructing sexual identity stemming from ahighly complex cultural mixedness (Parker, 1999)8.Furthermore, growing up in a large family differentiated by class and religion, in afamily-oriented culture, with relatives spread across small interior farms, cities and themajor metropolis, traveling was inescapable; it shaped my itinerant attitude and sponsoredmy uncountable trips from one home to other homes. Since then home has been placed inthis flux, this contiguity among homes. Sephardic Jews, marranos9, protestant missionaries,orthodox Catholics and African cultures encounter my family as a place for many homes.When I relate these experiences of the inescapability of traveling to my queer positioning, Isituate them as the critical settings in which my written narratives are located as “dwelling”and in the same way as a “diasporic space”, between the global and local, inside and outside(Brah, 1996). Nevertheless, in spite of that, I always relished traveling; and home has beenvaguely positioned in this entre lugar, this in-betweenness of places, spaces, classes, races,genders, temporalities and sexualities. Entre lugar, narrowly translated from the Portugueseto English as in-between, was articulated by Santiago (2000) as a space of agency toconstitute ways of knowing, to deconstruct Latin American histories of cultural dependencyand subalternity. These concepts of home, diaspora and entre lugar are relevant to my workand directly relate to other theories such as transculturation, hybridity, border thinking,subaltern studies, and mestiçagem. But I am less fascinated about how they relate to each78other than I am curious to know what we can do with them in visual culture education. I ammore involved in the process of developing critical narratives about my recollections, whichI believe are closely related to what Anne-Marie Fortier calls “sexuality as movement” andqueerness as “movement out of place” in which connections between exile, displacementand migration are found in discussions on queer diaspora and queer remembrances (Fortier,2001, P. 406). Fortier (2001) comments on the stationary moments of remembering, asfollows:Re-membering home is lived in motions: the motions of journeying between homes,the motions of hailing ghosts from the past, the motions of leaving or staying put, of‘moving on’ or ‘going back’, the motions of cutting or adding, the motions ofcontinual reprocessing of what home is/was/may be. But the motions are also‘stilled’ within the discrete ‘moments’ of memory. In this sense, memories of homecombine forces of movement and attachment at once. In a manner akin to ‘stills’from movies, the images conjured up by remembrances of home are ‘stilled’ but also‘un-stilled’, animated with moving memories, people, emotions. The act of remembering places disturbs fixed notions of spatiality and territory, while it allowsfor considerations of memories as constituted by stationary ‘moments’, or intervals.In other words, the motions of memory challenge commonly held assumptions aboutthe fluidity of time and the stillness of space (Fortier, 2001, p. 420).Furthermore, while desiring, choosing and enjoying most of these different articulations ofspaces and knowledge, I recognize that my nomadic narratives have been reasonably andcomfortably shaped by class, race and gender privileges. However, none of these trips hasbeen effortless, untroubled and painless. If this imaginary journey embodies a trajectory of40 years of a Latin-Brazilian-American cultural history, it is not my intention here ofrepresenting or celebrating the homogenizing discourse of a harmonious whitened mestiçotraveler in these different societies. There are fissures everywhere, as reflected in numerousincidents during my traveling with other subjects, in which they were constantlymarginalized and excluded from mobility, remaining in rigid positions because they did not79have resources to travel. According to Clifford these experiences of mobility and stasis areunstable, and a view of human location might be constituted by the relationship between“dwelling/home” and “traveling”, which themselves are categories of mediations (Clifford,1997). Mignolo highlights that center/periphery relations as well as diaspora or travel invokean epistemological location from which one can speak, and we can speak from differentlocations, hence, these diverse locations from which we can enunciate can be understood asdiasporic (Mignolo, 1999, p. 239).Nomads: Syncretism, Sexuality and LanguageIt can be asserted that there is nothing epic about my routes as they have been limitedand contingent upon my personal processes of social identifications, disidentifications, andeducational formation. I commenced my university expedition in dentistry school, albeitsoon after I redirected it to the social sciences; but never finished these courses sinceimmediately after a seminar trip to the Republic of China and a holiday in the United States,I edgily displaced myself, and migrated to the mid-western capital of Brazil: Brasilia. Imoved away allegedly to pursue a BA in art education, which I ultimately finished,adventuring through painting, art history, cinema, education, anthropology, semiotics andlinguistics. However, the vital motivation to depart from the northeast was the fear ofpersonal annihilation due to my newly initiated engagements with non-normative sexualpractices and identities; besides, I wished to explore and seek protection in the scope ofsexual knowledge presented by a larger city. And beyond all opportunities and possibilitiesthat the authoritarian modernist Brasilia offered me, I found myself enmeshed within avibrant display of indigenous cultures, poststructuralist thoughts, and an active “gay”80culture. As much as I embraced the gay culture lived in the 1980s, I realized how it wasdisconnected from the local culture, from issues of race, ethnicity and class. The absence ofa strong queer black and mestizo culture in Brasilia, as it exists in the northeast, made meresist fully assuming this rigid gay identity. Hence, I advanced my sexual and identityjourneys surrounded by what was lacking in this gay culture: I engaged my thoughts andcuriosity on sexuality and race, pleasure and desire, class and social layers.In Brazil the relation between class and race clearly manifests itself: the darker yourskin, the higher is the probability of you belonging to a lower class. I felt compelled tolearn, make my artwork, and live focusing my interests in the candomblé, its visual artifactsand representations, its powerful narratives of African deities, the orixás, and their complexsexualities. Although minimalism stresses the idea of reducing a work of art to the minimumof formal features, and does not attempt to represent any experience, my artwork byinterconnecting minimalism with these aspects of candomblé, conjoined these contradictoryterms in a process that I called “expressive minimalism”.I often heard that the orixás were depicted as bisexuals and, when I was younger, myJudaeo-Christian family, aware of my early interest, discouraged me from getting closer tocandomblé, but it did not prevent me from reading and learning more about how it combinessensuality and expression which allow people of any sexual orientation to have a spiritualpractice. However, this concept of the Orixcis’ bisexuality has always been up in the air.Monica the lakekere da Taba de Oxossi Cacador’° affirms that the translation of legendsand languages made the Yorubci culture often misunderstood; and that that provoked themyth that some Orixás are intersexed or trangendered. As Monica explains: “All orixásembrace the feminine and masculine creation; some with more predominance of one or the81other; but this does not mean they have two sexes” (Personal communication). In theOrixás’ formation sometimes they become visible as the feminine principle, others as themasculine (2005, personal communication). The social construction of gender in Brazil andAfrica cannot be directly translated to European and North American experiences, norelsewhere.I make this point because during that time, images of beads, red, yellow, blue, white,red, and maroon beads, incenses, perfumes, holy waters, tiny statues, oils, gems, andseashells used in candomblés ceremonies, haunted me. The long established history of beaduse in Africa acquired new forms and meanings in Brazil with the influence of nativeBrazilians and European immigrants. Nowadays Cerqueira (2004), presents an improvedunderstanding of the Afro-Brazilian religions indicating that not all their deities are bisexual;nevertheless these religions:[...] reject the taboo of sex from the location of the tradition, myths and legends oforixds. It is perfectly possible to rescue the archetypes and the mythology of orixáswithin the afro-Brazilian tradition, demonstrating that the sexual barriers andinterdictions are very tenuous, even though it is incorrect to affirm that in theterreiros [places of Cult] a free sexuality is lived, without rules”. [Italics added] (p.1)In addition, according to Stam (1997), Brazilian candomblé is a site of development ofmultiple personalities with astonishing aspects related to diverse sexualities, as he states:In terms of sexual politics, the constitutive bisexuality of the orixds, and the fact thatmen can be possessed by female deities and vice versa, can be considered a“feminist” advance over Judaism and Islam, with their very patriarchal conceptionsof the Deity, and over Christianity, with its masculine triad of Father, Son, and asexually ambiguous Holy Ghost expressed in phallic symbols like birds and tonguesof flame. ... Nor is candomblé repressive toward homosexuality. In the 1940s, RuthLandes noted that although women dominated the traditional terreiros, homosexualmen dominated the others. Many male priests wear female dress and hairdos, andpriests are referred to as “wives” of the orixds regardless of gender. Analystsspeculate that homosexual men saw candomblé as a way of identifying with women,noting that the metaphor of the “divine horsemen” who are “mounted” by the saints82easily takes on a sexual resonance of corporeal penetrability. The initiates are calledthe iao (wives) of the saints as well (p. 210)Stam’ s narrative invites us to delve a bit more into this space. Perhaps, a quick story cansimplify the relation of candomblé and syncretism in Brazil.Historically, the shape of syncretism in Brazil created an amalgam of relationsbetween African, Christian and indigenous religions, which facilitated these multi-possibilities of sexualities and gender locations and representations (Bastide, 1974, 1978;Fry, 1982, 1985, 1995; Hanchard & Reis, 1995; Murray, 1992). Alongside syncretism, therehas been a prevalent and acknowledged miscegenation and hybridity. Initially, thesyncretism enforced by the Catholic church on the black population, mainly Yorubá peoplefrom the Bay of Benin, and the indigenous people, incited assimilation and development ofthe mestiza Brazilian culture. Additionally, the hegemonic national ideology considershybridity in general as characteristically Brazilian, contrasting with ideologies of racialand/or cultural purity prevalent in other parts of the world (Veiho, 2000).Stam (1997) approaches this situation by pointing out that African Brazilian religionsare oral rather than written, the texts are performative and ludic, involving bodily pleasures;they are polytheistic; engage in literal animal sacrifice; and convey the individualpersonality in the collective and transpersonal fusions of trance’. Because of thesecharacteristics, dominant discourses consistently misrepresent diasporic syncretic religionsof African origin (Stam, 1997, pp. 206-207). Thus, I consider that hegemonic discoursesfrom within, outside or inside out of the Brazilian nation silence subaltern epistemologies ofknowledge. Candomblé has been silenced, but above all a polysemantic discussion of raceand sexuality including a variety of disciplines is somewhat absent.83While doing my BA, there were several aspects of art making I was interested inpracticing and studying; nonetheless Mario Cravo Neto and Pierre Verger’s photographicrepresentations were the most significant entry points to Candomblé and sexuality12.InVerger’s extremely rich and extraordinary photo collection, I have been an acute spectatorof his fascination with and gaze into representations of homoerotic desire involving blackmen’s bodies. Although Pierre Verger never identified himself with any sexual identity,several series of his photographs undoubtedly fix their focus on the representation ofcorporal and erotic pleasures involving men, thus also connecting his work with concepts oftransubstantiation of bodies, genders and sexuality in candomblé. In Verger’s photos, at thattime, I came to challenge his and my own fractured and unstable disciplinary gazes as white“colonizers” utterly dependent on the “subaltern” for our sexual, social, racial, emotionaland genderized survival.Mario Cravo Neto is a Brazilian artist born in Salvador, Bahia; and his work dealswith issues of cultural identity by making sensual visual representations that bring togethererotic and sacred cultures. Mario Cravo Neto’s photographs convey the principle that theirmaterialization taking place in his own culture and social background is a visual world thatrelates to everyone. Mario Cravo Neto explores a visual rendering of the Brazilian mètissageof Portuguese, Indigenous, and African people. Moreover, he lays emphasis on the bondinvolving humans and the environment by juxtaposing the urban landscape with the humanbody. The concealment of significant body parts places the spectator in a position of lurking,peeping, and gazing into these out-of-the-ordinary images. Cravo Neto delves into Africanculture to embark on a new syncretism drawing on his sculptural and theatrical sensibilities.84In fact, I have come to see candomblé’s visual representation as a turning point inmy early encounters with the academy. I finished my BA in Art Education in paintingholding a body of artworks that dealt with how lace, crochet, edging, filigree, mesh, net, andthreadwork in candomblé work to entwine, interlace, ravel, unravel, twist, weave, unveil andveil sexualities. Shortly after, I decided to move away from this Brazilian space, and movedto England to pursue a Master of Arts. During this period, I traveled freely within Europe;and took excursions through painting, deconstruction, hispanisms, gayness and this “new”cool stuff called queerness.As an added element of all of this, I broadened an agonized dwelling on myrelationship of estrangement and longing with the English language; throbbing whichunsettlingly persists. Since then, I have realized that it is precisely by listening to the soundsof my diverse accents, whether while speaking Brasfiia’ s or North-eastern Brazil’sPortuguese, of English, Spanish, French, or even when loudly reading in Italian, Valencian,Gallego, or Catalan, that a pervasive queer sentiment of be-longing situates myself. I feel atease within this strange home, strangerness that recurs along with listening to my locatedsexual and cultural articulations. Although I am aware that they are all European languages,these colonial languages are constitutively haunted by the forced offerings of their previousand present historical encounters. Having said that and making use of Bhaba’s concept ofhybridity (Bhabah, 1992, 1994). I argue that the Brazilian Portuguese in the act of‘mimicry’, act of reiteration, of the Portuguese language, created this “slippage” in whichthe colonial subject inescapably brings into being a hybridized translation of the “original”.Likewise, the American English and the peripheral Brazilian Portuguese, derived from the“central” English and from the Portuguese, nowadays occupy an indispensable position for85the production, implementation and circulation of knowledge within these languages. Ibelieve that the splintered accents of multilingual individuals or communities, or both, areuseful spaces of resistance, pedagogy, and intervention. In these situations, it seems that anyidea of local and global are mixed, lost and found in that space. Furthermore, it is exactlywithin the fractures and interstices of traveling that I have been embryonically ascertaininggeographies of comfort and agency.Sublimity: Post- Occidentalism: Latin American Post-colonialismNow, traveling as a Latin-Brazilian-American drawing on queer and film studies, Ifeel compelled to confront my geo-political itineraries in order to situate myself historically,socially and culturally within the relational experience of cultural studies, LatinAmericanism, and queer theory. In order to achieve this goal my first difficulty has been tosituate myself within Latin Americanism (as a position of enunciation) and among whatMoreiras (2001) called ‘non-Latin American Latin Americanists’— scholars writing oncritical theory, Post-colonial and subaltern studies; and predominantly in English— and‘Latin American Latin Americanists’ scholars writing mainly in Spanish or Portugueseseeing themselves in tension with predominantly European and North-American theories. Ido not feel at ease to fully comply with any of these theoretical positions since I articulatemy work from both stances, and once more I am at the fracture. Besides, the ways ofrepresenting Latin American politics of knowledge though this confined academictaxonomy, seem to mutually misrepresent all indigenous people of Latin America who donot speak any Latin language and do not share Latin cultural practices (Moreiras, 2001).86Initially I argue that, for the most part, Latin American studies concentrate onHispanic America, thus overlooking Luso-Brazilian studies. Secondly, in spite of this, I amusing some of these locations in this thesis. And thirdly, I have been desiring and strugglingto find myself in a third space that goes beyond both the national popular identity formationand discussion of the Latin-Brazilian-American space, which are institutionalized throughconcepts of transculturation, hybridity, testimonios, and mestizagen, in spite of theirusefulness, and the hegemonic European and North American epistemologies.Along with Coronil (1996), I strongly believe that my task as a scholar is to surpassthese institutionalized categories that preserve the Latin American epistemologies as another, by means of patently and contradictorily adopting/placing some of these sameepistemological categories in a border space along with other hegemonic epistemologies.The initiative is not to claim a place for transculturation (anthropophagy, hybridity,syncretism, mestizage and so forth) and other subaltern epistemologies within the dominantepistemologies, but rather to claim the power of the frontier/border as a generativeepistemological space that can at once accept, understand, recognize, value, contradict, andtranspose epistemologies configured by different geocultural positions and histories.It may be necessary now to point out that although Bhaba and Canclini are two of thekey contributors to the theorization of hybridity and the development of ‘borderepistemologies’, in this thesis I lay emphasis on the thoughts of these concepts from thepoint of view of Mignolo. In the interpretation of Mignolo border spaces endorse subalternepistemologies’ exercise of self-denial at the same time that they allow them the experienceof sameness, which has been denied by hegemonic epistemologies (Mignolo, 1998a, p. 39).87Therefore, it is exceedingly complex for me to locate myself in the amorphous mapof Latin Americanism in which center and periphery are constantly shifting even if weconsider the more unstable ways in which binary oppositions have been recently understood.Concerning this matter, Mignolo (2002) argues that binary oppositions are the conditionsunder which subjectivities have been formed in the process of colonial accumulation, asfollows:The enduring enchantment of binary oppositions seems to be related to the enduringimage of European civilization and of European history told from the perspective ofEurope itself. Europe is not only the center (that is the center of space and the pointof arrival in time) but also has the epistemic privilege of being the center ofenunciation. And in order to maintain the epistemic privilege it is necessary, today,to assimilate to the epistemic perspective of modernity and accuse emergingepistemology of claiming epistemic privileges. [...] While capitalism moved fromEurope to the United States, then to Japan, and now to China, epistemologyapparently remains located in Europe, which is taken, simultaneously, as the non-place (or transparently universal) locus of enunciation (p. 938) [Italics added].According to Mignolo (2000a, pp. 66-69) in order to deal with this matter, a merereversal of the binary oppositions’ epistemic privileges is not enough; it is necessary todevelop the “border thinking” (border gnosis or border epistemology). Border thinking isunderstood as a decolonization of knowledge that employs a double critique of differentepistemological locations by using a deconstructive criticism situated on the subaltern. Inaddition border thinking encourages the expansion of an “other thinking”, which is a way tothink without an “Other”, displacing the binaries self/other, center/periphery, etc. Thisimplies that the practices of border thinking strengthen the reallocation of notions ofspectatorship, image analysis, ways of seeing, and issues of positionality; and intenselychallenges methods of interpretation. The propagation of margins produced by and as adirect effect of postmodernism fragmented the notion of center as a consistent hub of controland stimulated a constant slippage towards static binaries. Richard explains that transcultural88and multidisciplinary cultural studies and Latin American Studies, join forces to “respond tothe new categorical shifts between the dominant and subaltern, the educated and popular, thecentral and peripheral, the global and the local: shifts that travel through geopoliticalterritorialities, identity symbolizations, sexual representations, and social classifications”(Richard, 2004, p. 687) And like Richard, I also believe it is extremely pertinent to reflectcarefully the significance of each academic and theoretical location and the condition ofexperiences that surface from the agency of newly-developing ‘border epistemologies’ whileimmersed in a particular geocultural location.The Latin American token of transculturation is understood here in the Ortizianmeaning, in which mutual transformations and different effects result from communicationand dialogue between communities of different backgrounds; but also as a concept thatreplaces the general view of culture exchange in terms of a narrow repositioning of“commodities” from a civilized center to a primitive subaltern space. Ortiz, like Andrade’s“anthropophagy” (this trope will be later introduced), drew singular attention to themultifaceted practices by which subaltern groups pick out what to absorb/devour/understandfrom the dominant culture (F. Ortiz, 1995) . I entirely reject the idea of transculturation as aprocess that mingles components from different spaces/places/times into a merged cohesiveculture (national, local or global). Pratt (1992), following Ortiz’s sense of transculturation,named “contact zones” those spaces/openings where various cultures influence each other;but for her, these contact zones are not restricted to peripherical sites, as manytransculturalists tend to contend; instead she argues that the effects of colonial cultureshappen and affect all sides. As an unlimited process of shared influences, her concept oftransculturation has hybrid cultures originating independent of concepts of center and89periphery. As much as I am indebted to Canclini’s, Ribeiro’s, and Ortiz’ theorizations (seeCanclini, 1995, 1999, 2000; F. Ortiz, 1995; R. Ortiz, 1994; Ribeiro, 1968, 1971, 2000) onthe politics of location, in order to achieve my purposes in this thesis, I privilege the termstransculturation and border thinking over notions of hybridity, barbarian theorizing andmondialization.The preceding discussion sets the frame for a shorter understanding oftransculturation as a crucial element for my analysis of fissures/fractures/splits and inbetweenness in the study of gender and sexuality in visual culture representations.Moreover, supplementary to Pratt’s concept of contact zones are Mignolo’s (1995b) ideas;as he puts them:A new configuration of places (rather than any non-place or non-location) isengendering a new geocultural politics of location in place of national— or territorial- identity politics. In other words, territories and locations are at once fixed andfloating, emergent at the crossroads of places, memories, and sensibilities, wherepeople cross borders, change languages, and deal with both the imprints of their earlycultural legacies (e.g., school and family) and whatever options arise later. Thetransnational does not, of course, erase the national, in the sense of the place whereone is born and educated (even if that place is a borderland), but it does imply sucherasure. Nor is the transnational necessarily the postnational. It is, rather, thecoexistence of regional languages, smells, tastes, objects, pictures, and so forth, withinternational communications, interactions, and the activities of daily life. Thepolitics of geocultural location does not imply, then, a defense of the national, butrather the recognition that one is always from and at (Gilroy, 1973), whether or notthose locations happen to be the same place. (pp. 174-175)As stated, my primary interest here is not to explain the theorizations for interpretingcultural contact in Latin America, but rather to position myself within a flow of all thesedifferent discourses on transculturation, in relation to post-colonialism, visual cultureeducation, and queer studies. This grounds my appreciation of Mignolo’ s key formulationsof “loci of enunciation” and “post-occidentalism”. Analogous to Haraway’s (1991) conceptof” situated knowledge”, Mignolo’s notion of “loci of enunciation” can approximately be90explained as the epistemological space from where one speaks, including the “self-reflexiverecognition of one’s own locus of enunciation”(Lund, 2001, p. 61).I mention the Brazilian locationlculture because at this time I feel the need to narroweven more my locus of enunciation. Like many contemporary cultural studies thinkers, I amemploying here a broad concept of culture as the practices, actions, performances,representations, languages, and patterns of behavior and customs of any society. Brazilianculture stands in one extraordinarily ambiguous space. Brazilian culture dynamically shiftsits locations from the perimeters of a hub to a hub of other perimeters, concomitantlyoccupying several positions as construed through vectors of power, and yet remaining aninvariable subaltern to a larger and widespread cultural production of knowledge that flowspredominantly from north to south, and from both sides of the Atlantic. Despite this negativeassertion, Dussel (1998) disputes that the arguments that Latin American loci of enunciationare totally marginalized from the construction of Western knowledge fail. Dussell considersthat Western knowledge production is more of an effect than a cause of epistemologicalproduction developed elsewhere. Therefore he compels us to think less in terms of our ownloci of enunciation and to not take for granted the naturalized discourses on westernknowledge production.The preceding discussion sets the stage to look at the Latin-Brazilian-American siteof enunciation. It is pertinent to emphasize that during the Spanish and Portuguese colonialperiod, if Brazilian and Latin American cultures were imaginarily constructed andpositioned at the extreme borders of the Occident13 they were initially imagined not as thefoil to Europe but as its enlargement and expansion (Mignolo, 2000a, p. 24). “Occident”here derives from Mignolo’ s view of Occidentalism, which was the discursive field that91imagined the Occident as a privileged space-temporal construction, with Europe as ahegemonic geocultural location which invented peripheral borders, e.g., Africa and theAmericas (Mignolo, 1998a). Moreover, if Latin America was invented by nineteenth centuryFrench imperialism, the twentieth century social and economic remapping of the worldrelocated its name, cultures, and Latin languages to beyond the western borders, alsoothering it as non-West; while simultaneously asserting and privileging the English-speaking cultures (Beasley-Murray, 2002).Although Post-colonial theory has established itself as one of the most productivealternative critical approaches in Europe, the U. S. and the British Commonwealth countries,several Latin American scholars and critics resist locating the position of Latin America inPost-coloniality’4.For many Latin American critics such as Eduardo Mendieta, Erna von derWalde, Fernando Coronil, Santiago Castro-Gomez, Alberto Moreiras, Mabel Morana, NellyRichard, Jorge Kior de Alva, Walter Mignolo and many others, the overlapping of imperialpowers in Latin America (Luso-Franco-Hispanic/British-American) occurred less in termsof colonization and more as occidentalization. In spite of their differing points of view, theygenerally concur that the cultural history of Latin American decolonization is different fromthat of the former British colonies from whence Post-colonial theory derives (BeasleyMurray, 2002; Teves, 2001). According to Coronil and Mignolo (Coronil, 1996; Mignolo,1 998a, 1 998b, 2000b), there is a more accurate terminology to articulate the intellectualdecolonizing discourses in Latin America, given that the passages and superposition ofimperial powers in Latin America were imagined less as terms of colonization and more asOccidentalization. Therefore, Mignolo argues that Post-colonial theory has been a usefulmodel and an extraordinary opportunity for the development of a Latin American Post92colonial discussion and theorization: Post-occidentalism. Post-occidentalism is proposed asa regional strand of post-colonial critique situated in the particularities of Latin Americandiscourses’5(Mignolo, 2000b).Following the previous arguments, I want to emphasize that it is through the lensesof post-occidentalist critique that I recognize a strong strand of the intellectual endeavor tounderstand cultural discourses in, from and outside Latin America (Na, da efora daAmerica Latina). Furthermore, I am attentive to the fact that I articulate from a subalternstandpoint, but it does not imply inferiority but rather an arrangement of knowledge of asubaltern position within the globalized production and distribution of epistemologicalpower. In fact it is in the flow of interrelations of Latin Americanism (Post-Occidentalismand anthropophagy), imprecise cultural studies, fractured queer studies, slippery visualculture studies, and controversial critical pedagogy that I locate epistemological space fromwhere I can speak.Appetite: Anthropophagy and the Devouring of Post-colonialismFrom now on, I employ the trope of Anthropophagy,’6a devouring term mostly usedin the Brazilian context, and throughout this thesis meaning hermeneutics, interpretation,understanding, and analysis of the subaltern and its cultural production. For I would like totake advantage of the historical fact that cultural studies from, in, and of Latin America havebeen intensely concerned about its position of theoretical articulation, enunciation andconsumption. Cannibalism has been an enduring colonial trope of Latin American culturaldiscourse’7,most explicitly in Brazil. Oswald de Andrade (1928) conceived anthropophagyin his Anthropophagite Manifesto, as a strategy for the discussion of culture, knowledge and93power. That work proclaimed the need for Brazilians to consume everything that wasstrange and different in other cultures and within its native cultures, and thereby to generatean original identity of national distinctiveness. Hence, cannibalism, a European trope for thesavage and uncivilized, becomes as anthropophagy, a post-colonial trope. Almeida (2002)affirms that Andrade:[...] proposed the “rehabilitation of the primitive” in the civilized man, givingemphasis to the bad savage who is the devourer of other people’s culture fortransforming it into his own, and for deconstructing binary oppositions likecolonizer/colonized, civilized/barbaric, nature/technology. When hypothesizing thetransforming, social and collective cannibal as subject, Oswald not only produces arereading of the history of Brazil, but also of the proper construction of theOccidental tradition in America (p. 1) [My translation]Following a long period of appropriation by all sorts of imaginaries, the essentialistnationalism of the Anthropophagite Manifesto has currently succumbed to a reviseddeterritorialized trope of anthropophagy as a commodity and mechanism of transculturation(Bellei, 1998; Candido, 1977; Castro-Klarén, 2000; Shohat & Stam, 1994, 1998; Stam,1997, 1998). Subtle shades of meanings and a range of sly differentiations attached toanthropophagy, allow it to draw on the diverse modalities of transculturation: syncretism,hybridity, creolization, and mesticagem.Drawing on ethnographic description and interpretation of Tupi’8 cannibalismCastro-Klaren (1997), for example, proposes a rereading of anthropophagy as a knowledgethat, instead of constructing fixed identities and subjects, is a relentless traveling toward anuncertain alterity; as she claims, for anthropophagic reason, everything is flux . In thissense, Castro-Kiaren argues that at the heart of anthropophagy as a method of constructingalterity, lies the TupI-GuaranI system of subject formation, which takes place withextraordinary openness to exteriority and transformation. Since the subject is always in94“transition”, its construction follows a process of continuous transformation where I, self,other, life, death, humans and gods, for example, are just transposable intertwined positionsin a universe always in flux, in which “One does not eat the other because there is no otheras opposition; one could ingest only non-self or self itself” (Castro-Klarén, 1997, p. 313). Inthis cosmology, Becoming precedes Being, and even if mutually sustaining entities,Becoming is not inferior to Being. In this context, the importance migrates from the spatialBeing (Ser) to a temporal Becoming (Devir/devenir/vir a ser); anthropophagy then as a tropeis somewhat a process of becoming, that is, an operation of “alteration” and transmutation.Proceeding from this understanding anthropophagy is an itinerary of dynamictransformations in which identity formation is a flexible and always wide-open way tounderstand others without discrimination. The concept of anthropophagy is, therefore,inclusive and evaluative of all diversity whether its strategies involve a devouring of thatwhich is desirable or of that which is appalling. Anthropophagy performs a sort oftransubstantiation in which the one that is the devourer alters him/herself through thedevoured and vice and versa (Ferreira de Almeida, 2002). Thus, Anthropophagy is aneffective transculturation: association, combination, conversation, diversification, andtransubstantiation.Besides, one of anthropophagy’s effects that allure me is that of serving as areminder that transculturation has never been a serene encounter, as historically it has beenentrapped in a dialogue of hostile acceptances. This aspect makes me prefer anthropophagyto other Latin American tropes, but also that it is a less neutral, conciliatory andhomogeneizing term. Further, anthropophagy advocates agency, alluding to an assertive act,and ultimately it emphasizes the body as a place of knowledge, as it is a direct reference to95the transitory human performances of becoming and belonging. The anthropophagic processis the transculturation that we perform, and live, in everyday life; it does not happen to us; itis a socially constructed cultural exchange. Accordingly, I suggest that anthropophagyconcentrates on similar elements of investigation to those of post-colonial theorization,cultural studies and the studies of subalternity, as suggested by Teves (2001, p. 8).Just as anthropophagy dismisses the main perspectives of knowledge imposed anduniversalized by the colonial order, such as eurocentrism and racism, it denaturalizes theplaces constructed for those excluded from hegemonic discourses. By opposing itself tofixed identities, anthropophagy also defies the notion of the evolution and progress of ideasin determined and linear time, the pretension of objectivity and the universality ofinstitutionalized forms of knowledge. Anthropophagy seeks for principles of knowledgecapable of accounting for the historical agency of the subaltern subjects and collectivities inthe colonization process; and in so doing, it searches for a rupture and a geoculturaldecentring of the loci of enunciation of knowledge. By creating strategies for the discussionof asymmetrical distribution of culture, knowledge and power in the world, anthropophagyexamines the intricate associations of the legacy of colonialism, or post-occidentalism as itis considered within the Latin American context.Curiosity: Locating Queer Theory in BrazilI consider that if concepts from queer theory have in recent times extended to“beyond” the Anglo-American academic world, it does not mean that their reception hasbeen occurring in the same way, with the same intensity and producing the same effects inall other places. In order to understand this course of development, it is necessary to96comprehend changes in global tendencies of queer studies and their circulation andreception in specific contexts. It is clear that one of the main challenges posed to most LatinAmerican spaces initially has been to find approaches and loci of enunciation to discuss theemergence of queer theory as a transdisciplinary field between the fluid thoughts of localand global settings. Further, there has been an enormous enterprise to grasp the specificAnglo-American history of queer theory, given that this new exceedingly fluid and slipperytheoretical framework has been a subject of contestation even within Anglo-Americanacademies. Subsequently, it has been essential to inquire into what ways queer theory’s mainepistemological claims might impact on and assist Latin America’s cultural strategies. Inspite of the recent intensity of this transnational movement of information on queer studies,and more specifically on queer theory, across the globe, in Brazil the discussion of it hasbeen almost exclusively inside academia and mostly by white or whitened male scholarsconcerned mostly with white male issues. Thus, at the moment it is very far from includingand looking at the diversity of “homosexual” issues (Góis, 2004).To interpret this late reception of queer studies as mere backwardness andconservatism of the Brazilian academy in comparison to their counterparts in the Anglo-American societies, is an excessively simplistic approach and corroborates prejudicedcolonial and neocolonial assumptions of Latin American belatedness and lack of originality.Despite the ostensible moralist and heteronormal character of Brazilian academia, there aresubstantial historical cultural particularities in Brazilian sexualities, as studies state (Green,1999; Parker, 1999; Santos & Garcia, 2002; Trevisan, 2000) and also theoreticalreservations amongst scholars (Lopes, 2002; Lopes et at., 2004; Lugarinho, 2002; Mott,2002) about uncritically accepting, reproducing, relocating, and translating queer theory or97any other theoretical framework largely shaped in the English-speaking world or elsewhere.In view of that, Lugarinho (2002) suggests a devouring of queer; and since the English-language construct of queer has no semantic equivalent in the Portuguese language”, hesuggests that we should attempt translating this cultural construct in a Derridian mode, thatis, “to reinterpret, re-elaborate and deconstruct” (2002, p. 281). Denilson Lopes stronglyasserts that the lack of linguistic translation of queer and queer theory to Portuguese mayindicate “a lack of intellectual and scholarly translation” (2002, personal communication).However, if Lopes does not translate it directly into his writings, recently other scholarshave been less troubled using the word queer, but constantly contextualize its connotationsas is shown in several articles of the proceedings of the 2004 conference of the BrazilianAssociation of Homocultural Studies [Queer culture studies].Moreover, in spite of the fairly large literature on homosexuality and queer culture inBrazil, most of the published analysis up to now, specifically related to queer theory, placedhere as a post-identitarian concept, is modest and mainly concerned with issues of outing,affect and homosociability, the interrelation with race and class, and their pedagogicalimplications (See Costa, 1992, 1993; See Costa, l994a, 1994b, 1994c, 1998; Edward, 1990;Fry, 1982, 1985, 1995, 1995/1996; Green, 1999; Góis, 2004; Larvie, 1999; Lopes, 2002;Lopes et al., 2004; Louro, 2004; Lyra & Garcia, 2001; Mott, 1987a, 1998, 1987b, 1995,2001, 2002; Murray, 1992; Parker, 1991a, 1991b, 1999; Perlongher, 1987; Portinari, 1989;Santiago, 2002; Santos & Garcia, 2002; Trevisan, 1986). I argue that more important thanrenaming or translating literally queer and queer theory to Portuguese (transviado), Spanish(torcido), and French (sexuaIit flottant), is to begin to locate and translate this developmentas an emerging theoretical model which functions as a mode of analysis and constitutes a98field of theoretical production and circulation, which is in constant transformation; and thento contextualize its theories historically, culturally and socially. Also, it is relevant toacknowledge that queer theory already holds terminology that, though not directly related toPortuguese, signifies the academic efforts that brought about a transnational conversation onsame-sex sexualities in a post-identity context.The works of Silva (1999, 2001) and Louro (1999), which more explicitly traversethe areas of curriculum studies and sexuality, have been undertaking similar approaches.Louro introduces queer theory as an understanding of sexuality that underscores shiftingboundaries, ambivalences, and cultural constructions, such as curriculum, which changedepending on historical and cultural context. In this regard, Louro (1999) provides thefollowing statement:A queer pedagogy and curriculum would be distinct from politically correctmulticultural programs, in which gender, sexuality or ethnic differences are toleratedor appreciated as exotic curiosities. A queer pedagogy and curriculum would turntowards the process of production of these differences and would workfundamentally with the instability and precariousness of all identities. By placingunder discussion the forms in which the “other” is constituted, they would lead toinquiry into the narrow relations of self and other. Difference no longer would be leftoutside, on the other side, distant from the subject, and would be understood asindispensable for the existence of the subject: it would be inside, integrating andconstituting the self. Difference would be present instead of absent: makingmeanings, haunting and disestablishing the subject. Regarding the processes thatproduce difference, the curriculum would start to demand attention to the impliedpolitical game. Instead of merely contemplating a plural society, it would beessential to be cognizant, the disputes of negotiations and the constituent conflicts ofthe positions that the subjects occupy (pp. 48-49). [My translation]Despite the fact that multicultural education as conceptualized in the Anglophoneworld does not apply to the Brazilian experience, I cite Louro’s passage because I want tohighlight that she stresses the pedagogical possibilities provoked by queer theory. Besides, Iwant to recognize that queer theory’s ideas enter into the Brazilian academic space with99great debt to educators such as William Pinar and Deborah Britzman. Adding to Louro,Rolnik (1996, 1997), drawing from psychoanalysis, overtly establishes the relationshipbetween Brazilian anthropophagy and the contemporary processes of subject formation in aglobalizing world. Evidently affected by Butler’s Gender trouble, she proposes aconfrontation of the genders (generos), or in other words, an alteration to the politics ofsubjectivities, by exploring the highly polysemous word gênero in Portuguese, which carriesdifferent meanings such as gender, genre, type, class, race, ethnicity, sexuality and style, andembraces several concepts, for example, status, category, class, family entity, sex, anddescription. Rolnik essentializes in Brazilian culture and history a certain fluency in undoingthe effective normative features of identities and genders because mestiçagem blurs theborders between different attributes that underpin the constitution of the hybrid Brazilians.Following related arguments, Santiago’9(2002), visibly speaking from the post-occidental position, emphasizes the Brazilian hybridity of race, sexuality, and class in theconstruction of a “wily homosexuality”, a concept developed with the intention ofcommenting on the north American politics of identity, and specifically the politics ofouting, in which homosexuals aiming to accomplish normalization adopt contractual normsthat marginalize them from society. Further, he suggests a debate over whether subtler formsof activism and agency would be more useful to constitute subjectivities than antagonisticones. Santiago, by analyzing the relation between public/private in the construction ofsexual subjectivities, argues that privacy, established in Brazil as a class conceit, placedconstraints on the same-sex practices and behaviors of lower class gays and lesbians, whoused to be accepted in society through more transparent social relations and practices(Santiago, 2002, p. 16). I consider that this idea of “moment of mediation in dialogue” is one100of many possible strategies of border epistemology and one that could have been used toaddress the issue of subalterns’ reception of knowledge.Along with Santiago, Lopes (2002) has been troubled by the politics of outing; heurges subtleties and discretions in sexuality. In order to achieve this goal, he proposesHomoafetividade. Lopes, like Santiago, in overt dialogue with Eve Sedgwick’s BetweenMen, draws on the division of public and private, and its effects on homosocial desirebetween men, and desire between men and women. Homoafetividade, roughly translatedhere as homoaffection, is a concept that looks for ambiguous and deconstructive forms of thehomo/hetero binary and acts as a mode of analysis to think apart the ambiguousmasculinities in Brazil. Drawing on psychoanalysis and in favour of homoeroticism, Costa(1994a; Costa, 1994b) has emphasized the social construction of erotic desires establishedby linguistic realities and the Brazilian cultural arrangements. Costa explains that eachculture organizes these desires in moral codes that determine what is accepted and rejected.However, ethically we can rewrite and re-evaluate anew the social moral consequences ofsexual preferences that nobody is entirely free to choose, since they are also performed onus. Costa has further explained that he uses the term homoerotismo, (homoeroticism)intending to support a change in vocabulary, in order to vary the questions, transformproblems and eventually be able to find different answers. But that is difficult to achievewhen this discussion is still operating on a homosexual/heterosexual binary terminology.Lopes’ homoafetividade as well looks for dialogue, and not to fix a strong identity ofhomosexuality. Interestingly, he assesses homoafetividade as being not as political andconfrontational as queer theory, because it owes more to a post-structural debate aboutethics and the aesthetics of existence, and about friendship, than to a transgressive mode of101disrupting subjectivities. However, not surprisingly, by shifting its attention to affectionbeyond sexuality and mediating antagonistic positions, homoafetividade has been having awarmer reception in the academy than queer theory.I assume that there is in these scholars’ texts the explicit presence of the fact thatBrazilian cultural history shows the influence of having transculturalism as its organizingprinciple of subjectivity formation, as well as having community over individuality as acontext of constructing same-sex sexualities. Therefore, if the understanding of queer theoryin Brazil comes about with marked reservations regarding the use of the word queer and itslack of portability, the fear that it weakens or even totally erases the specificity of gay andlesbian experience, concerns, political strategies, and agency, we are obliged to take intoaccount that analogous contestations have been happening transnationally. Whetheranthropophagy and/or hybridity are represented as essentialized assets, or not, of the Latin-Brazilian-American experience, I will not enter into the debate here. Most fundamental, formy purposes, is recognizing that these writers’ productive post-occidental anthropophagicdiscourses on queer theory effectively function as transdisciplinary interpretive tools. Inthese discourses, concepts from different disciplines undergo collective transformations andhybridize. Therefore, I argue that hybrid transdisciplinary interpretive practices such as theseprovide us with a powerful apparatus for a queer subjective mediation and agency intranscultural situations.But what kind of agency and queer subjective mediation are these that surface fromthis post-occidental anthropophagic critical interpretation of queer theory in Brazil?Considering the strategies, approaches, and propositions offered, I argue that they contributeto a discussion on the amplitude of social differences, suggest new ways of knowing cultural102specificities, and, politically, signal relations of power/knowledge reaching beyond theconstricted queer theory notion of an elitist intellectual inquiry to disrupt normativesexualities. These rereadings reach the intensity of political resistance, negotiation and socialactivism. By critically intervening in the formation and application of these rereadings astransdisciplinary tools, locally, they broaden queer studies to education and share withcritical pedagogies the concern for “the construction of the disciplines and theirinstitutionalized pedagogical delivery [not] as politically innocent activities but as situatedwithin specific relations of power” (Spurlin, 2002, p. 10). Foremost, it is the connection ofqueer theory’s rereadings with critical pedagogy that is desired, because critical pedagogiesemploy tools, such as Freire’ s conscientização, to create conditions for learning how toperceive the social, political and economic contradictions in order to provoke agency toparticipate in and transform society. Queer theory has similarly epistemological approachesthrough which, although not restricted to sexual identity and power/knowledge relations, butinformed by them, they deliver through concepts like Butler’ Performativily (1999), pivotalpossibilities of configuring an irreverent, different and engaged pedagogy: queer pedagogy.I enter into this crucial space of what queer theory’s practice in the Brazilian contexthas to offer to this discussion, by bridging queer theory to critical pedagogy. And I considerthat most of the tentative conceptual viewpoints earlier described might become extremelyuseful encouragement to queer pedagogy, but mainly if we further explore them in relationto other experiences. These scholars have been proposing an inclusive and conversationalcontext with a view to not only disrupting the GLBT/queer binary pedagogies, but alsoabove all provoking the intersection of queer theory with race, class, gender, and so forth.Accordingly, I consider that the agency and queer subjective mediation that emerge from103these discourses is the organization of hybridity as the main apparatus to understand thecharacteristics of objective and subjective realities.ConclusionIn this chapter I examine locations from where I speak at the same time that I seek tounderstand spaces in between coloniallpost-colonial, being/becoming,remembering/disremembenng and seeing/seen. Post-colonial theory has been a useful modelfor my practices and has created extraordinary opportunities for the development of a LatinAmerican post-colonial discussion and theorization, situated in the particularities of LatinAmerican discourses. Post-colonial theories made me aware that I articulate my discoursesfrom a subaltern standpoint through a flow of interrelations of Latin Americanism, culturalstudies, queer studies, visual culture studies, and critical pedagogy. I focus my work onAlmodóvar’s visual representations in order to confer visibility on the interactions of thesedisciplines and fields, the flows of ideas, concepts and visual representations that affect thecultural construction of queerness, and to provoke responsiveness of queer visual culture andart education in the Iberian-American location,. Latin American Post-colonial tropes oftransculturalism and anthropophagy are socially constructed as cultural exchanges. Theyadvocate agency, emphasize the body as a place of knowledge, and are the processes that weact and live in everyday life. By opposing itself to fixed identities anthropophagydenaturalizes places constructed for those excluded from hegemonic discourses such asaboriginal people, blacks, Asians, Latinos, women, homosexuals, gays, lesbians,transgendered, adolescents, elderly people, and so on.104Scholars interested in queer issues in Brazil have been proposing inclusive andconversational contexts with a view to not only disrupting the GLBT/Queer binarypedagogies, but above all, provoking the intersection of queer theory with race, class,gender, and so forth. The agency and queer subjective mediation that emerge from theseintertwined discourses are the organization of transculturalism as the prevailing LatinAmerican apparatus to understand the characteristics of objective and subjective realities.105CHAPTER 6DerivationsIt is past time to correct the repression of queers in the curriculum, especially inhistory, in literature and the arts. It is past time to think out loud what queerpedagogy and queer curriculum might be.Queer pedagogy displaces and decenters, queer curriculum is noncanonical, forstarters.William F. Pinar Queer theory in Education, 1998, p. 3.As I mentioned earlier, the intertextual characteristics of my own artwork, and mypractice as an art educator, shaped the possibility to associate notions of identity,representation, pedagogy, queerness, visuality, and cultural borders indispensable to thestudy of Almodóvar’s work. As a result of these considerations, I wholeheartedly embracedalr/tography as a suitable arts-based form of research that theorizes the production of the artsas a mode of scholarly inquiry while integrating methods of representation, and I alsoacknowledged queer theory as a major approach to achieving my objectives for this thesis.The importance of queer theory to my research is threefold. Firstly, it assists me inanalyzing discursive and cultural practices, shifting from emphasis placed in validating nonnormative sexual and gender identities to troubling all of them. Secondly, queer theoryprovides a better unfolding theoretical configuration for promoting transgressive inquiry,particularly within the visual culture education context, than lesbian and gay studies did forthe art education perspective. Thirdly, in Almodóvar’s movies the complex relations among106sexual and gender identities, social norms and non-norms, and cultural differences,constitute an arrangement of overlapping, ambiguous, paradoxical, ironic, impossible, andchallenging positionalities; and queer theory is one of the means at my disposal to unravelAlmodóvar’s filmic representations.“Derivations” has not only been a starting point of this research, it has also been aconsequence of it. Here, Derivations directly stem from the Latin Deriváre meaning torechannel, divert, or not fixed. In this project Derivationss is my possibility of having apractice of thinking, reading, researching, teaching and making art otherwise, between thelines, and not taking my own experience as the common source of all thoughts. Thistransdisciplinary research, drawing on alr/tography, queer theory, and applied toAlmodóvar’s films, is a “derivative” one; it lacks the notion of a pristine original since thereis no original from which to copy, as the poststructuralists taught us. By borrowing fromthese methodological approaches, my thesis reproduces them through relentless processes ofimitation, however it cannot entirely represent the source of its citation. Impersonating othermethodologies fulfills me.I argue that this arrangement of methodologies not only assists my research but alsocontributes to art educators’ association of visual culture education with transdisciplinarypractices. Art education lacks concepts and approaches for understanding contemporaryvisual culture, for example, when the focus is on conditions surrounding viewing rather thanon the aesthetic objects, or when the center of attention is the study of new and integratedmedias, film, video, websites, and so forth, instead of the fine arts. Also, my methodologicalapproach values multiple ways of knowing and critical thinking in visual culture education;thus the acceptance of several perspectives, discourses, and understandings about cultural107life. I assert that this mélange of theoretical frameworks impacts curriculum development,teaching, researching and learning in visual culture education.Labor: Air/tography and Border Epistemology as Forms of Epistemological linquiryHere I briefly describe a few key conceptual aspects of alr/tography, given that manyother sources already provide extensive ideas and descriptive examples of alr/tography (SeeDarts, 2004; de Cosson, 2002, 2003; R. Irwin, 2003; See R. Irwin & Springgay, In press;Springgay, 2001; Springgay et al., 2005; S. Wilson et al., 2002). I have chosen thetheoretical métissage of alr/tography as one of my approaches to reviewing Almodóvar’svisual representations of gender and sexuality because, as a critical pedagogy, it is deeplycommitted to the development of transdiciplinary ways of knowing and practicing research,art and teaching within visual culture education. Moreover, to permit it to theorizecontiguous interactions among the roles of artist, researcher, teacher, and their fluidassociations involving image and word, alr/tography’s theoretical structure is steeped in thescholarship of French poststructural philosophy, phenomenology, educational actionresearch, feminist theories, and contemporary art criticism with all of which I fully relate.Following a recently growing movement within the educational system to identify andrecognize the possibilities of integrating visual culture and research practices, Rita Irwin,collaborating with a research group from the University of British Columbia, has beenarticulating alr/tography as a methodology. A/r/tography has been conceptualized as a livingmethodology, practice, and form of action research, in which the broadly conceivedidentities of Artist, Researcher, and Teacher function in a web of “prac/theore-tical”interrelations. Thus, to make possible these “lived/living” experiences and understandings,108alr/tlographers emplacement is within the liminal spaces among artist, researcher, andteacher that in turn provokes alr/tographers to happen, exist, pertain, retain, dwell, be andbecome in the in-between spaces of inquiry.According to frwin and Springgay (In press) the constructs and conditions ofalr/tographical research are: practice based research, communities of practice, relationalaesthetics and the six renderings of engagement: contiguity, living inquiry, metaphormetonymy, openings, reverberations, and excess. Springgay, Irwin and Wilson Kind (2005)further explain the role and concept of renderings within alr/tography as follow:The intent of the term rendering is not to offer a criterion-based model, nor tosuggest that these six are descriptions of alr/tography. Each rendering is not anisolated event but rather formed in relationships with each other. So too, there is amediation and meditation between these six renderings that leaves open the potentialfor additional renderings, and the activity that exists in their intersections.Renderings offer possibilities of engagement. To render, to give, to present, toperform, to become—offers for action, the opportunity for living inquiry. Researchthat breathes. Research that listens. Renderings are not methods. They are not listsof verbs initiated in order to create an arts-based or alr/tographical study.Renderings are theoretical spaces through which to explore artistic ways of knowingand being research. They may inform the doing of research, the final representation,and/or the ways in which viewers/readers understand and access an alr/tographicaltext. For renderings also return and/or give back. (p 899)Accordingly, these renderings conduct us to multi-possibilities for engagement becauserenderings do not exist on their own but in intercessions. The renderings presenta/r/tographers with the environment for pedagogical agency in which meaning issimultaneously an influence and consequence of continuous interaction between creativeartistic and educational inquiry. The renderings are the theoretical basis of alr/tography, andtheir task is threefold: to provoke, assist and complicate multifaceted exchanges andintenelation within inquiry, aesthetics and learning, as follow:109The Six Renderings ofAir/tography (all citations from Springgay et al., 2005, pp. 900-908)Contiguity: A/r/tography is a coming together of art and graphy, or image andword. It is a doubling of visual and textual that complement, extend, refuteand/or subvert one another. Contiguity is also emphasized in ourunderstanding of the roles of artist/ researcher/teacher or the practices of artmaking/researching/teaching. Rather the intent of drawing attention to theseroles is to also speak of their interrelatedness, their shifting, transitory nature,and to make visible the spaces in between the roles, and the activity inherentin practicing these roles.Living Inquiry: In alr/tography, visual, written, and performative processesare enacted as a living practice of art making, researching, and teaching. Theyare not merely activities added to one’s life, but are the processes by whichone’s life is lived so that “who one is becomes completely caught up in whatone knows and does” (p. xvii). One cannot separate, through abstract means,visual and textual interpretations of lived experiences (Meskimmon, 2003).• Metaphor and Metonymy: More importantly, it is the movement withindisplacement that provides metonymy with its pulse of difference,recognizing the extent to which signifiers dislodge ‘others’ with partial,opaque representations, not only revealing meanings, events, objects, but alsoobscuring them in this very act. This play between meanings does not suggesta limitless positionality, where interpretation is open to any whim or chance.It is the tension provoked by this doubling, between limitlless that maintainsmeaning’s possibility. While metaphor is the substitution of signifiers, where110one signifier takes the place of the other in the signifying chain, the twosignifiers are not equal; one does not absorb the other in unification.Openings: AIr/tographic knowing un/folds, stretches out, and is exposed. Itis raw, like the frayed edges of a piece of fabric; threadbare like lace.However, openings are not passive holes through which one passes easily, orthat allow one to see through with distinct clarity. These openings are cuts,cracks, slits and tears, refusing comfort, predictability, and safety deliberatelyseeking out “the difficult, the unknown, the ambiguous, [and] theunpredictable” (Sumara, 1999, p. 42). Openings are invitations that leaveroom for encounters between artistlresearcher/teacher and reader/viewerentangling experience(s).• Reverberations within a/r/tography call attention to the movement, thequaking, shaking, measure and rhythm that shifts other meanings to thesurface (Aoki, 1996). These vibrations allow artmaking/researching/teaching to sink deeply, to penetrate, and to resonate withechoes of each other. Reverberations also excite possible slippages ofmeaning, where the act of returning is not mirrored, but a performance whereeach reverberation resists and pushes forward towards new understandings.• Excess is an ongoing practice concerned not with inserting facts and figures,images and representations into language, but with creating an opening wherecontrol and regulation disappears... .Vacillating between conservation anddestruction, excess becomes a movement towards anything; everythingreturning in a dynamic momentum. More traditionally excess has been111associated with bodily states: excrement, the anus, blood, sex, orgasms, andabuse. Such associations carry with them the weight of the monstrous, theother, hierarchical class distinctions whereby the deviant and abhorrentthreatens discipline and control. This excess is the excess of waste, the stuffof discipline and re-pair.Compulsiveness: The Visual and Textual within A/r/tographyThe dialectic of text and image has long provoked theoretical speculations,contradictory and hybrid relationships, radical conflicts, and conciliatory synthesis, and stillpromises to be increasingly important today. Historically, the inherent contradictionsbetween scriptural (word) and iconic (image) texts have had a strong impact on definingWestern culture. From ancient middle-eastern civilization until now, word and image havebeen the basis for intense dialogues wherein each has been in search of absolute power overthe other. Each has achieved an evident degree of power in distinct historical periods. Butneither of these texts has ever absolutely reigned over the other, since words and images arepart of the same construct; they owe to each other their own existence. Nevertheless, as wearrived at the turn of the twenty-first century, the situation is such that the visual hastremendous power over our everyday lives. Accordingly, I assume that visual cultureeducators should be predisposed to understand and act upon this condition.We, westerners, occidentals, post-occidentals have been socially constructed underthe burden of the idea that words are the material base for rationality and that images aresubstandard ways of knowledge because they are related to magic, creativity, uncertainty,and illusion. Additionally, the ideas of literacy have typically privileged logic and112univocality while iconological thoughts have searched for multivocality. Albeit the samecharacteristics associated with images also “belong” to written words, because they arevisuals, they depend on visualization (revelation, apparition, etc) to exist. During the projectof modernity with which we lived for at least the last four centuries, the clash seems to havebeen between the abstract intellectuality of words and the sensorial perceptions of images.Nevertheless in recent years, within the academy, many scholars (e.g. Barone, 2003; Barone& Eisner, 1997; Coulter, 1999; Diamond, 2001; Eisner, 2002; Eisner & Day, 2004; ElbazLuwisch, 2002; Epps, 1998; Fox & Geichman, 2001; Pearse, 1992; Phillips, 1995;Piantanida et al., 2003; Saarnivara, 2003; Sava & Nuutinen, 2003; Slattery, 2001, 2003;Slattery & Langerock, 2002; Taylor, 2002; Van Halen-Faber & Diamond, 2002; WilsonKind, 2002) have been attempting to understand, value and conceive art making as a modeof scholarly inquiry; and this developed into newly acknowledged arts-based forms ofresearch, and arts-based educational research. Art making should be understood here in itshistorical contexts of production, formal qualities, and sensorial aspects. The key argumentfor arts-based forms of research is that they disrupt the “standard” methods through whichresearch is shaped, performed, conducted, and understood. Arts-based forms of researchintentionally displace established modes of research and knowledge making, while allowinga polystemic research and its multiple meanings, and emphasizing uncertainty, artistry,imagination, illusion, insight, visualization, and dynamism.AIr/tography is just one way to theorize and practice arts-based forms of researchand arts-based forms of educational research. The main constitutive aspects ofalr/tographical work, the visual (images) and textual (words), are discourses that encountereach other in permanent conversation. It is, among other things, a dialogue of image and113word in which the flow of meaning may not obey any hierarchical order; it is a fluiddialogue in which alr/tographers, engaged in a lived inquiry, provoke themselves and othersthrough visual and textual representations or performances that inform and form each other.Springgay, Irwin & Wilson Kind (2005) argue that alr/tography is a doubling of visual andtextual that complement, extend, refute and/or subvert one another, as follows:The doubling of art and graphy is important when conceiving of a methodology thatincludes both visual and written processes and products of a research text.Respectively, the use of the terms “text/ual” make present the implications of “texts”beyond, outside, unknown, and tangential to the visual and the written. Thus,a/r/tography includes an understanding of positionality and intersubjectivity.Through doubling, hegemonic categorizations of knowledge production are troubled,infusing both the art and the graphy with intention and attentiveness. This doublingis not a static rendering of two elements positioned as separate and distinct, but it isthe contiguous interaction and the movement between art and graphy that researchbecomes a lived endeavour. (p. 900)Springgay, Irwin and Wilson Kind (2005) further explain alr/tographical research as situatedwithin conversations exploring understandings and experiences: acts of negotiating meaningbetween texts and images. Furthermore, it is pointed out that in this vibrant dialogue of textand image one does not erase the other: rather, they merge or they might become somethingelse since alr/tography encourages their differences.Contamination: From Air/tographical Practice to Visual Culture; Pedagogical ApplicationsAt this juncture, I depart from a confessional and personal narrative in order to givedetails of how an alr/tographical orientation uses visual and textual practices to disturb,influence, connect, inform and form inquiry; and also, more specifically in my research, howthe interactive identities within alr/tography are engaged to inquire into and with queertheory and Almodóvar’s queer visuals. In this segment a number of questions are asked toorient the reader and myself: How do the images in my thesis function in dialogue with the114text? What specific insights about Almodóvar’s queer filmic discourse and queer theoryhave I gained from my alr/tographic inquiry? What specifically did I learn, and why is thissort of visual inquiry important for visual culture education? Moreover, what did I learn inthe process that would otherwise not have become apparent?To contextualize these questions it is important to note that I have never studied in alearning setting like the Faculty of Education at UBC; I have only studied in visual arts anddesign schools and universities. When I commenced the PhD program this new ambianceprofoundly disturbed me, because I felt castrated of the openness, directness, bluntness,unpredictability and amorality I had experienced before in art schools. Moreover, I found itdifficult to articulate a response to this situation using only oral or written texts. Influencedby an arts-based research course that I took with Rita Irwin and Kit Grauer, I felt the need to“tell visual stories”; that is, to create visual narratives based on the general concept of queervisual representations of gender and sexuality. Amazingly, the sincerity, openness, softness,sonority and impact of these narratives allowed me, initially, to explore my everydayexperience of discomfort and strangeness at being in an intimidating situation, then toexplore a daily inquiry into queer visual representations, and finally to establish a point ofdeparture for my research, teaching and artistic practice during this project. By developingthese visual narratives intertwined with the texts, I now realize how knowing through acreative process disrupts the concept of a coherent, projected, and safe knowledge within aformal educational setting. I also recognize that artists, as well as educators and scholars, usepractices that necessitate excitable discourses for effusively conveying private and sharedmeanings within an educational system. I also believe that the creative ways of knowingfound within alr/tography inherently disrupt knowledge through the sheer juxtapositions,115interactions and disjunctures that happen between textual and visual elements within a visualnarrative body, while keeping the intrinsic differences between visual and textual elementsintact.Yet I have also learned that a/r/tography needs to explore another constituent tofurther strengthen its practices. I argue that there is an important element missing in thetheorization of alr/tography: that is, the power of orality as the needle that interlaces textualand visual elements. The mediations in alr/tography need a third space to happen, but I,posited here as an alr/tographer, claim that a more complex relationship among written text,visual (senses), and oral articulation must be acknowledged. As a visual arts educator Ilearned that the act of alr/tography involves textual, visual and oral ideas and processesthrough a continuous flow of relations. And this flow of relations opens spaces for thealr/tographer to visualize the position of the artist/teacher/researcher subjectivity in theprocess of reading, making, viewing, and speaking. It is in this flow of relations thata/r/tographical practices are informed through the making of and assigning of meaning totexts, images, and speech employed by a/r/tographers as they create, read, speak, watch, andview. A/r/tographical works and alr/tographers cannot perform these actions required todevelop a flow of relations essential for their existence without the mediation of thediscursive practice of speech.I claim that there are many practical strategies visual culture educators may use tograsp the web of relations and their malleability in order to inquire a/r/tographically. For thenext few paragraphs I will briefly present some of these strategies. Firstly, visual cultureeducators must be open to a passionate exploration of the fractures that lie between selfidentity and understanding oral, visual, and textual representations. Thus, alr/tographers116must draw from phenomenology in order to provoke an autobiographical narration of livedexperiences, not only drawing from memory but also from the body. Narration fora/r/tography could be understood as a performance, as Ted T. Aoki and Doug Aoki (2005)explain:The problem is that narration is yet another performance and that autobiography isyet another presumption of the presence of the narrating performer. To put this another way,the problem with the narration of the subject is not the inevitability of its failure, but ratherthe possibility of its success. The performative caution is not that the narration cannot makethe subject present, but rather that narration is the only way to do so. That is, the subject isnever present in and of itself. In Lacanian terms, before the subject is positioned in thesymbolic order—before it is written into social existence—the subject is only present aslack. It is only produced (as present) through discursive gestures whose archetype is thenarration of the self. This is the pertinent lesson of the Derridean, “there is nothing outsidethe text”: the subject only comes to be the subject which drives its narrative production. Thatis, it is because the subject is not “there” that its story gets told. For Butler, social identityonly persists because it continuously fails. The incessance of failure necessitates the iterationof its recuperation. Hence the characteristically repetitive nature of social life: we need to“perform” the same social gestures again and again, often on a daily basis, to be able tosustain the images of ourselves as female or male, gay or straight, teacher or student. Forexample, sex may appear to be biologically determined, and it is generally taught as such,but even its factuality demands discursive support. (p. 243)Thus, through processes of reiterations of accounts of lived experiences, visualculture educators narratively explore the activities of alr/tography involving the entire body,117and hence move from a focus on the conceptual to establish a dialogue with the physicalbody of knowledge. More importantly, according to post structural thought as discussed byTed T. Aoki and Doug Aoki, the creation of these visual narratives becomes the verydiscursive means of constructing visual culture educators’ subjectivities. Moreover, thesealr/tographical explorations encourage visual culture educators to shamelessly, defiantly andboldly produce representations that embrace their inner desire, and emphasize the role of thebody in giving meaning to experience and identity formation. Through a/r/tography visualculture educators are able to analyze the processes by which they come to assume theirpositions as artists, researchers, teachers, and learners. Rather than assuming that visual arteducators’ identities are obvious and fixed, alr/tography, like queer theory, assists in tracingthe processes that construct identity within language and discourse.My thesis did not set out to define what alr/tography is or how it must performed orpracticed. AIr/tography, after all, is a lived practice in which each a/r/tographer interrogateshis/her emergent understanding within her/his basic theoretical framework. A/r/tography is ashifting concept that gradually evolves over the course of creating alr/tographical pieces andconversing with other alr/tographers: thus it is a difficult task to define alr/tography with anycertainty. However, the attentive viewer must notice that the form and method of analr/tographical work always perform the theory that they represent. In this light, I was drawnto the practice of alr/tography and in turn, my own art making became a starting point forexamining relationships between visual culture theory and practice. A/r/tographycontaminated, altered, and diversified my practices. Moreover, the art or the visuals createdwithin this a/r/tographical approach were created through inquiries directly connected to thepractices of a/nt. In my case, for example, defining a research project was more an act of118visual inference than conclusions that I arrived at from written texts. When I decided onAlmodóvar’s filmic discourses on gender and sexuality as my chosen sites of analysis, I hadalready seen all his movies, and only then did I come to the decision that it was necessary toestablish a conversation among art education, visual culture, and queer theory. I arrived atAlmodóvar’s work from my own visual and subjective standpoint.While conducting literature reviews on texts of visual culture education, queertheory, transculturalism and Almodóvar’s visuals, I collected, on a daily basis, literallythousands of images that helped me to inquire into the projects, concepts, theories, andnotions commonly viewed and represented, and into problems that became apparent— andof great interest to me. Furthermore, to frame my research questions I had to read visuallyand “writerly” (Barthes, 1986) Almodóvar’s visual representations. While collecting andseeing, watching and viewing his stills, clips and movies I recognized the paucity of thiswork in art education discourse; there is a tendency to focus on one unity of representation,one object, one image, one painting or one sculpture. Although one film, as a unity, isalready a multiplicity of images placed one after another, I chose to study not one visualrepresentation but Almodóvar’s film discourse, using three of his films. The alr/tographicalpractice allowed me to foresee the possibilities of different approaches and implications ofviewing/reading visual representations. Moreover this alr/tographical practice pointed outfor me other discursive viewings that analyze not only authors but also, themes, genres, andmedia discourses.Throughout my PhD program, I created visual narratives within each course; and theend result is the electronic book Border Epistemologies, annexed to this thesis. This e-bookis an assemblage made from all visual journals I created through a series of written texts and119mixed media, collages, paintings, photographs, and graphic designs. Although I made threeDigital Video Recordings, or DVDs, for this thesis they are not included for technologicalreasons. These journals had an affect and an effect on my practices at UBC as a teacher,researcher, student, and artist because they functioned as key locations of my alr/tographicalprocesses until the assembling of the final e-book. My view is that these alr/tographicalpractices provide visual culture educators with the possibility of thinking about teaching, artmaking, researching and learning processes in ways that have not previously been explored.In this sense I argue that alr/tography helps visual culture educators to translate theirexperience from the visual to a space in between the visual and text. Also, I assert that thisspace is the means to critically question one’s a/nt practices through the ongoing practice ofliving inquiry. For example, through the interference of the visual with the written text,research questions continuously evolve, re-emerge, submerge, and readjust over and overagain.I must highlight that my visual representations through the e-book are not intended tobe understood as stunning, artful embellishments to, and illustrations of, the thesis text, butrather are a simultaneous and interwoven process of making meaning in conversation withthe written texts. Through this experience I have been learning that the alr/tographicalpractice is an active one: it disturbs visual culture educators’ comfort zones within theireducational and art performances; it revives and intensifies empathy and playfulness whileat the same time routinely registering one’s personal development and forming a sense offamiliarity with the subject studied. To promote an alr/tographical process I worked througha group of twenty-nine concepts that covered the scope of my concerns and later became thechapters and subchapters of this thesis:120Absorption Disruption Intermingling OverfillAffinity Dressing Irony OverhaulAloofness Dwelling Labor ReinstatementAppetite Dying Liminalities ResonanceCompulsiveness Effort Loss RoutesContamination: Embodiments Mapping RummageCuriosity Emplacement Noise RumorContiguity Fragrance Nomads SublimityDeliverance Gain Opening TransparencyDerivations Gaze Overdub UnoriginalityDevouring Hallucination Overdye UnpredictabilityDiscretion Inconsistency Overeat UnrulinessFurthermore, I appropriated an entire body of work from Almodóvar to refer to mypersonal relationship with the PhD program and how I responded to some presentations,lectures, and so forth. I went through the whole program facing my difficulties with writtenand spoken English. Therefore I “lurked” in every session, presentation, and email exchangeand felt terribly disturbed because I am too shy to speak to large audiences. Thus by visuallywriting, using my memory of images and texts, and letting my bodily senses and desireswork freely, I was able to inquire in a space that emerged through a chain of reenactment,reiterations, and imitations which could not have been produced without undergoing analr/tographical process.The whole e-book comes together as a material object at the same moment that adialogue between the verbal and the iconic points toward a new and powerful strategy forinterpreting everyday life through images and one’s own subjectivity. Following thisperspective, I argue that by directly placing autobiographical references in the e-book Iexploit intuition, which changes in the process of artistic inquiry to consciousness, andtransforms emotion and knowledge into interpretation, which can be repeatedly replaced121with new interpretation. Furthermore, I claim that beyond the interpretation of the e-book Iam both the location under discussion by the c-book and the constructed subjectivity that is aresult of its development.The central visual signs for the c-book are firstly the Polaroid photos of bubble gumstains on public pavements that I have been taking since 1993 in many parts of the world,which signal my traveling and my search for home, safe space and place; and are metaphorsto better address concepts of belonging, displacement and border, includingartist/researcher/teacher and student. Secondly, there is a regular use of maps, flags, stamps,envelopes, coins, corsets, and dresses, which I read as instruments of regulation and control.Thirdly there are a great variety of stills from Pedro Almodóvar displaying traces of hisvisual performances, as images of the borderland: for example, bodies, colors, settings, andso forth. Fourthly, there is a compulsion with representing dot, spot, point, blotch arrangedin symmetrical and asymmetrical patterns. The dots can be read as narratives with somedegree of continuity and discontinuity, and as the repetition of themes when we tell a story.Ultimately I consider that my most prevalent art making has been viewing, and Idraw attention to the creativity of viewing for visual culture educators, the dialogicalmovement through a multiplicity of levels of anxiety and comprehension, the shiftingmovement from appreciation and consciousness to understanding, from desire to knowledge.However, the viewer has to be able to produce the terms of these dialogical relationships;that is, “to be able to speak from both sides, to incorporate, or not, what is important, or not,about what has been seen and understood” (Burnett, 1995, p. 43).122Effort: Queer Theory and ResearchThe key word in my project is transdisciplinariry. Transdisciplinarity as a complexprocess draws together discipline-specific theories, concepts, and approaches to addressquestions through a shared conceptual framework that is more than juxtaposition and morethan the arrangement of one discipline along side another. Transdisciplinarity transgressesthe ways in which we know the world surrounding us by not worshiping disciplinaryboundaries. Therefore, while I am critical and interested in dialoguing with many fields ofknowledge, this thesis is not intended as a demonstration of the advancement oftransdisciplinary research within art education practice. Given that, I affirm that in this thesisI am far less interested in interdisciplinary practices, which create a space for meetings inthe boundaries of disciplines, than in transdisciplinarity, as a more comprehensiveframework where the meetings of disciplines and knowledge systems juxtapose and engulftheir borders. So led by Spivak’s assertion, I am at ease with the fact that “I am not eruditeenough to be interdisciplinary, but I can break rules” (1999, p. xiii).In alr/tography and queer theory discourses, concepts from anthropology, sociology,literary criticism, philosophy, visual culture, visual studies, education, and psychoanalysisundergo collective transformations; they merge and hybridize. Thus, I argue that hybridtransdisciplinary practices such as these are complementary, providing me with powerfulmeans for a subjective mediation and agency in the study of visual culture education.As aforementioned alr/tography’ s theoretical structure has been built upon the workof post-structural thinking. I argue that it essentially transpires through the philosophicalconcepts, elements and strategies developed by four philosophers: Gilles Deleuze, FelixGatarri, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida (see Dow, 1993; Marks, 1998; May, 1997;123McQuillan, 2001; Sheppard, 1997). AJr/tography draws primarily from Deleuze and hislongtime partnership work with Gattari on the concepts of rhizomes, the fold, multiplicity,becomings, flux, mappings, landscapes, and the aesthetics of sensation. From Jean-LucNancy the concepts of being-with, thinking in community, relationality, and betweennessare widely explored. And finally Derrida’s deconstruction plays an important role in theassembly of alr/tography; and its strategies, such as derailed communication andundecidability, deliberately or unconsciously deeply affect the development of alr/tography.The hinges, oppositions, indeterminacy, pharmakon, the supplement, overturning,displacement, the metaphysics of presence, the trace, differance, iterability, citationality,signatures, contamination, and the parergon are approaches or deconstructive acts that areembedded in alr/tographycal methodology.As earlier declared, queer theory questions the fixed categories of sexual identity andthe cognitive paradigms generated by heteronormativity. As does alr/tography, queertheorists also rely on and often draw on deconstruction to destabilize the “self’, who isheterosexual, white, and middle class, and they constantly question these same overturnedand displaced categories. According to queer theory the displaced self is still a subject thatneeds relentless attention to avoid fixedness. Gender theorists initially viewed the categoryof I?genderH as a human construct enacted by a vast repetition of social performances.Accordingly gender categories do not merely reflect the “social” but rather they are productsof culture and also help to create them. Moreover, queer theory draws attention to theconstruction of identities of all people, bodies, things or entities that refuse gender or/andsexual categorization.124Contained by these assertions, my approach to queer theory in this thesis is restrictedmainly to Judith Butler’s work; and I employ her key concept of performativity and hersubsequent ideas on performance, repetition, reiteration and parody because they arerelevant concepts that directly assist me with my research questions. Also to a lesser extent Idraw on the work of Eve Sedgwick, Diana Fuss, and Teresa de Lauretis, who, along withJudith Butler, I select as keystones of queer thinking. Since my inquiry does not attempt toanswer the question of what queer theory is, but rather explores it as an interpretiveframework, I now turn to the work of these scholars.In earlier work Sedgwick (1985) reflects on the components of male hornosocialrelationships pointing to a connection between erotic and friendship bonds between men,and questions the representation of this relationship and the fluidity of gender categories.Sedgwick claims that heteronormativity masks the occurrence of homosocial associations. Inlater work, Sedgwick (1990) affirms that the secrecy of closeted sexual behavior ororientation has had an irrefutable outcome on culture and history, and ponders the historicalcreation of a homosexual identity and the gender construction of homosexual people.Sedgwick explains that historically there have been two contradictory aspects of closetformation: one based on an essentializing view that avows that there is an apparent group ofpersons who are homosexuals (minoritizing view), and the other which is a more flexibleview asserts that sexual desire is unpredictable (universalizing view). Hence “heterosexuals”would, might, could, may possibly express same sex desires as well. However, rather thenarguing for the validity of either of these two tendencies, Sedgwick proposes a wovenapproach to these categories. Along with Sedgwick, Fuss (1989, 1991) renounces binaryessentialism/constructionism and argues that, to a great extent, the former is more flexible,125and the latter more normative and essentialist than previously theorized. As an alternativeshe proposes cunning acts of ongoing critical awareness. Consequently Fuss’ impulse is tomove from the questioning approach to the performative means by which sexualreinterpretation builds on the idea of multiple identities.In The Technology of Gender De Lauretis (1987) states that thinking of gender assexual difference sustains the prevailing ideas of woman as the difference from man. DeLauretis avers that the subject is social, cultural and historical and therefore fluctuating. Soin order to move from this model of thinking through differences, de Lauretis proposesdisplacing the thought of the masculine at the core of humanity, and deconstructing thebinary position: man/woman. As Hoofd (1997) explains:In order to deconstruct this binary of Man (oppressor, subject, at the centre) versusWoman (oppressed, other, marginalized) she uses the theory of representation, orsemiotics. Gender, she states, is a representation, and its social construction is thisrepresentation of gender. Gender is not (biological) sex, but a system of meaningspredicated on the conceptual dichotomy of two biological sexes. Thus gender assigns(constructed and therefore theoretically changeable) identity, status, value andlocation in family structures to individuals within a certain society. Gender thus hasthe function of constituting individuals as men and women, she says. She hereequates gender with the Aithusserian notion of ideology of which he said that it hadthe function of constituting concrete individuals as subjects. Now, any system ofrepresentation or constitutive (like cinema and books, but also for instance everydayfamily life or feminist theory) that helps carrology of gender. (para. 12)Consequently, and according to de Lauretis, the notions of gender that follow a constructivemodel, as presented by de Lauretis herself, Sedgwick and Butler, tend to moderate the powerof the “naturalness” of the previous dichotomy and emphasize the performativity of gender.Moreover, de Lauretis (1991) in her studies of spectatorship and narrative in cinema, pointsout that narrative creates a situation in which the woman spectator is trapped between twothings: the gaze and the image. De Lauretis studies disturb the stable and prevailing ideas126that the gaze controls the negotiations of the process of viewing films, the gaze-within-film,and images; and are valuable to some understanding of Almodóvar’s works.To further emphasize the focus in Butler’s work, I briefly present some notions ofher concept of performativity. Butler’s work “derives” from a questioning of interrelationsof sex, gender and sexuality as systems of difference and from the way that “digressing”gender and sexualities displace these systems. Butler confronts notions of fixed genderidentities upon which discourses of sex/gender/sexual difference have been established. Inorder to assert that gender is produced and established by cultural acts, Butler initially drewfrom Michel Foucault’ s ideas that subjects are produced in discourse and are not intrinsicbeings; the subject is an effect of systems of power/knowledge that are culturally andhistorical specific. Butler informs us that non-normative genders and sexualities directenormous effort towards the construction of fixed identities: for example gay, lesbian, andtransgender; however those actions simply reiterate the social power of heterosexuality.Consequently she presented the notion of the production of identity through a reiteration ofperformative acts as a form of resistance to cultural control. Butler posits the performativeproduction of gender, in which gender is constructed through a series of recurring andcompulsory performances forced by prevailing regimes of gender. Moreover, Butler alsoputs emphasis on the reiteration of performances that purposely imitate gender or traces inwhich gender has been determined; as drag queens and kings who destabilize fixed views ofsexual or gender difference by employing a parodic performance of gender. Theperformative nature of both difference and identity is a key component for the dismantlingor disruption of sex/gender fixities. Discussion of the problems of gender/sex/sexualityposed by Butler creates the possibility of showing the diverse spaces opened up by127suggesting that not only sexual orientation and gender, but also the body, may be open tomultiple readings.Unpredictability: Gathering informationThe transdisciplinary attribute of my project allowed it openness but also setrestrictions mainly due to power resistance among the many disciplines, fields, and stanceswith which I have been dialoguing. The efforts that I have committed myself to in thisproject required engagement with disciplinary specificities, bodies and languages that wereat times strenuous and intricate processes. I do not want to emphasize obstacles that graduatestudents engaged in transdisciplinarity have to confront but rather to stress the multi-possibilities of taking on this kind of research. Actually while working in thistransdisciplinary research I discovered one attribute that I never thought I had: being patientto understand other disciplines’ languages, demands, and discourses, while dialoguing withmy supervisor and committee as we came to understand the pressures in which my questionsare embedded.I chose to study Almodóvar’s films for several reasons. Firstly, the multiplemeanings and intertextual characteristics of his filmic texts disturb normal representation ofsex/gender/sexuality. Secondly, as an out gay film director he approaches film from a borderposition. Thirdly, Almodóvar’s films offer a variety of analytical possibilities.I attempted to study most of Almodóvar’s fifteen films but the analysis here isrestricted to his narrative films in general and, at the time of writing, to his latest threemovies: Bad Education, Talk to Her, and All about My Mother. Although these three filmscharacterize Almodóvar’s discourses slightly differently, I decided to explore them because128they are more multifaceted than his earlier movies, and his characters, cinematography, andmise-en-scene are more directly relational to his overall visual representations. Furthermore,these three latest films have become more refined; his earlier defiantly confrontationalapproach has changed into a cinema teeming with representational references that deal withliminalities, contiguities, reverberations, openings, and lived experiences. Moreover, Talk toHer is considered a follow-up of All about My Mother and Bad Education is the rupturewithin this sequence. Besides, it was very important to choose these films because All aboutMy Mother is about those who want to become and are women; Talk to Her is about thedifficulty of dialogue between men and women, and Bad Education refers to a male whomasquerades as a manlwomanltransgender and heterosexual/homosexual/bisexual in orderto become an actor.My ways of understanding these films are diversified, that is, I use severalinterpretive tools from queer theory and air/tography as part of my approach for analyzingand discussing the possible meanings of the films. I translate the countless concealed,exposed and overexposed meanings of these films in order to understand if they informvisual culture education theory and practice. Also, by analyzing them I explore in what waysthe utilization of the films, as geographies of border epistemologies of queer sexuality andgender are significant to visual culture education practices.However, these are not comprehensive analyses; the approached employed here isonly concerned with thematic analysis (gender and sexuality). But Almodóvar’s films’particular vocabulary, terminology, and structure, such as self-referentiality, appropriation,and intertextuality, are considered when necessary. The idea is not to investigate only oneaspect of film such as cinematography, sound, stills, movements, visual representation, or129text, but the wholeness as a dialogue among them. Hence analysis is not focused only on theconstituent elements of each film, it is also applied to the three movies as a longer “film”,that is, I analyze Almodóvar’s discourse on representations of gender and sexuality ratherthan the specifics of his genre, style, etc. As a thesis soaked in cultural studies the analysisprimarily operates from a political perspective, departing from the belief that the language offilm can expose the way that people are oppressed within current social structures, sincepeople are formed by language as individuals and as social subjects.I never visualized this research as drawing on distinct methodologies with clear,standardized procedures. I prefer to use a blurred genre of research and that is the reason Ichose and brought into play alr/tography and queer theory as approaches to my thesis. Istress this because I would like to keep the area of methodology wide open. I will focus myattention in queer theory and alr/tography but the analysis is primarily informed by thepillars of cultural studies: rejection of elitist notions, questioning of socialinterconnectedness, interest in everyday cultural life, disrupting borders between disciplines,and above all displacing notions of normality. Therefore, I strive to understand howAlmodóvar’s discursive film representations of gender and sexuality work, or not, to createpower inbalance.ConduitsDue to the transdisciplinary nature of my work I had to conduct more than oneexploratory literature review to help me to continuously pull together my questions. Iassembled the literature reviews by adopting important concepts addressed nowadays inrelation to art education (the emergence of visual culture education & arts based educational130research), queer theory (modes of analysis), postcolonialism (Latin-Americanism) and PedroAlmodóvar’s films (Representations of gender and sexuality).resources.• Primary sources: Pedro Almodóvar’s films• Secondary sources: Documents (books, dissertations, theses, academic journals,periodicals, magazines, conference papers, conference proceedings, website articles,private documents, and email conversations) visual materials (photography, digitalmedia, digital photography, film clips, video clips, and DVD), audio materials(sounds and music).Essential for this thesis was the utilization of libraries, computerized databases,personal and private archives, and film archives. It was crucial to collect information in loco.Documents and audio visuals were collected, photocopied, and reviewed, in the following:• Centro de DocumentaciOn Pedro Almodóvar at the ICA, Instituto de EstudiosAvancados de la Communicacion Audio Visual da Universidade de CastillaLa Mancha, Spain.• Centro de DocumentacIon Digital Pedro Almodóvar Cuenca ICAUCLM,Campus Universitario de Cuenca, Spain.• El Deseo S.A., Madrid.• Filmoteca Nacional, Madrid.• Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid.• Filmoteca Española, Instituto de Ia CinematografIa y de las ArtesAudiovisuales, Madrid.131In addition further documents were collected in Castilla La Mancha (Toledo andMadrid), Andalucia (Sevilha, los pueblos blancos, Córdoba, Ronda, and Cádiz) and at theValencian community (Valencia), Spain.ConclusionIn summary this chapter has attempted to draw attention to alr/tography and queertheory as the fluctuant methodologies of my thesis.I have chosen the theoretical mdtissage of alr/tography as one of my approaches toexamining Almodóvar’s visual representations of gender and sexuality because as a criticalpedagogy, it is deeply committed to the development of transdisciplinary ways of knowingand practicing research, art and teaching within visual culture education. In alr/tography andqueer theory discourses, concepts from diverse disciplines of knowledge undergo collectivetransformations. Thus these transdisciplinary practices provide me with powerful means fora subjective mediation and agency in the study of visual culture education.Queer theory is concerned with normative definitions of sex, gender, and sexualityand questions the fixed categories of sexual identity and the cognitive paradigms generatedby heteronormativity. Contained by these assertions, I highlight that my approach to queertheory is restricted mainly to the work of a key queer theorist: Judith Butler. I make use ofher concept of performativity and her subsequent ideas on performance, repetition,reiteration and parody because they are relevant concepts that directly assist me with myresearch questions. Also to a lesser extent I draw on the work of Eve Sedgwick, Diana Fuss,and Teresa de Lauretis.The importance of queer theory to my research is threefold:132• it assists me analyzing discursive and cultural practices,• it provides an unfolding theoretical configuration for promoting transgressiveinquiry,• it helps me to unravel the arrangement of overlapping, ambiguous,paradoxical, ironic, impossible, and challenging positionalities ofAlmodóvar’s filmic representations.I chose Almodóvar’s films to study for several reasons. Firstly, the multiplemeanings and intertextual characteristics of his filmic texts disturb normal representation ofsex/gender/sexuality. Secondly, as an out gay film director he approaches film from a borderposition. Thirdly, Almodóvar’s films offer a variety of analytical possibilities. The analysishere is restricted to narrative film in general and to Almodóvar’s latest three movies: BadEducation, Talk to Her, and All about My Mother. The approach employed is mainlyconcerned with some thematic analysis (gender and sexuality) and some issues that affectAlmodóvar’s particular vocabulary, terminology, and structure (self-referentiality,appropriation, intertextuality, etc) within a filmic text. Analyses are not focused only on theconstituent elements of each film but are applied to the three movies as a longer “film”, thatis, I am interested in analyzing the discourse rather than the genre, style, and specificities ofeach film.As a final point I stress that in spite of focusing my attention in queer theory anda/r/tography, my analysis is primarily informed by the objectives of cultural studies:rejection of elitism, interest in everyday cultural life, questioning of socialinterconnectedness, disruption of borders between disciplines, and above all troublingnormality.133CHAPTER 7GazeOn the map ofyour empire, 0 Great Khan, there must be room both for the big,stone Fedora, and the little Fedoras in glass globes. Not because they are equallyreal, but because they are only assumptions. The one contains what is accepted asnecessary when it is not yet so; the other, what is imagined as possible and, amoment later, is possible no longerItalo Calvino, Cities and Desire 4, in invisible cities (1972, P. 28)In Gaze I introduce features of Almodóvar’s aesthetics, explore his notions of filmicenunciation, and look at how and to what extent Almodóvar’s visual representations relate tospectators. In addition, I discuss Almodóvar’s distinctiveness, authorship, cross-genres, anddevelopment of meaning and spectatorship.Unoriginalily: Introducing AlmodóvarPedro Almodóvar’s filmic corpus plays very different roles in constructing anddisrupting concepts of sexual and gender representations. His cinematic representations oftrans/gender/sexuality dislocate the various ways of seeing them, and trouble interactionbetween viewer and object of vision. I am interested in the fluidity with which Almodóvar’sfilms soften boundaries of feminine and masculine representations, posing a critique ofidentity that affects and dislocates normative representations of gender and sexuality,challenges spectators to confront the position from which they look, and impels them to alevel of consciousness of the act of looking. Here I employ certain historical details and134scholarly materials to trace the definition, establishment and development of his film-making activities as border culture and border thought.Almodóvar’s fifteen 35 mm films20 to date along with thirteen short films, constitutean intense body of work that negotiates issues of national identity, historical and culturalconsciousness, popular culture, social diversity, media and technology, social structures, andrepresentation of class, race, gender and sexuality (Almodóvar, 1974a, 1974b, 1975a, 1975b,1975c, 1975d, 1976a, 1976b, 1976c, 1977a, 1977b, 1977c, 1978a, 1978b, 1980, 1982, 1983,1984, 1987, 1988, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1995, 1999, 2002b, 2004; Almodóvar & Ferrero, 1986;Almodóvar et al., 1997). Almodóvar not only directs and sometimes acts in his films but hasalso written all the scripts, a bestselling book of short stories (Almodóvar, 2000) and a self-interview book (Strauss, 1996), and fashioned his autobiography through the eyes and bodyof a fictitious international porn star in photonovellas: Patty Diphusa (Almodóvar, 2002a).To date, several book-length critical works have been produced around the worldreflecting the most diverse aspects of his productions and covering an array of themes andtopics such as: film aesthetics, comparative literature, gayness, gay self-representation, filmand the Spanish historical context, interviews, masculinity, the politics of representation,postmodernism, film reviews, sociological analysis, and transculturalism andtransnationalism. Almodóvar’s work has been receiving a privileged attention fromacademia, which has been developing a considerable variety of critical interpretations,theoretical treatments and interdisciplinary studies as is revealed by the large number oftheses, dissertations, papers and journal articles. I am aware that a large number of PhDtheses and Masters dissertations on and around Almodóvar’s work have been developedfrom the most diverse fields of study in Europe, Brazil, and the United States, but135astonishingly none so far in Canada21.Within these dissertations, selected areas of his filmicproduction have been extensively scrutinized through many lenses: Anthropology,Comparative Literature, Drama, Film Studies, Gay and Lesbian Studies, History, LatinAmericanism, Sociology, and Women’s Studies. However, if his work has been receivingfull exposure to academics of the most varied stripes, there is no apparent literaturecontained in this cluster of countries that approaches it from a position of queer theory;likewise there is no attempt whatsoever to interconnect his filmic and cinematicrepresentations with any form of educational practice or critical pedagogy.Absorption: Almodóvar Expliqué aux Enfants.Almodóvar’s films are often inscribed under the banner ofpop/trashlcampfkitschlslasher culture, and generally described as a mixture of comedy,melodrama, and suspense. According to Zunan the so-called “contaminacionesAlnwdavarianas” are the impossible mixtures of genres, multiplicity of traditions,sensibilities and complexities, which constitute his contaminated eclectic aesthetics (Zurián,2005, pp. 25-26). In a Derridian sense, these “Almodovarian contaminations” poisonprevious traditions and current modes of film aesthetics, while creating his particular modeof knowing and representing the world. Almodóvar’s most striking markers are the use of avibrant color palette, dramatic songs, intertextuality, sharp humor, and complex narratives inwhich stories are told tearing apart representations of social categories. Through an infusedspirit of burlesque his tragicomic works displace subjects by showing difficult and importantissues in distorted ways, and putting on screen socially neglected subjects in a respectfulmanner.136Almodóvars’ works, that is, films, books, screenplays, and so forth, have beendeeply influenced by Anglo-Saxon culture, but they are an intrinsic part of a comprehensivetraditional Spanish culture (Gubern, 2005). According to Gurben (2005), La novellaPicaresca from the seventeenth century, the sainete and esperpento from the eighteenthcentury, and the Latin melodrama endowed Almodóvar with a vast array of specific literary,dramatic and visual representations. It is well-known that Almodóvar’s films in theirdistinctive claim for disruption resist clear-cut classification, but characteristics and featuresof these abovementioned genres frequently appear in his films and help us to grasp some ofhis structures and meanings (Almeida, 1996; D’Lugo, 2005; Forgione, 2005; Garcia, 2005;Gubern, 2005; Varderi, 1995). Firstly, La novella Picaresca provides Almodóvar withaesthetic legacies of canniness, ingenuity, impropriety, misconduct, lawlessness, sagacity,promiscuity, vulgarity, corruption, flair, decadence, carnival, mockery, excess, vice,travesty, sarcasm, the existence of antiheros and antiepics, and ultimately the lack ofscruples or a code of conduct. Then, the esperpento explorations of realism through themeans of tragicomedy, grotesque, and ridicule disrupt conventional language andcommunication, and additionally assist Almodóvar in his constructions of absurd andfantastic realism. Then, in the sainete is found the tradition of parodic doublings,appropriations, multiple meanings, puns, simulation, trickery, and pastiche. Finally, theLatin melodramas bestow on Almodóvar the features of overemotionalism, nostalgia,burlesque, sentimentality, profuseness, and ambiguity. Within Almodóvar’s representations,melodrama transgressively exacerbates their already-excessiveness in order to challenge theself-contradicting precepts of heteronormativity; and with the support of this genre137Almodóvar’s films reveal bodies, genders, and sexualities as acceptable and legitimatepositions for political resistance and contestation.However, the presence of these components in Almodóvar’s films is not superfluousor excessive; they assign meanings to different situations and particular contexts of Spanishhistory. La novella Picaresca, the sainete, esperpento, and the Latin melodramtz share withAlmodóvar’s aesthetics the fact that they arose during periods of political and socialupheaval and transition. They functioned and still function as creative strategies to accessthe depth of social practices and beings, and straightforwardly interfere with, reveal, andunravel social conventions, while claiming the existence and continuation of transgressivebodies, and the uncanny in everyday life. It is precisely through these playful andidiosyncratic approaches that Almodóvar’s films attempt to subvert social and politicaldiscourses.The transition to democracy in Spain, from forty years of Francoist dictatorship, wasconspicuously marked by a general cultural displacement, social apathy, and politicalconcealment. The artist’s main concern was how to redeem cultural and artistic nationalheritage from a fascist discourse that had appropriated it for its own political interest. Thisstate of affairs opened spaces for numerous prolific conversations between film and popularculture, in which new possibilities of artistic creations were invigorated with new aims,constituents, effects, and meanings. Almodóvar films, taken altogether, are an effect of theSpanish political transition as much as he deeply affected the routes of cultural transition. Inthis sense, He had a huge impact on the transition cultural movements by presenting a bodyof work that blends pop, camp, kitsch, slash, trash, and traditional Spanish aesthetics,impelling displacements that not only destabilized rigid concepts of the subject’s positions,138but also released into Spanish society an array of gender, sexual and social roles thatloosened the legacy of the Francoist past.Almodóvar’s aesthetic decisions signal the importance of this social context, but alsothe director himself stresses the importance of looking at his loci of enunciation tounderstand his meticulous mode of representing reality through fictionalized narratives.Almodóvar articulates his speech from, among other spaces, the male, gay, artist, Spanish,European positions, but he does not claim to speakfor any of these, nor that he intends to;on the contrary he seems to speak with and through these categories of gender, class,sexualities, religiosity, politics, geography, power, and knowledge. The director does notjump to conclusions, he neither judges his characters nor forces them to speak for anythingor anybody (Zurián, 2005). Almodóvar’s principles have been to present filmicly the life hesees and feels, but without moral constraints, containments, or control. Representations ofqueers, drug addicts, transgender, bisexuals, prostitutes, gays, lesbians, sado-masochists,corrupt policemen, crooked nuns, pedophile priests, murderers, nymphomaniacs,housewives, sexual abusers, serial killers, incestuous people, kidnappers, junkies, punks,womanizers, voyeurs, pregnant nuns, AIDS sufferers, comatose patients, prisoners anddeceivers, in Almodóvar’s films are to acknowledge and acceptthem as everyday actors,performers, and practicioners of society. By accepting these social types as intrinsic parts ofour everyday life, Almodóvar’s films refuse to go along with the prevailing authoritarianclassificatory system that judges social practices; and they further question and incitespectators to rethink the terms and basis in which they classify, define, and describe humanbeings and their practices. In this context, I argue that Almodóvar does not makepropaganda for any of these practices, rather he introduces, exposes, and distorts them,139aiming to make them visible. At some point in the thirty-two years of Almodóvar’s career,modernists, post-modernists, structuralists, poststructuralists, critical thinkers, feminists,gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender activists and scholars, feminists, and positivistthinkers among others, from within and outside academia, have come into conflict with hisideas, visual representations, meanings, writings, and taken as a whole, his stance. His filmsupset theorists from the right, center, and left positions; they really disturb society.In an essay that shows how Almodóvar’s Talk to Her makes the most of traditionalfairy-tale narratives, Novoa (2005) claims that the Spanish director travels around the fairy-tale structure and thematic as one of his narrative basics, visiting the limits of the differencebetween the emotional and the rational, between moral and amoral, and ridiculing a societyoverwhelmed by dehumanization. In this sense, as Byatt explains, these imaginative storieswith magical and uncanny characters are narrative forms that exploits entrenched fears andsocial moral panics, hence constitute a privileged location in which to rationalize and simply“think” about human beings. Thus fairy tales render fluid apprehensions and desires intoalternative lucid configurations (as cited in Novoa, 2005). Many critics argue that in makinghis case the director imposes a misogynist conception of gender, however these assumptionsmust be analyzed with extreme care, as Novoa (2005) explains:The notion that a director might evoke audience sympathy for a rapist, even amongfemale viewers, seems rather implausible. To fully appreciate this achievement, we mustunderstand how Almodóvar’s use of narrative devices from fairy tales makes the story work.Were it not for the fact that the story is built on a fairy tale, with its corresponding dividingline between the real world and the world of fantasy, it would be impossible to swallowwithout feeling repulsed by its underlying significance [...] I mention this particular140exchange because it helps us to understand how complex this movie [Talk to Her] is interms of gender, how we need to be careful in teasing out its different meanings, and whysome critics felt compelled to overlook things they would otherwise reject. (p. 224)Through these years, Almodóvar’s narratives have explored a large number ofthemes and story lines. He has created comedies that look into complex subjects; forexample, critiquing the Catholic Church through the story of a woman forced to hide outwith a group of outrageous nuns, and the tales of sexual-abuse scandals and atrociouspractices of Catholic priests. Once again it is important to note that his narratives arestunning sequences of events in which love, sex, and gender identity occupy the centralpositions. Almodóvar’s narratives are a spectacle of temporal shifting, impeccably movingback and forth among the films’ presents, foreshadowings, flashbacks, and flashbacks-within-flashbacks. Our attention is drawn to these puzzling temporal fragmentations that, asindispensable elements of his films’ construction, have the objective of reaching liminalspaces/times between reality and fiction.As I explained earlier, Almodóvar’s films’ distinguishing functions are to open updiscussion about sexuality and gender identifications, and to interfere with prevailing canonsof sexual and gender desire. With those aims, Almodóvar’s stories use cheap and oversexedphotonovellas and advertisements as the basis to create shocking sexual caricatures; andsimilarly he makes use of overt sexuality to look at female and male sexuality, and desire.The account of housewives struggling to cope with the everyday life and issues of femaleindependence and solidarity was part of his initial psychological dramas. Accounts andcharacters of ‘mothers’ recurrently appear whether as housewives or atrocious castrators,passive, incestuous, melancholic, fanatical, zealous and bizarre. Likewise family themes are141important, such as representations of the innate strength of sisterhood, motherhood,brotherhood, friendship, and the power of family; however father characters are by and largelacking. Also there are stories of a woman falling in love with the man who kidnaps her andholds her captive, incestuous relationships between mother and daughter, and father andson-to-daughter, a pedophilic relationship between a dentist and his child patient, andintimacy between priests and young novices. Lately Almodóvar’s narratives have includedthe story of a woman’s pursuit of her dead son’s father, a transgender; the story of twocomatose women loved by two men, who desperately attempt to communicate with them;and the story of a former molester priest, married with children, in a relationship with ayoung male whose brother, a transgender, when young endured sexual abuse from the samepriest.However, as implausible they might be, Almodóvar’s narratives explore and conveyemotional intensity; love, loss, suffering, selfishness, affection, devotion, passion, desire,repulsion, loathing, pleasure, tension, cruelty, and generosity are just some of the states hedeals with. Until recently, Almodóvar privileged the representation of the feminine space,but in the latest two films, Talk to Her and Bad Education, there has been a significantchange; the masculine and feminine space have become to some extent more defined,establishing an ongoing conversation between them, and also relating the representation ofmasculine formation, elements of maleness, manliness, manhood, and boyhood, to theprevious portrayal of femininity. Not surprisingly in the U.S.A, and to my amazement, inSpain as well, several critics have overtly questioned if this constant emphasis on feminineidentification in Almodóvar’s productions contributes to misogyny; while other hostilecritics of his films claim that Almodóvar worships women but rejects proximity with their142bodily beings, diminishing women to passive and disadvantaged characters (Cavagna,2004).Almodóvar’s work is polysemic, and open to multiple interpretations. He has nopower to control the perceived meaning of his films, and even if that were a possibility hewould not be interested in it, as he has been ceaselessly affirming in many interviews overthe last three decades (see Strauss, 1996; Willoquet-Maricondi, 2004). Meanings derivefrom interactions between visual representations and varied audiences and spectatorshipsfrom different social, cultural, subcultural, and political contexts, and Almodóvar knowsthat. If for his critics his representations are a “perfect” mirror of reality, for Almodóvar theyare about desire, imagination, fantasy, hope, and vision. As Novoa (2005) explains:The split between appearance and reality that pervades the film [Talk to Her]undermines our ability, as viewers, to make judgments, or to conceive of justice, in acorrupt, alienated, and false society. Almodóvar wants the viewer to consider thepossibility that Alicia’s violation is a miracle that saves and cures, an eventbelonging to the fairy-tale world rather than an actual rape happening in reality. Thecomplex notion of reality developed in Talk to Her is similar to that in Basile’s Locunto de li cunti. Canepa explains that the latter’s “prospective pluralism’ orattention to the polysemic nature of reality” left in the reader the impression that the“truths that can be extracted from the narrated material are often at odds with eachother, and with the tale itself’ (“Entertainment” 39). In a similar way, Almodóvarconfronts the spectator with the multiple and contradictory truths that result fromBenigno’ s actions. I must stress that the director himself, explaining the reasoningbehind the silent movie, asserts that he intended The Shrinking Lover “as a kind ofblindfold. In any case, the spectator will discover what has happened at the sametime as the other characters. It’s a secret which I’d like no one to reveal.”Furthermore, he resists calling this a manipulation of the spectator, saying, “it is anarrative option, and not exactly a simple one. That’s why I’m so proud of the result”(“Self-Interview”). But we should question what it is that he does notwant us to see,or what precisely he wants us to see. (p. 237)Furthermore, in spite of these criticisms, it is necessary to point out that the role of womenand specifically of the mother in filmic representation has been long established as a tropeimplying the ideological, political and philosophical Spanish culture. So the images of143creature, body, and entity in his characters are self-referential spaces in which Almodóvarradically conceives narratives, poetics and dramas, re-configuring and experimenting withrepresentations of gender and desire, but always keeping a nuanced political tone. In hisfilmic discourses the body is the empowered location in which a series of polemicalconversations about what is prohibited, forbidden, illegal, unmentionable, offensive,distasteful, and deviant in gender and sexual practices, takes place. ThroughoutAlmodóvar’s films there is an apparent aim to explore bodily representations of gender andsexual differences across society by giving voice to the neglected foci ofenunciation/articulation of what I am here deliberately naming primarily, as queers, women,transgenders, gays, lesbians, and cross-dressers.Reading Almodóvar’s films throws us into a complex arrangement of textualrelations that require close examination. Thus understanding his films comes to be an act ofnegotiation between texts. Therefore, Almodóvar’s films are intertexts because theirmeanings lie between film and the rest of the network of textual relations it cites (e.g. otherfilms, music, and sounds). In his narratives, Almodóvar makes the spectators move betweenhis film and the enmeshment of the other related texts. The most frequent texts cited arefilms, theater, and songs, but also advertisements, comics, photonovellas, ballet, andliterature (see Aronica, 2005). The directors that explicitly or indirectly influencedAlmodóvar’s poetics and have been frequently cited in his films are Alfred Hitchcock, BillyWilder, Blake Edwards, Douglas Sirk, Frederico Fellini, George Cukor, Howard Hawks,Ingmar Bergman, J. L. Manckiewicz, Jack Arnold, King Vidor, Luis Buñuel, FernandoFernán-Gómez, Marco Ferreri, Richard Lester, Tennesse Williams, Vincent Minnelli, andWilliam Wyler.144As a bricoleur Almodóvar promotes a mannerist genre in which he brings togetherhistorical and stylistic genres to dismantle and reinterpret models of making, and to translatefilms to the audience through alterations, quotations, distortions, transpositions, anddisplacement. In addition, he not only cites other texts but his own texts, films, and books,making his filmic corpus another chain of meaning. Likewise he makes use of other formsof intertextualities to stress features of dissimilarity, interference, contiguity and continuity;for example, when he assigns the specific role of a male-to-female transgender to a woman(All about my mother), or when he gives the role of a heterosexual man who pretends to be ahomosexual/heterosexual/transgender, to a famous heterosexual actor (Bad Education).Almodóvar’s characters are liminal ones; they dwell at the border and look out for it to open.Aronica argues that Almodóvar’s perseverance in intertextuality is less a question ofstyle than a recognized desire to dialogue, to bring about conversations with himself,between his characters, audience and traditions (Aronica, 2005, p. 57). By rejectinghierarchies among different forms of texts Almodóvar is unchained to play around withrepresentations from a wide spectrum, hence there is no space for the existence of binariessuch as high art/low art, cinemaltheater, postmodern/modern, contemporary/traditional,literature/painting, etc. In Almodóvar’s films there is a constant play of representationswithin his representations, film-within-film, theater-within-film, and so forth; also herepeatedly employs self-referentiality.Loss: Almodóvar’s Queer Gender Between Spectator and Object of VisionCentral to my studies is the relationship between films and their viewer. In the fieldof film studies there has been an increasing interest in understanding the influence that a145film has upon its audience, or vice versa. Not only academia is aware of this location ofpower. Society through its educational, religious and judicial institutions explores it, tryingto assess if visual representations are harmful, innocuous, or useful to members of thecommunity; and in order to protect the general public these institutions possess the authorityto sanction, censor, and control them. I mention this in order to stress that my interest infilm studies lies in spectatorship rather then audience research; spectatorship understood asthe study of how subjects dialogue with and translate film, that is the relationship betweenthe viewer and the objectlsubject being viewed, and audience research understood as thestudy of film consumption.I argue that Almodóvar’s aesthetic representation of gender and sexuality reflects apostmodern alteration of the transcultural critique that shifted traditional theoretical modelsof spectatorship toward a queer spectatorship (see Gilmartin, 1994). Utilizing these termsZurIan further reminds us that Almodóvar’s stylistic characteristics should not be understoodas reflections of reality, instead as an extremely distorted image of reality since thisdisruption of the real is the authentic possibility to engage spectators with the film and itsmeanings (Zurián, 2005, p. 29). I contend that Almodóvar pays special attention to the waysin which his filmic corpus relates to social interpretations concerning the construction of thegaze, subject positioning, and the politics of the cinematic apparatus. Therefore, I furtherclaim that an understanding of those modes of spectatorship that queer subjective formationand position, yields interpretive practices in visual culture education, and influences thedialogue with critical pedagogies.As Laura Mulvey’ s theoretical framework developed over the last thirty years hasbeen overwhelmingly used to comment on Almodóvar’s films, and on himself as author,146artist, creator, and individual, I will go into a few details of how her work has inspiredrevaluations on several bases of feminist film theory and criticism. Mulvey asserts in herbreakthrough article on mainstream Hollywood classic film texts that there is a discrepancybetween male and female representations and spectatorship (Mulvey, 1999b). She arguesthat specifically in classical films women have the conventional role of being displayed andlooked at as sexual objects while men project their gaze either at the screen narrative or asthe spectator. From Mulvey’s point of view, the male visual pleasures are split between anobsessive fixation and aggressive gaze upon the female body and a self-absorbedidentification with the male characters. If the spectator is male, it is because women havelearned to identify with a male gaze.However, ironically Mulvey’ s concepts are frequently charged with naturalizingheterosexuality and reifying the patriarchal system as monolithic and irrefutable (Rieser,2001). Also, Allen has explained that by restricting a voyeuristic gaze only to males Mulveydid not allow as readily the idea that any spectator might identify with the camera (R. Allen,1999). In addition, Allen points out that Mulvey’s analysis works upon the hierarchyseeing/being seen, or only at the level of analysis of film apparatus; the interpretation deniesfemales the control of gaze. Instead, as Janet Bergstrom critically demonstrated in RaymondBellour’s analysis of Hitchcock (as cited in Allen, 1999), it is feasible to display a structureof visual fictions in which gender hierarchy is created across a series of formal contrastssuch as close ups/long shots and stasis! movement.In a similar way, Linda Williams suggests that women can be presented as powerfulsignifiers in non-classical and non-realist films instead of being viewed only as symbols forcastration and “lack”, as Mulvey advocates (Williams, 1991, 1996). Drawing strongly on147Jacques Lacan, Mulvey argues that film does induct the spectator into realist formalism andits ideology, but Barbara Creed (1999) opposes this statement and affirms that inhorror/slasher films the spectator is invited to look away, turning the pleasure in looking —scopophilia- into displeasure. Another negation of the Mulvey model appears in CarolClover’s work on slasher films (Clover, 1999), in which she points out that in slasher filmsmale/female does not correspond to masculine/feminine; thus there is a loosening of genderand sexual categories. As a result, Clover asserts that identification in slasher films is nolonger divided along the sexual lines Mulvey predicated. Nevertheless after the release ofher seminal article for film studies, Mulvey reconsidered some of her initial positions andexplored the stance of the female spectator more in terms of positionalities and less in termsof character, an exploration that has since been taken further by many other feministtheorists (see Mulvey, 1999a).Reflective of this topic through textual analysis is for example, a claim by Davis’(1999) that Almodóvar by his choices of form and content perpetuates patriarchalstereotypes about women and female sexuality rather than liberating women, in spite ofAlmodóvar’s claims of being a feminist man and filmmaker. Davis argues that Almodóvar’srepresentations of female and feminine characteristics and lifestyle are problematic,questions if a man can speak for a woman, and asserts that Almodóvar attempts to portraygay and lesbian lifestyles as normative and palatable for heterosexual audiences (p. 4). Foran analysis of a few of Almodóvar’s films22,Davis assembled the following categories:lesbianism and female heterosexuality for the female sexualities; and for the malesexualities, transvestism and disguise, male-to-female transexuality, male homosexualityand male heterosexuality. After examining the films using this frame of reference, Davis148concludes that through his work Almodóvar disguises his misogynist tendencies and createsan illusion of female power, which does not exist; and suggests that Almodóvar affirmsnotions of “male superiority not only through his depictions of male and femalehomosexuality, but whilst presenting more traditional heterosexual relationships andlifestyles” (p. 89). For Davis, Almodóvar pretends to provide women with a voice but this isa masquerade; he actually violates, controls, filters and determines their experiences,expressions and behaviors. As a final point Davis maintains that Almodóvar’s postmodern,fluid, hybrid world in which “homosexual male utopia” succeeds and prospers and allwomen are inferior and perverse, functions well only for men (p. 91).Davis’ claims provide me with an excellent case of inference and advocacy in whichthe contexts and assumptions used to support the validity of claims lack both a localizedcontextual awareness and a dialogical transcultural analysis. I had difficulties withadmissibility in several other readings and rereadings of Almodóvar films as well, but Ichose Davis’ work as the best indicator of the most common problems in readings ofAlmodóvar’s work: attempting to understand his corpus via the homosexual/heterosexualand male/female binaries, essentializing characters’ identities, and universalizing sexual andgender experiences. In commencing with Davis’ work, I look at her rationale for studyingAlmodóvar from one of the many feminist standpoints: the feminist psychoanalytic theoryof cinema that states that the perverse pleasure of the cinema functions in the consumptionof and at the expense of women.In this context it is important to note that despite the fact we need a terminology todiscuss gender and sexuality, and that choice of terms plays a considerable role in queerstudies, the choices of words and concepts one makes in approaching Almodóvar’s films149must take into consideration their specificities. It is vital to consider that Almodóvar hasnever been concerned with representing fixed notions of gay, lesbian or straight identities;he rather prefers to create and explore the representation of sexuality and gender asqueergender or trans-beings (Allinson, 2001, pp. 100-108; Paul Julian Smith, 1997, p. 179).His characters remain for the most part unlabelled, hence characters’ identity markers arecoming from outside the gathering of spectators and film. Therefore, approaching his workby using a fixed binary heterosexual/homosexual lens makes the reading obsolete anddeficient in terms of multi-possibilities. Hence, a number of feminist theorists have beenfrustratingly attempting to identify and undo Almodóvar’s binary logic in order to reversethe binary and then displace the whole system of binary thinking. The struggle happenssimply because they are trying to unravel the inconsistent binary, which in Almodóvar isfloating. Davis’ categories of analysis weld together the binary male/female andheterosexual/homosexual while Almodóvar does not place male/female parallel toheterosexual/homosexual nor does he conflate these binaries with masculinity/femininity.By this means Almodóvar breaks with the patriarchal tendency of mainstream cinema tonaturalize gender and sexuality as biologically determined.However, I argue that if Almodóvar’s objectives are neither to represent fixedidentities nor to present the sexual binary heterosexual/homosexual, he openly posits indiscussion the gender binary masculinities/femininities, which is performed upon hischaracters independently of their sex and sexuality. As a result, I claim that in order todeconstruct Almodóvar’s work effectively the binary logic is masculinity/femininity inwhich the weaker term can be either, depending on context. So by presenting us with areductive analysis, many critics and scholars imprudently impose their own theoretical150frameworks, agendas, and contexts onto Almodóvar’s films. More importantly, in this sensethey are not allowing themselves an opportunity to produce and understand “other”methodological possibilities for appreciating his cinematic understanding.In terms of construction of the gaze, subject positioning and the politics of cinematicapparatus, Yarza (1994) contends that Almodóvar fractures traditional sexual and socialboundaries; he rips apart rigid notions of subject conceptualization; and consequently social,sexual and gender representation. His filmic corpus relates directly to the question of social,national, and individual identity. Yarza, like Davis, draws intensely on Mulvey’s concepts ofmale gaze to explore his model of “monsters and transvestites”. For Yarza, Almodóvar’snarratives privilege the presence of two forms of representation that destabilize traditionalsexual categories: the monster and the transvestite, which both threaten the symbolic order,problematize the binary division of sexual categories, and provoke epistemological crises intraditional categories of representation. The monster and the transvestite would interferewith the male gaze and are both charged with the construction of femininity. To reach theseconclusions Yarza analyzed principally Matador, in which Almodóvar explicitly flirts withslasher films, classic horror films,film noir and melodrama. Yarza compares the monstersand transvestites to the virgin/wife/mother framework in horror films, which characters arethe spectacle and suffer the male gaze.Analogous claims have been previously challenged on many grounds by Clover, whoargues that generally not taken into account is the figure of the “Final Girl”, the femalevictim-hero who lives to fight the monster (Clover, 1987, 1999). She provokes us toconsider: a) whether the sexes that we see on the screen are what they seem--that screenmales represent males and screen females represent females--and b) female spectatorship.151Clover argues that slasher films are texts in which the categories of feminine and masculineare collapsed into one body and the same character “an anatomical female, whose point ofview the male spectator is invited to share” (1999, p. 246). Moreover Clover affirms that,particularly in slasher films, the combination masculine-female prevails over feminine-male,thus privileging masculinity in conjunction with femininity.Almodóvar, by appropriating canonical filmic genres of melodrama, horror, comedy,and film noir, establishes an intense conversation among them in ways that subvert theideological apparatus they carry along with them. Thus, in Matador, for example, he notonly privileges masculinity in conjunction with femininity, but also mixes the roles ofmonster and Final Girl and mingles homosexuality-disguised-as-heterosexuality withhomosexuality, heterosexuality and bisexuality. Therefore, the Final Girl, Maria, is also themonster, which has both attributes of a masculine female and a feminine masculinity,inviting identification of not only a male gaze but also a female spectator. In this same film,Angel is constructed as a feminine male and Diego has a central role as a masculine male.By describing some aspects of Matador I contend that Yarza’ s model of Monster andtransvestism, as an interpretive tool for Almodóvar’s work, is insufficient because it isconstrained by conceptions of male spectator and by gender boundaries.In Mark Allinson’s A Spanish Labyrinth (2001), I located an improved approach totaking on the relationship between Mulvey and Almodóvar. Allison declares that if feministpsychoanalytic theories drawn from Mulvey unravel the hidden structures in classicHollywood film, in Almodóvar’s films these same structures are the center of his cinematicexperience, and are consciously and explicitly presented as parodic and comic main themes(Allinson, 2001, pp. 72-75). Furthermore, Allison stresses the fact that instead of serving152patriarchy, Almodóvar’s films problematize gender binaries in their physical and symbolicdisplay of men, masculinity, women and femininity. Thus, Almodóvar represents a beaconfor critical analysis of masculinity, because many of his male/man/masculinitycharacteristics, differently from Mulvey’ s perceptions, are associated filmicly and bycontent with passivity, exhibitionism, masochism and spectacle. I agree with Allinson that inmost of the films and particularly in Matador, Labyrinths of Passion, What Have I Done toDeserveThis, Law ofDesire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, High Heels,Talk to Her, and Bad Education, the male characters are exposed and objectified; and inmany sequences Mulvey’s typical arrangement of looking (male/gaze-women/object) isreversed, troubled and made unstable. Peter Lehman also critiques the limitations ofMulvey’ s initial propositions and suggests that Almodóvar inverts the traditional cinematicgaze and by doing it, poses fundamental questions surrounding the representation of themale body and the unveiling of the social construction of masculinity (Lehman, 1993).Paul Julian Smith raises important questions regarding the gendering of thespectatorship and proposes analytic tools for approaching Almodóvar’s films (see PaulJulian Smith, 1996a; Paul Julian Smith, 1996b, 1996c, 1997, 2000; Paul Julian Smith &Bergmann, 1995). Smith presents his main arguments as follows:I suggest, then, that the redefinition of sexualities functions in two ways inAlmodóvar: first, by proposing a displacement of the binaries of genderedspectatorship; and second, by suggesting that at the formal or technical level thisdisplacement is effected in the films themselves by a certain dislocation orincommensurability between dialogue and image. (1997, pp. 180-181)In analyzing the first scenes of Matador and Law ofDesire, Smith notes that it isextremely difficult to articulate either how characters correspond to Mulvey’ s gendereddivision of roles or how they do to other feminist models presented to date. That is because153characters’ viewpoints are as hard to establish as their gender or sexual identities. Manycharacters present a multi-possible sexuality and gender, or in other words impossiblesexualities and genders. Smith argues that Almodóvar points to a cross-gender identificationthat is open to the spectator as well; and observes that the fluidity of the narrative scheme isalso present in purely cinematic means such as crosscutting between objective andsubjective viewpoints and dislocations of image and sound tracks.The arguments presented by these selected authors are extremely important instudying gender, sexuality and spectatorship because they provoke us to look not only at thepositions of males, females, and cross-genders but also at the genres of films. However, inthe case of auteur films such as Almodóvar’s these modes of analysis can only work asflowing references.ConclusionHere I have brought together features of Almodóvar’s aesthetics, looked at hisnotions of filmic enunciation, authorship and cross genres, and initiated a conversation abouthow Almodóvar’s visual representations relate to spectators and development of meaning.Pedro Almodóvar’s filmic corpus plays very different roles in constructing anddisrupting concepts of sexual and gender representations. His cinematic representations oftrans/gender/sexuality dislocate the various ways of seeing them, and trouble interactionbetween viewer and object of vision. Besides, the fluidity with which Almodóvar’s filmssoften the boundaries of feminine and masculine representations, posing a critique ofidentity that affects and dislocates normative representations of gender and sexuality,154challenges spectators to confront the position from which they look, and impels them to alevel of consciousness of the act of looking.Almodóvar’s films are often inscribed under the banner ofpop/trashlcamplkitschlslasher culture, and generally described as a mixture of comedy,melodrama, and suspense. His most striking trademarks are the use of a vibrant color palette,dramatic songs, intertextuality, sharp humor, and complex narratives in which stories aretold tearing apart representations of social categories. His tragicomic works displacesubjects by showing difficult and important issues in distorted ways, screening sociallyneglected subjects in a respectful manner, and assigning meanings to particular contexts ofSpanish history. Diverse traditional Spanish aesthetics influence Almodóvar and function ascreative strategies to access the depths of social practices and beings, interfere with socialconventions and subvert social and political discourses.Almodóvar’s films acknowledge and accept everything that is considered “nonnormal” in everyday actions, performances, and practices of society. And by refusing to goalong with the prevailing authoritarian classificatory system that judges social practices,Almodóvar’s films provoke questions and incite spectators to rethink the terms and basis inwhich they classify, define, and describe human beings and their practices.Moreover, the Spanish director explores the fairy-tale structure and thematic as oneof his narrative basics, visiting the limits of the difference between the emotional and therational, between moral and amoral, and ridiculing a society overwhelmed bydehumanization. In this sense, his inspired stories with magical and uncanny characters arenarrative forms that exploit entrenched fears and social moral panics, hence constitute aprivileged location in which to rationalize and simply “think” about human beings; thus155fairy tales render fluid apprehensions and desires into alternative lucid configurations.Besides, Almodóvar’ films main distinguishing functions are to open up discussion aboutsexuality and gender identifications, and interfere with prevailing canons of sexual andgender desire, a laden areas of taboos and uncertainties. With those aims, Almodóvar’sstories use, among other “things”, cheap and oversexed photonovellas and advertisements asthe basis to create shocking sexual caricatures; and similarly he makes use of overt sexualityto look at female and male sexuality, and desire.Almodóvar have covered a large number of themes and story lines creatingtragicomedies that look into complex subjects, explore, and convey meanings of emotionalintensity. Almodóvar’s work is polysemic, polyvocal, and multivocal, thus open to multipleinterpretations, but for him it is about desire, imagination, fantasy, hope, and vision. In hisfilmic discourses the body is the empowered location in which a series of polemicalconversations about what is prohibited, forbidden, illegal, unmentionable, offensive,distasteful, and deviant in gender and sexual practices takes place. Reading Almodóvar filmsthrows us into a complex arrangement of textual relations, and to reveal their meanings it isnecessary to trace those relations. Thus understanding his films happens to be an act ofnegotiation between texts.Almodóvar’s cinema pays special attention to the ways in which his filmic corpusrelates to social interpretations concerning the construction of the gaze, subject positioning,and the politics of the cinematic apparatus. He is not concerned with representing fixednotions of gay, lesbian or straight identities; he rather prefers to create and explore therepresentation of sexuality and gender as queergender or trans-beings. Almodóvar does notplace male/female parallel to heterosexual/homosexual nor does he conflate these binaries156with masculinity/femininity; and by this means he breaks with the patriarchal tendency ofmainstream cinema to naturalize gender and sexuality as biologically determined.Almodóvar’s films problematize gender binaries in their physical and symbolic display ofmale, men, masculinity, females, women and femininity. His film’s characters’ viewpointsare as hard to establish as their gender or sexual identity since they present us with a multipossible sexuality and gender. Almodóvar points to a cross-gender identification that isentirely open to the spectator.157CHAPTER 8DressingSometimes masculinity’s got nothing to do with it. Nothing to do, that is, with men.And when something is about masculinity, it isn’t always “about men.”Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Gosh, Boy George, you must be awfully secure in yourmasculinity!This chapter departs from the premise that Almodóvar’s filmic discourse is a dragperformance; it is “a copy of an origin which is itself the ground for all copies, but which isitself a copy of nothing”(Butler, 1993b, p. 313). Dressing is like a changing room for theprevious chapters. It exhibits the story lines of Bad Education, Talk to Her, and All Aboutmy Mother; explores meanings within these specific narratives, offers bandages to protect orsupport our offended souls from their complex and provoking tales, and flavors ourunderstandings of Almodóvar’s filmic discourse of gender and sexuality.Here I analyze Almodóvar’s aesthetics and his ideas on multi-possibilities ofbricolage and métissage, and look at a variety of images from which I read signs of notionsof gender and sexuality produced through filmic representation and performativity. Thematerial of my analysis is restricted to his latest three films, and I build my interpretationmainly on the “Butlerian approach” developed by Robert Shail (2001), a strategy for theanalysis of gender construction in film based around central concerns found in Butler’s(1999) Gender Trouble. Shail proposes this approach as a theoretical and methodologicalbasis for developing a practical form of film analysis, and as a means to problematize the158concept of traditional male and female identity and desire. He conceives three essentialmethodological threads from Butler’s work: the transitory nature of gender identification;the need to place constructions of gender within a specific historical context; and aconsideration of the role of fantasy or “masquerade” in disrupting the naturalized categoriesof identity and desire.The first analytical strain within Butler’s work is in the area of personal genderidentification in which she argues that gender is a social construct that is not tied up withbiological sex definitions, pointing to the extraordinary diversity of gender constructsmanifested in different cultures at different historical moments. Accepting Butler’stheoretical rupture between sex and gender is crucial to understanding that gender isconstructed as a performative act, that is to say that gender is a “clothing” acted out by asubject contained within a certain cultural context. Moreover, Butler asserts that there areseveral elements of agency within the individual construction of a gendered identity; thusidentity is internally created by the subject; masculinity is as much a part of the agency ofgender construction as femininity and vice versa.The second strand is the historical placement ofgender, in which Butler affirms thatthe construction of gendered identities is contingent upon a process of recognition thatoccurs within historical discourses, which are themselves subordinated to the continuouschange in society. Although this strand could be particularly helpful in relatingrepresentations of gender in cinema back to the changing cultural and social contexts inwhich they were produced, I emphasize in my Butlerian approaches the two other strands.The third aspect of Butler’s work, which has a particularly crucial significance formy analysis is the concept offantasy and masquerade, and performance. Butler redefines159notions of gender performance “that enact and reveal the performativity of gender itself in away that destabilizes the naturalized categories of identity and desire.” Also she suggeststhat fantasy, and its public enactment, act as a cultural rescuer by liberating represseddesires, and in so doing allowing them to be accepted by social order and stability withoutintimidation. As an added element to all this, Butler gives examples involving transgender,cross-dressing and drag artists as means of public expression of fantasies of gender identity,which once articulated become part of the cultural arena and contribute to the discourse ofpossible available gender definitions. Butler has also pointed out that her theorizing does notinclude a notion of simplistic voluntary changes of identity; on the contrary, she drawsattention to the fact that the construction of gender identity happens within complex powerrelations and under many kinds of constraints.Almodóvar’s imagery intentionally offers appealing elements of gendertransitoriness and discussions of sexuality in society. I insist that a Butlerian way of thinkingthat denaturalizes genders, and puts on show how the dominant sexual order is maintainedthrough performative repetition, functions as a direct entry point to his films.Undertaking a Butlerian approach I analyze character construction, change andtransformation in these Almodóvar films. Moreover, I focus on representative transgendercharacters Agrado (All About my Mother), Benigno and Lydia (Talk to Her), andIgnacio/AngellJuan (Bad Education), which manifestly locate issues of gender and sexualityand are the connections with the other characters. Although the Butlerian approachdeveloped by Shail is based around central concerns found in Butler’s Gender Trouble, Iadditionally draw from a few of her other texts (Butler, 1993a, 1993b, 1997a, 1997b, 1999,2004) . For analytic purposes I codify All About my Mother as “All”, Talk to Her as “Talk”160and Bad Education as “Bad”, and the discourse of them as “All Talk Bad”. The citations intext are structured as follows: (actor), (film title, actor), and when necessary (actor, film title,character). I utilize slashes to highlight a chain of roles played by the same actor.Overdub: Introducing Bad Education, Talk to Her, and All About my MotherBad Education, Talk to Her, and All About my Mother show a more reserved, serene,experienced, and refined Almodóvar. Through them, Almodóvar exploits attractive newsubjects. All About my Mother still focuses on the representation of women and femininity,one of Almodóvar’s trademarks, but in Bad Education and Talk to Her he shifts towardsrepresentations of men and masculinity. Nevertheless with those of his themes still sharesimilarities with his earlier films: they stress the importance of friendship, the fragility ofrelationships, and the power to disrupt prevailing notions of sex and gender. AlsoAlmodóvar forces the viewer to contemplate the importance of love in our everyday lives,especially when we have to overcome tragedies and misfortunes. The following accounts ofthe three movies are built upon the work of Holden, Maslin and Mitchell (Holden, 2004;Maslin, 1999; Mitchell, 2002)All About my Mother.All About my Mother turns around the teenaged Esteban (Eloy Azorin)’s singlemother Manuela (Cecilia Roth), a nurse, who following a series of extraordinary adversitiesand tragedies, is forced to recollect feelings and events from the past in order to start her lifeanew. She is a sensible, strong woman surrounded by multi-possible gendered characters,including a pregnant nun with AIDS, a transgender prostitute, a couple of tempestuous161lesbian actors, a father losing his memory, a father-stallion-transgender, and a highlyregarded but corrupt mother who forges the paintings of Chagall. Esteban is fascinated byliterature, and is currently writing a story about his mother. One night Manuela and Estebanare having dinner watching All About Eve (Mankiewicz’ classic film) on television, whenEsteban thinks of the title of his story: “All About my Mother”. The next day is hisseventeenth birthday and to celebrate this occasion they attend a theatre performance of AStreetcar Named Desire especially to see the work of Huma Rojo (Marisa Paredes), theactress who plays Blanche Dubois. While waiting for Huma Rojo’s autograph Manuelaconfesses to Esteban that she played the part of Stella and his father played StanleyKowalski with an amateur group. Before this statement Manuela had only told him that hisfather died before he was born. She promises to tell him everything about his father whenthey get home. Huma Rojo and Nina Cruz (Candela Peña), hastily leave the theater and calla taxi. The taxi speeds away; Esteban runs after it, the taxi turns the corner when another carsuddenly appears, and kills him.At home, after reading the last entry in Esteban’s journal, about how he wishes tomeet his father for the first time, Manuela decides to return to Barcelona in search of thefather. She must tell the father not only that he had a son but the son is dead now. Once inBarcelona, Manuela meets a group of women who will help her to bear her pains. In searchof Lola, Esteban’s father, Manuela goes round the buy-and-sell world of sex and drugs. Inone of these places, she finds Agrado, an old roommate of hers who used to be a friend ofLola twenty years ago when both of them were without breasts. Agrado takes Manuela homeand brings her to the shelter for beaten women where they meet Sister Rosa (PenelopeCruz), a stunning young woman whose father is rapidly losing touch with reality and whose162hardhearted mother never nurtured her. Rosa was the last person to see Lola. Manuela findsout that Sister Rosa is pregnant with Lola’s baby.Manuela again encounters Huma Rojo and Nina Cruz, who are performing AStreetcar named desire in Barcelona. Manuela becomes Huma’ s personal assistant, in themanner of Thelma Ritter (All about Eve). She even stands in for Nina Cruz in oneperformance, but Manuela is the opposite of Eve; she has no ambitions. In fact, thefollowing day she abandons her job with Huma to take care of Sister Rosa, who hasdiscovered she has AIDS. Although Manuela resists at first she ends up adopting her, like adaughter. Sister Rosa dies during the delivery of a boy named Esteban who is born HIVpositive. During the burial, Lola appears and Manuela tells him about the Esteban who diedand the one that has just been born. Lola begs Manuela to be allowed to see Esteban, and shenot only grants him his wish but also gives him a photo of their Esteban. Manuela returns toMadrid with baby Esteban; and after two years she goes back to Barcelona, with the healedEsteban, where she reunites with her family, Agrado and Huma.Talk to Her.Talk to Her focuses on the relationship between two men. Marco (DarIo Grandinetti)is a journalist left heartbroken after his bullfighter girlfriend (Rosario Flores) is gored by abull and left in a coma; and Benigno (Javier Cámara) is a nurse caring for a ballerina(Leonor Wafting), who is also in a coma as a result of a car accident. The two men meet inthe hospital and become friends, united by their inability to speak to the women who meanthe most to them. Benigno’s unrelenting optimism and strength is a source of strength forMarco, who has difficulty expressing his feelings.163If All About my Mother ended with a theater curtain opening to reveal a darkenedstage, Talk to Her begins with the same curtain, also opening. But now instead of actresses,this film concerns men who narrate their lives, who talk or attempt to communicate to thosewho can hear them and above all, those who cannot. The curtain rises on a piece of filmedtheater: A dance performance linking the cinematic and choreographic spectacles. Theperformance begins with a ballerina dancing in close up and another ballerina standing inthe background, as a delayed shadow of the first woman; and both somnambulist womenhesitate, stumble blindly across the stage, hitting the walls, and delicately falling down to thefloor. One male dancer desperately tries to stay one step ahead of the ballerinas in close up,moving obstacles out of their path. In the audience a pair of men are sitting side-by-side:Marco and Benigno. Marco deeply absorbed in the dance and moved to tears, and Benignowho ignores the performance and looks intently and fascinatedly at Marco’s emotionalintensity.The two men meet again at the private clinic where Benigno works and establish afriendship. Benigno continually chats to Alicia; slowly and gently he tries to communicatewith the object of his longtime voyeuristic obsession, hoping she will come out of coma.Alicia is Benigno’s doll. He bathes her, dresses her, and makes her look pretty. In short, hepretends to be in a relationship without having to deal with the other person’s desires.Benigno is the heart of the film, literally and spiritually. His obsession for Aliciabecomes both a love story and a horror story. Sexually dubious and dormant, he has learnedcaregiving by tending for his invalid mother. He has transferred his skills and affections buthe barely knows Alicia. Benigno has fallen in love with her from a distance and exchangedonly a few words with her when she was awake. One night while chatting to Alicia Benigno164narrates the story of an erotic silent film, in which a tiny, shrunken man is seen exploringand penetrating the nude female body of the lover who shrank from him. While telling thestory, Benigno commits a societal transgression; he has sex with the vulnerable Alicia, andimpregnates her. Whilst traveling abroad Marco reads that Lydia has died. He phones theclinic and finds out that Benigno is in trouble, and then goes back to Madrid to help him, buthis efforts are in vain. Benigno goes to prison, is denied information about the fate of Aliciaand their newborn, and in his attempt to go into a coma and join Alicia he dies. For Alicia,the sexual abuse has left her with a gain: the chance of a new beginning. Her dreadfulexperience has taken her out of the coma. Marco, who inherits Benigno’s apartment and hislove for Alicia, sees from the same window that Benigno used to gaze at Alicia, that she isalive and recovering from the coma. One day they meet at a theater and feel an immediateconnection between them. Another relationship is established.Bad Education.Since Bad Education is a film-within a film, and its intricate screenplay interweaveslayers of flashbacks, flashbacks-within-flashbacks, and tricky narratives creating a wickedmystery, the dates are very important, serving as key to understanding the story. The filmgoes back and forth between 1964 and 1980, with a climax set mostly in 1977. The filmstarts in 1980, with a visit by an actor who announces himself as Ignacio (Garcia Bernal), toa successful young filmmaker called Enrique Goded (Fele MartInez), who is in search of astory to tell. Ignacio introduces himself as his old intimate friend from back at Catholicboarding school, but Enrique does not recognize features, since he has not seen Ignacio for16 years. Moreover, Ignacio tells him that he has changed his name to Angel, and insists on165using only this artistic name. Ignacio/Angel explains that he is now a professional actorseeking work; and drops off a manuscript of a story he has written, The Visit, which hehopes Enrique will adapt into a film.Enrique agrees to read the script and learns that it alludes to his and Ignacio’ s youthin the mid sixties, when they fell in love at a Catholic school. At that time, Father Manolo(Daniel Giménez-Cacho), a literature teacher and principal of the school, obsessed withIgnacio, then an attractive boy soprano, expelled Enrique (Raül Garcia Forneiro) from theschool after catching sight of them hiding in a school washroom. Ignacio’ s story, The Visit,creates a fictional gathering in the 70’s of the characters of the 60’s and 80’s, including asuburban family man (Enrique) and a drug-addicted transvestite named Zahara (Ignacio).Zahara poses as Ignacio’s sister and blackmails the priest who abused Ignacio for the priceof a sex change, using a story written by Ignacio also called The Visit. The threat is toexpose father Manolo as a pedophile.Enrique gets involved with the semi-autobiographical aspects of Ignacio/Angel’ sstories, memories and imagination, and decides to write a screenplay and shoot the film.However, Ignacio/Angel insists on playing the main character in The Visit, the femaleimpersonator Zahara (Gael Garcia Bernal). Enrique callously sets out to seduceIgnacio/Angel, aiming to push his limits and unveil some of his secrets. But Ignacio/Angelwho desperately wishes to play the leading role, does not care what he needs to do tosucceed as an actor, even pretending to be gay. Enrique investigates Ignacio/Angel’ s pastand uncovers mortal sins. Ultimately, Enrique disentangles this network of pretense,impersonations, reiterations and performances when Father Manolo (LluIs Homar)—who166has left the church, gotten married and had a kid, and lives under the name of Berenguer—voluntarily tells Enrique what happened.Enrique finds out that, as in The Visit, Ignacio is a drug-addicted transgender, whohas been determined to blackmail Father Manolo to obtain as much as necessary to completehis sexual transformation. This is the real Ignacio, Enrique’ s first love, not Ignacio/Angel.Ignacio/Angel turns out to be Ignacio’s younger brother, Juan (Ignacio/Angel/Juan), who hasstolen Ignacio’ s screenplay and impersonates him. Berenguer tells Enrique that while beingblackmailed by Ignacio, he fell in love with Juan and both decided to get rid of Ignacio andkeep the ransom for themselves. They gave Ignacio an overdose of heroine and he diedwhile writing a letter to Enrique saying that he had finished The Visit. Then Juan hustles,abandons, and starts blackmailing Berenguer, using The Visit, letters and their private eroticvideos. After confessing to Enrique, Berenguer meets Juan who threatens him with death;and some time later, a car driven by Juan runs down Berenguer and he dies. Juan marries,becomes a famous fashion model, and does television work. Enrique carries on makingfilms.Overdye, Overhaul, and Overfill: Analyzing All That BadAlmodóvar’s films have a look and feel that is very particular; each reminds you ofanother film by Almodóvar. Citationality in Almodóvar narratives leads to an endlessarrangement of reiteration of gender, functioning as a lexicon in which every entry leads thespectator to another entry reaching search of the “initial” meanings; but the original isalways altered. Thus what I initially observe is that Almodóvar’s movies, from Pepi Lucy,Born and Other Girls on the Heap to Bad Education, through this recurrent masquerade of167gender and sexuality, cite and alter the previously performed representations in his earliermovies, which are themselves imitations of previous referents. Therefore I am suggestingthat there is no original theme upon and around these citations, because the performances ofcitations themselves manufacture this foundation. As Butler puts it “gender is a kind ofimitation for which there is no original; in fact it is a kind of imitation that produces the verynotion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself’ (Butler, 1993b, p.313). In this sense, I maintain that Almodóvar’s film representations of gender becomecoherent to the spectator through the understanding of these foldings, doublings, inventions,and their repetition in the alterations; in short they become clear as a repetition in theirrecurrent citations.Concepts of masculinity and femininity, and transgender, are incredibly slippery,with complex definitions that are usually self-contradictory. In recent times, masculinity hasbeen mostly linked to power, reason, ingenuousness, naturalness, integrity, agency, virility,bravery, physicality, and promptness, while femininity has been associated with mimicry,masquerade, affectation, obedience, dependency, limitation, naturalness, nurturing, andattractiveness. These positions have been respectively fixed on men and women through thepower of various gendering discourses, and these discourses have been used to strengthenthe naturalized bipolar gender system, to enforce gender conformity, despite their ownambiguity. Butler informs us that the impersonations of gender, such as in dragperformance, are able to reveal the instability of these fictitious binary constructions (Butler,1 997b).As previously mentioned in Gaze, Almodóvar’s film discourse is associated with,and often described as privileging representations of non-normalized notions of femininity168and masculinity in a patriarchal society. His women emphasize a staged theatricalitydependent on over-the-top constructions of identity employing intricate makeovers in anelaborate masquerade, and incorporating elements of parody. The challenging reproductionof 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 normalfeminine body, thereby objectifying the female. Agrado performs femininity with the intentof passing into the essence of femininity: the perfect body and character. Agrado’ sambitions are to be a real woman and have an “authentic” body. She says, “It costs me a lotto be authentic. And one cannot be stingy with these things because you are more authenticthe more you resembIe what you have dreamed of being”. The parodic qualities of excessand repetition used throughout Agrado’s performance thereby confuse notions of what itmeans, “to be real” for her, and for us spectators. Agrado points to her subjective agency andpower to become a woman, as she desires, so her reality is performatively constitutedthrough an imitation of its own desire as the origin and ground for her imitation. Butler,talking about heterosexuality as the original for homosexuality (1 993b), highlights thatheterosexual identity is performatively constituted through an imitation that sets itself up asthe origin and the ground of all imitations; thus heterosexuality is always in the process ofimitating and approximating its own specter idealization of itself. In this sense I argue thatAlmodóvar’s characters are performatively constituted through series of imitations thatreflect their sources and effects. Moreover I argue that through employing production of169gender as desire marked on the surface of bodies, Almodóvar’s films embody Butler’s ideasthat “gender can be neither true nor false” (Butler, 1999, P. 173).The drag queen characters’ reenactment of the established tropes of femininity alsocan be addressed as performatively constituted. Especially when we are aware that inAlmodóvar’s diegetic practices he often casts actors from the sex that his character willimpersonate; for example, the actress Antonia San Juan plays the MTF transgender Agrado,and in Law ofDesire the actress Carmen Maura plays the role of Tina a MTF transgender, inlove with Ada, played by Bibi Andersen, a famous MTF actress. Agrado, Tina and Adadouble cite the actresses Antonia, Carmen and Bibi, and also they form a link from Tina andAda to Agrado and from Agrado to Ignacio. Anatomical sex, gender identity, and genderperformance circulate in those performances, suggesting “a dissonance not only between sexand 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 thesex of the performer and the gender that is being performed, as well as the relationshipbetween sex, gender and performance.In Almodóvar’s films the body’s transitivity is invariably apparent. There is apreoccupation with revealing how bodies are important in the construction of gender, andthe juncture in which this construction is performed on bodies. For example, Ignacio copiesAgrado 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 changeher sex because she depends on her penis as a working tool to survive, Ignacio, who hasonly done his breasts, blackmails his abuser to obtain the means to fix the face and the restof the body. I fully support Butler’s view that “One surely cites norms that already exist, but170these norms can be significantly deterritorialized through the citation. They can also beexposed as non-natural and unnecessary when they take place in a context and through aform of embodying that defies normative expectation”(Butler, 1997b, p. 218).Zahara (Bad), Ignacio/AngellJuan’ s impersonation as a drag queen of his transgenderbrother, reiterates the need of repetition to construct his body in order to become a realwoman. While learning how to impersonate Zahara, Ignacio/AngellJuan repeats gestures,body language, and the mannerisms acted out by another drag queen who is an impersonatorof Sara Montiel, a famous actress in Spain. Ignacio/AngellJuan 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 dragqueenimmediately affirms, “That’s me. Why don’t they give me the part?” This is a meetingbetween two copies in which one claims originality over another. This is a complex meetingin which a double copy, Ignacio/AngellJuan, learns how to copy another one, Zahara, who isthe imitation already of one of his copies, Ignacio. Almodóvar did not give the dragqueenthe role of Zahara because he needed Ignacio/Angel/Juan to perform another chain ofreiterations for his filmic discourse. According to Butler (1999) Drag’s parody of genderchallenges the stability of identity constructions. She further explains:In other words, acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core orsubstance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifyingabsences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as acause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in thesense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express arefabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and otherdiscursive means. That the gendered body is performative suggests that it has noontological status apart from the various acts which constitute its reality. This alsosuggests that if that reality is fabricated as an interior essence, that very interiority isan effect and function of a decidedly public and social discourse, the public171regulation of fantasy through the surface politics of the body, the gender bordercontrol that differentiates inner from outer, and so institutes the “integrity” of thesubject. (p. 173)However Butler further explains that certain kinds of parodic repetitions effectively disruptwhile others become disciplined as instruments of cultural hegemony; thus parody is notnecessarily transgressive (Butler, 1999). To further explore this intricacy of production andrepresentation of gender through repetition in Almodóvar’s films I look into Lydia’s role inTalk to Her.Lydia.Lydia is represented as a strong, sensuous spectacular woman, materializing herselfthrough a drag body. She shows signs of the “real and natural” aspect of women bullfighters,having to incorporate and impersonate masculine acts and gestures to become the female-bullfighter-masculinity that is worn only during her performance in the arena. However,Lydia’s female-maleness body collapses offstage when she goes back to her “innate” state ofbeing a woman. Women bullfighters such as Lydia give the impression of being orattempting to be like a man; they are offensively labeled as butch by dominant concepts ofgender. These representations of masculine women in film disturb the meanings ofpatriarchy and heterosexism because their pretense exhibits for spectators the vision of theirfabricated bodies. The imitation of masculinity by females strikes at the foundations of eachreferent of masculinity, and across a chain of other referents, thus undermining the power ofthe inflexible boundaries between masculinity and femininity to prevail. Women bullfightersparody male bodybuilders; they enact a pastiche that disputes and puts into question the verypossibility of an original. In the case of sex/gender identifications, their pastiche reveals that172the original is already an unsuccessful attempt by a male bullfighter to copy a specter, a goalthat cannot itself possibly be achieved without failure. As Butler (1999) assertively states:Categories like butch and femme were not copies of a more originaryheterosexuality, but they showed how the so-called originals, men and women withinthe heterosexual frame, are similarly constructed, performatively established. So theostensible copy is not explained through reference to an origin, but the origin isunderstood to be as performative as the copy. (p. 209)In this sense, the female bodybuilder confuses the oppositionality of notions of masculinityand femininity as fixed binary concepts. Thus the effort to categorize Lydia according to“woman” and “femininity” is itself dislocated. Lydia’s fluid shape — institutionallyconstructed by bullfighting discourse- interferes with the male/female binary, disturbing theset categories of masculine and feminine and the representations that they normally evoke.By proliferating possibilities of representations of gender and sexuality, Almodóvar’s filmsgradually enlarge the possibility of characters’ transformations in endless repetitions thatchallenge easy categorizations. Butler (1993a) claims that sexed-bodies are an effect of aperformance of sex acts that is constituted through discourse that it is performedreiteratively. She further explains that “performativity is thus not a singular ‘act’, for it isalways a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-likestatus in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition”(p. 12).During Lydia’s representations, an important issue arises at this point concerningimpersonation in High Heels and Bad Education. In High Heels the Judge Dominguez(Miguel Bose), masquerades as Letal, a drag artist who impersonates Becky (MarisaParedes), and Hugo, a drug dealer; and in Bad Education Juan masquerades as Ignacio whoimpersonates Angel who poses as Zahara. In both films, during investigational processes,173DominguezlLetaLlHugo (High Heels) and Juanllgnacio/Angel/Zahara (Bad) are slowlyrevealed as personifying numerous conflicting masquerades. Also at the end of both movieswe learn that these roles have been taken on as part of their secret missions to conceal(dress) a social transgression (Bad), and to uncover (undress) a murder case (High Heels).Letal, Hugo or the Judge and Juanllgnacio/Angel/Zahara, like Lydia, touch on themes suchas ambiguity and the status of masquerade as a challenge to categories of identity. As Cover(2004) explains:Masks share an ability to address ambiguities and to articulate the paradoxes ofappearance. They testify to an awareness of the ambiguities of appearance and to atendency toward paradox characteristic of transitional states. They provide a mediumfor exploring formal boundaries and a means of investigating the problems thatappearances pose in the experience of change. Referring to a cross-dressing type ofmasquerade it constitutes ‘a challenge to easy notions of binarity, putting intoquestion the categories of “female” and “male” whether they are considered essentialor constructed, biological or cultural’. (para. 16)Therefore we can infer that masquerade in its intentionality troubles categories of essentialidentity in general, not just gender identity.Benigno.In order to unravel some of this complicated mesh of imitations and citations I willtake the role of Benigno as my “original” quotation. My argument is that Benigno (Thebenign), the key character of Talk to Her, openly reiterates All About my Mother’s LaAgrado (the Agreeable) and obliquely foregrounds the performance of Paquito (the devoteeJavier Camara) and father José (the servant-Francisco Maestre), both from Bad Education.Also Benigno and Father Manolo are a masquerade of each other in their obsessiveness forlove and sexual practices interdicted by moral codes of conduct, as are Benigno and Ignacioin their repetition of overdose. In both cases their desires, for a comatose woman, young174boys and drugs, are the prison of their bodies, not the other way around. Butler explains that“the soul is a surface signification that contests and displaces the inner/outer distinctionitself, a figure of interior psychic space inscribed on the body as a social signification thatperpetually renounces itself as such” (Butler, 1997b, p. 172).The representations of Benigno and Father Monolo as bodies of interdiction confirmthe fracture between their internal desires and their bodies in a conflict in which not only arethe interior psychic spaces inscribed on their bodies, but their bodies are carvedperformatively on their psyches. Butler further explains to us that exclusionary rulesgenerate the corporeal stylization of gender, and the taboos of incest and homosexualpractices are the formative and crucial moment of gender identity; in short, they are theinterdictions that construct identity through the idealized and compulsory framework ofheterosexuality (Butler, 1999, p. 172).In addition, Benigno as directly related to the initial dance performance, the film-within-film, and as the narrator of these events and stories, has plenty of latitude fordigressions, commentaries and alterations in translation. Like the man who serves to protectthe woman from her obstacles in the dance, Benigno devotes his life to Alicia. Benigno isthat man’s citation. Respectively, the dancer in the foreground and her partner in thebackground represent Alicia and Lydia. Benigno is performatively instituted as harmless,charming, talkative, outgoing, and a devoted nurse who manicures, nurtures, and cherishesAlicia. He is perceptibly characterized as a male who enacts and repeats gestures and normsof femininity, that is, masculine femaleness, but without explicit reference to his sexuality.The absence of an aggressively masculine sexuality leads to the perception of Benigno as asafe man, incapable of hurting women.175Through the way that we are socially constructed we gain a tendency to desire aunified, logical, integral and recognizable self. Butler informs us that that this tendency ofunity covers up the multipossibilities of gender contexts, in which the dimensions of sex,desire, and sexuality and gender do not express or reflect one another. Thus, the gendercomplexities within Benigno’ s representations and narratives provoke the spectator toquestion the traditional gender classifications and their meanings. Through Benigno,Almodóvar clearly disrupts our notions of gender.the abject.Generally, I am guided by Novoa’s (2005) views on Almodóvar and fairy tales whenI need to discuss the abject in the representation of gender in Almodóvar. I assert thatBenigno, along with Ignacio and Lola (All), are the abject; they represent monstrouscharacters in these Almodóvar movies. Almodóvar’s monsters comprise an alienatedpsychopath, a corrupted transgender junkie, and a deceitful transgender womanizer.However they are ambiguous monsters; as in fairytales they are compassionate, sensible,and sensitive beings, conscious of their status as strangers, and belonging to the world offantasy. Like most monsters they are characterized as abject, but Almodóvar does notrepresent them as fixed in a binary good/evil; they are instituted as forms of transformativeperformance that interfere with the notion of the normalized subject. Consequently,Almodóvar’s representations of these abjections destabilize, transform and redefine thegender and sexual identity of their others. The abject is that which upsets subjectivity,reminding us of our construction in the symbolic transformation in the encounter with the“other”. These characters are often represented in a way that positions the woman not as176only or just a victim, but as a symbiotic double for the monster (Clover, 1987; Creed, 1993;Williams, 1996). I maintain about Almodóvar’s abject characters that their representationsfunction as symbolic explorations of the subject who is forced to recognize the instability ofgender and sexual identity. Cover (2004) explains that “the abject, as such disrupts orthreatens subjectivity and the need to incorporate such abjection into a performative identitythrough recognition of identity’s lack of foundation and through the embrace oftransformation”. Cover’s assertion resonates in Benigno’s, Lola’s and Ignacio’s alterations ifwe recognize their volatility of gender and sexuality. From a neutral male femalenessBenigno comes to perform agency and masculinity; Ignacio moves from a male to a femalebody; and Lola reworks her personality from that of a dehumanized absent father to a caringand nurturing person. The three films end in the same spirit; all is reconciled, and thecharacters’ decisions, far from having any traumatic consequences, point the way toward abright future.Overeat: dyingI found remarkable ways of knowing, showing and viewing by studyingAlmodóvar’s films with reference to gender, masculinity and femininity in the sphere ofperformativity. Initially I point out that Almodóvar’s representations of gender and sexualitychallenge and eventually shape notions of the masculine and feminine, which are presentednot in opposition to each other, but instead as independent variables because, among otherthings, his characters convey agency through their transgression of boundaries, theirrejection of authoritarian systems of control, and their exclusion from socially acceptednorms. Almodóvar’s visual narratives challenge our notions of gender and sexuality because177they continually change concepts of what is or could be the masculine and the feminine. Hisfilms represent female and male relentlessly reiterating and performing concepts of man,woman, masculinity, femininity, maleness, femaleness, and so forth.Moreover, Almodóvar’s imagery suggests gender transitivity and re-negotiation ofsexuality in society. Through recurrent masquerades of gender and sexuality his moviesrefer to the previously performed representations of his earlier movies, whose formerreferents are themselves imitations. So these representations of gender and sexualityparticipate in the endless reiteration and construction of gender that affect the way we seethe normative and non-normative representations and performances of femininities andmasculinities.In Almodóvar’s films the body’s transitivity is invariably apparent revealing howbodies are important in the construction of gender, and the juncture in which thisconstruction is performed upon them. By proliferating possibilities of representations ofgender and sexuality, Almodóvar’s films gradually enlarge the possibility of characters’transformations in endless repetitions that challenge easy categorizations. His films operateunder the principle that gender can be neither true nor false, and employg production ofgender as desire marked on the surface of bodies. Thus the images of transgender presentedin his films contribute to constructing a critical cultural space for agency, and alsoparticipate in the formation of spectatorship.178CHAPTER 9UnrulinessI dislike good taste. I dislike common sense. I dislike good manners. I dislike all ofthem. I can even bear austerities. I don’t pity losers. I welcome transgressors and thebanished. I respect convenience. I don’t care for compromise. I can standappearances. I do not like mistreatment. Iput up with the modernists and theirwritten manifestos. I can even bear the straights and their perfect truths. I can bearthe aesthetes. I do not judge competency. I do not care for etiquette. I applaudrebellion. Jam aware of tyrannies. I understand compassion. I do not condemn lies. Ido not condemn vanity. I like those who are hungry. Those who die of volition. Thosewho dry up in desire. Those who burn!Senhas, Lyrics by Adriana CalcanhotoIn this chapter, I explore pedagogical approaches to Almodóvar’s queer genderdiscourses as an experiential conduit to a critical pedagogical practice in visual cultureeducation. I describe and explore two pedagogical moments I have experienced usingAlmodóvar’s queer gender imagery in classrooms. Also I situate the possibility oftranscultural approaches to viewing Almodóvar’s films. And I suggest pedagogicalapproaches to Almodóvar’s queer discourses.Irony: Almodóvar’s Queer Genders and their Pedagogical Moments in Classrooms.During my PhD program, two pedagogical events stand out for me as climacticmoments of teaching and learning with and through Almodóvar’s queer genderrepresentations. The first moment was a class I planned for an art education course withinthe Teacher Education programme of the Faculty of Education, UBC; and the second179moment happened when I met with a graduate class in art education to introduce my workon Almodóvar’s queer gender filmic discourse as a case of alr/tographical pedagogicalpractice. I highlight that these accounts are not polyvocal but are written from my ownperspective as a visual culture educator. However as a fragmented self I bring all myfractured voices into a locus of enunciation.pedagogy in shoes.The class I planned for the teacher education students was initially based on SylviaWilson Kind’s lesson plan, Pedagogy in Shoes. I adapted the plan around the same topic ofshoes but added elements of social studies, asking the students to look at and discuss imagesof shoes from multiple cultures and from racial, ethnic, gender, class, and sexualityperspectives. Prior to the class I asked students to each bring to class at least five images ofshoes, saying that I would provide them with stills of shoes from several of Almodóvar’smovies. For technical reasons, I only used photographs to introduce Almodóvar’srepresentations of gender and sexuality. My main objective was that students would be ableto create a three-dimensional object (referred to as a “shoe”) to express a personal journeythrough their gender, race, ethnicity, class, and sexuality.I asked the students to gather in six groups of six to look at and discuss the images ofthe shoes; describe what they see, what kinds of shoes they are, how they are made, whatkinds of shapes, materials, and textures they can distinguish, and in what ways these shoescan be described or can express themselves as pertaining to a specific race, ethnicity, gender,sexuality, or class. I also instructed students to compare shoes from different cultures, andsub-cultures, discuss what they are used for, and look at their sameness and differences. I180asked them to imagine who they think made and wore these shoes, and where they mighthave walked while wearing these shoes. Additionally I asked them to think of a journey theywould like to go on wearing a shoe (not a pair of shoes); where would they go? What wouldthey do? Who would they be? Would they be attached by their own sense of belonging to aspecific race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or class? I encouraged students to individuallyimagine a shoe they would wear on this journey, and then to begin to construct the shoe outof plasticine, to do one or two sketches of the envisaged three-dimensional shoe, to write astory of their journey to go with their sculpted shoe, and finally to display, share and discusstheir pedagogical shoes, drawings and narratives.Despite information in the course syllabus students initially resisted engaging in thisactivity. They wanted to just see the shoes, copy one, make a drawing, then make asculpture, and then to do the usual show-and-tell. Once past the early resistance they slowlygot immersed in viewing the photos but in all six groups the only social issues discussedwere related to race and ethnicity. I asked why gender, sexuality and class were not issues tobe addressed; were they rendered invisible to them? I was told that as future elementaryteachers it would be pointless for them to consider these issues since they will not be able todeliver this “content” in their classrooms. Also most of the students admitted that they donot feel comfortable entering into these zones of controversy inside an educational setting,and they preferred to “play safe”.Nevertheless after this initial conversation I presented Almodóvar’s images of shoesfrom High Heels, Talk to Her, All About My Mother, Law ofDesire, and Women on theVerge of a Nervous Breakdown, and provoked them to think about and view those shoes interms of gender and sexuality. I asked them to avoid thinking about the immediate use of the181lesson plan for their upcoming practicum, and to fully embrace this experience of viewing. Iasked the students to consider what it would take for them to leave their stableinterpretations and accept new information, knowledges and understandings. I explained thecontext in which these images of shoes were originally positioned, as well as the charactersthat wore them, and gave three detailed analyses of the scenes in which the shoes wereworn; for example, the matador’s shoes in the bullfighting scenes in Talk to Her. Iintroduced the photographs through a slide show and asked the students to look at eachimage but also to see the interconnection among them in relation to gender and sexuality ineveryday life in society.Most of the students were aroused by the irreverence in which these shoes wereconceptualized and spontaneously broke their silences, entered their private spaces, andengaged in a lively discussion about masculinity, femininity, men, women, transgender,homosexuality and heterosexuality to name just a few topics, themes, and issues. Noticeablymost students were surprised and delighted to be able to “see” and discuss these issues in anart class, but also some students were confused, disconcerted and speechless. I addressedthese feelings of discomfort and conflict by having individuals discuss in small groups howin our everyday lives we experience a multitude of bodily sensations through the pervasivepower of visual representations, discussing how the depiction of visual elements inrepresentation can have an impact on people from different backgrounds, class, gender,religions, races and so forth; additionally how we might position ourselves should a similarsituation arise in our classroom.At the end of the class several students reaffirmed that they still would not useAlmodóvar’s images in elementary schools, but said that his imagery had possibly made182them aware of linking social issues with art education practices. I argued that in order forvisual culture educators to engage critically with representations of everyday life, they mustcombine content and context, and recognize and value an extensive arrangement of socialissues, forms of expression, and pedagogical experiences. I also posited that visual cultureeducation practices ought to explore desire, pleasure, romance, seduction, music, plot,humor, and pathos (Ellsworth, 1997, p. 21). Moreover we engaged in conversation aboutacceptance, rejection and difficulties viewing images.Drawing on this initial experience I learned that Almodóvar’s queer discourse, notonly his movies or stills from them, could assist visual culture educators to embrace thestudy of social issues, specifically gender and sexuality, as instruments of critical pedagogy.In addition, I realized that the use of Almodóvar’s discourse in this class, as in any other thatI taught during the whole course, worked as a powerful pedagogical instrument to provokeadditional discourses, inciting an intense social discussion of its meanings.Matador.Now I move to the second pedagogical moment I experienced in a graduate course,which consisted mainly of white women including the instructor(s). Prior to my presentationon the viewing of Almodóvar’s film as an alr/tographical pedagogical practice I sent aliterature review of Almodóvar’s films that I wrote as part of my comprehensiveexaminations to the course instructors to distribute to their students. In class, I initially spentsome time introducing Almodóvar’s context as an ex-punk who in his early films critiquedeverything related to gender and sexuality such as masculinity, femininity, homosexuality,heterosexuality, bisexuality, and so forth, managing to irritate all sorts of community183associations such as feminist groups, gay and lesbian associations, pro-censorship groups,and groups that support family, state and traditional values. In addition I explained that hisfilms present a mixture of slasher, pop, kitsch, and neobaroque (postmodern) aesthetics. Iexplained that to further discuss and analyze aspects of his work and its possibleimplications for visual culture education I would show a clip of Matador and a slide showwith images from other films. I showed the introductory scenes of Matador, his fifth film.Analyzing this film Smith (1994) powerfully describes the first two shots, as follows:A woman is drowned in her bath. The blood balloons over her face as her throat iscut. The head of another woman is severed by a circular saw. Cut to an extreme closeup of a male face [Diego Montes], feverishly agitated. The next shot comes frombehind the man’s chair: his legs are placed astride the TV screen on which the earlierimages appear and he is furiously masturbating (just out of frame). (p. 65)The shots which follow focus on former matador Diego (Nacho MartInez), who has had toretire too early from his career after an injury; and in the scene he is teaching the art ofkilling a bull to a group of promising bullfighters. Angel Giménez (Antonio Banderas), aneffusive apprentice, is among them. And after this shot there is a sudden cut, as Aquarello(2003) describes:The training lecture then cuts to the image of a beautiful, enigmatic woman sitting ona park bench, Maria (Assumpta Serna) as she initiates contact with an anonymousman innocuously passing by, follows him back to an apartment, and, at the height ofphysical intimacy, stabs him with a long ornamental pin behind the nape of the neck- in the region between the shoulder blades defined in bullfighting as the cleft of theclods. The shot then cuts back to the training grounds as Angel, intrigued by (andundoubtedly, attracted to) his instructor, follows Diego back to the house for a drinkof water, and soon grows anxious when the conversation exposes his inexperiencewith women. (P. 1)As soon as the lights were turned on a strong reverberation was heard throughout the class.These clips created an immediate, loud and at times vociferous response from the students,both to the work and to how the work was shown. Two students abruptly complained about184having to watch “pornographic” films; some students cried, others left the room, and anotheraccused me of having “raped” her.I was taken aback! In my twelve years teaching courses on visual studies and culturalstudies in higher education I had never received any complaint from a student in class whowas ‘offended’, ‘disturbed’, ‘violated’, or ‘angry’ about a text or visual representation used inclass. In my most confident vision of the ability of Almodóvar to disrupt a classroom, Inever expected that clips that are detached from the filmic and the discursive context wouldhave the power to disturb so much. Or maybe the imagery disturbed for that very reason--because it did not aggregate the filmic and the discursive context to make it more accessible.Moreover, I was not prepared to deal with the situation. I could hardly speak; I was totallyshouted down by the students. One student after another in a relay process complained that Idid not warn them that I would be showing “pornographic material”. I tried to explain thatconcepts of pornography are extremely subjective, varying from one context to another, andthat we should learn how to deal with difference; and I tried to explain that the clips Ibrought to class were from a film exhibited in mainstream cinemas around the world. Manydifferent questions, comments, accusations, and arguments seemed to multiply exponentiallyas the evening went on. I could hardly react to this frantic wave of charges because I myselfwas in panic and because I felt extremely disrespected by not being allowed to finish thetalk, to present my slide show, and to articulate my thoughts about Almodóvar’s visualrepresentations. The viewing of the clips was enough to disrupt the students, interrupt mypedagogical strategies, and leave the instructors perplexed and silenced. All of us wereovercome by the occurrence; all became learners of what was happening.185During this turbulent moment while listening to the cries and criticism I went swiftlythrough a multitude of doubts about what affected them so much, and what disturbed themmore: the scene of a man masturbating and objectifying women as he views slasher movies,or the scene in which a woman objectifies men, cold-bloodedly seduces a man, and, onceshe has contained his penis, inserts a pin into the back of his neck, and symbolicallypenetrates him with her phallus. I considered from which position they looked at theseimages; what concepts of obscenity and pornography they were using; why it was only afterthe end of the clips that the students articulated that they could not view that kind of materialand that they considered it an imposition. I wondered why they did not leave the classimmediately after the first image that hurt them so much. Also I remember asking myself:are they looking only at the Spaniard Almodóvar’s queer film or at both the Almodóvar clipsand the queer Brazilian presenter Belidson as part of the body of interpretation? Was it myextremely red clown shoes that queered that environment? Why was the students’ angerdirected at me, at myself, instead of the director, the movie, and the clips?Since that class I have been continuously asking more questions, such as: Arestudents masochists enough to endure any suffering to please their masters, their teachers, orare they just pleasing themselves? What kind of pleasures did these students derive fromsubjecting themselves to this allegedly unpleasant, embarrassing, and abusive experience?Where are the places inside academia to screen and study visual representations of queergenders, if art education settings are not among them? In what ways are visual cultureeducators prepared to deal with such issues? How is it possible to prepare visual cultureeducators to negotiate these spaces of emotion and cognition? How can art educatorsnegotiate these issues cross-culturally and transculturally?186I wish I had had the opportunity to have immediately shared and discussed thesequestions with the class. The students had the assistance of their professors to furtherdevelop this experience. With the intervention of the instructors I was given a few minutesto conclude my presentation; however there was nothing much to be concluded, because wewere living the crisis of a disrupted pedagogical moment. There was a commotion in theclass and everyone seemed deeply affected by it. Moreover I was astounded by the wholeexperience, and I felt that in that entangled moment we were all learners, viewers, agentsfuelled with emotions, notions, concepts and reactions--all of them frenetically operating atonce. The concern of one of the instructors was that what was happening was shutting up notonly the educator Belidson but also the queer project of the art education program at UBC. Iargued that this was not the most important point and I would carry on with my work.Once my time was finished I left the room without knowing exactly what hadhappened. In the following weeks the instructor(s) engaged in intense conversations with thestudents; and then I was informed by one of the instructors that the “key” “problem” withmy talk was that students were not warned in advance about any strange, dangerous,difficult, and unexpected visual representations. Also I was informed that my article had notbeen distributed to the students prior to the presentation--and I had imagined that the articleand the introduction would suffice as warnings. I was invited for another session with thesame group weeks later, but I declined the invitation mainly because the pedagogicalmoment, the conflict, and the crises had happened within an earlier time frame and it mayhave been too difficult to bring the earlier session to a sense of closure and a comfort zonefor students, the instructors and myself. The instructors are highly qualified art educators187with wide knowledge of feminist and queer studies and were themselves able to promote arich discussion in the service of their pedagogical practices.I must assert here that although I learned through this experience that it is importantto inform students about what they can expect, I found exceedingly complicated the wholeidea of making warnings before viewing and discussing particular representations because inmy everyday experience the concepts of “unusual” or “unexpected”, “dangerous”,“difficult”, remain extremely fluid. I am fully aware of the role of educational institutions inestablishing what is appropriate, admissible, eligible, qualified, relevant, applicable, suitableand so forth, inside the curriculum. Thus, I argue that students should not be “warned” aboutsexually explicit material, or any other forms of potentially “offensive” content such assexism or racism. Rather, I argue that students must be informed prior to the beginning ofthe course about the course objectives and content. Students who have problems withmaterials presented in class are free to voice their objections, argue their opinions, and learnabout difference, contrasts, and acceptance. In particular, I focus on my use of Almodóvar’sfilmic discourse as a site of conflict and as a source of exploration with students of therelations between power, knowledge, social context, subjectivity, visual representation, anddesire. As Canaan and Epstein (1997) explain:The contexts in which materials are used in classrooms are key to the meanings thatare generated about them. Students cannot know in advance how a text fits into acourse by reading a list of materials before the course begins. What seems ‘unusualor unexpected’ to a student before a new course is underway can appear mundane bythe time the material is encountered within the context of the course as a whole.Conversely, a text that seems relatively unproblematic initially can become highlycharged by the time the text is used in class. (p. 101)This experience has been a major point in my pedagogical understanding of thepossibilities of using Almodóvar’s discourse for discussions of social issues in visual culture188education. All the doubts, uncertainties and questions have assisted me to ponder the visualpleasures given to, and arousal of, viewers by filmic representational strategies and modes ofaddress. I learned from this pedagogical experience that Almodóvar’s queer genderrepresentations can:• give prominence to discursive ambiguity.• acknowledge unusual modes of producing and consuming meanings.• unsettle the harmony of heteronormativity.Also they can incite reconceptualization of entrenched and commonsense notions aboutvisual representation of gender and sexuality by encouraging a pedagogy of confrontation asopposed to one of assimilation and uncritical reproduction. I understand that they canchallenge and stimulate visual culture educators and students to reconsider the terms andbases in which they classify, define, and describe human beings, social concepts, norms, andtheir practices. Moreover these discourses on gender and sexuality can help construct theconditions for learning how to perceive social contradictions in order to provokeinterventions, to participate in, and to transform society. And finally I argue thatAlmodóvar’s queer gender filmic discourses are a privileged location for visual cultureeducators to rationalize human cultural experiences of desires, sexuality and genderidentifications that rely on fixed fears and social moral panics.Inconsistency: Sexuality and Visual Culture Education in ContextFor approximately the last ten years the Brazilian federal government has beenreconceptualizing the teaching of the arts (visual studies, drama, and music) to includesexuality and gender. Changes initially became visible through the Brazilian National189education Guidelines and Framework law (LDB 9694/98) (MEC, 1998), which makes artseducation compulsory from kindergarten to grade 12. Presently the arts also form part ofentrance requirements for a few Federal Universities. The National Curricular Parameters(PCNs) suggest that the study of sexual orientation in school must be understood as aprocess of collective pedagogical intervention designed to transmit information and toproblematize questions related to sexuality, including positions, beliefs, taboos and values,and to present to students the possibility of exercising their sexuality in a sociallyresponsible and pleasurable form. The discussion of gender provides for the questioning offixed roles assigned to men and women in society, and evaluating these roles and theirflexibility.This proposal incited numerous discourses on sexuality in the educational system(See Altmann, 2001; Loponte, 2002; Louro, 2001, 2004, 1999; Maluf, 2002; Ribeiro Costaet al., 2003; Tonatto & Sapiro, 2002; Vianna & Unbenhaum, 2004). However the “teaching”of sexual orientation after the PCNs has assumed a purely biological frame of reference: thebody, health care and the fixation of gender. In accordance with the PCNs, it is the role ofschool, no longer just that of the family, to develop critical, reflective and educative actionsto promote the health of children and adolescents.Since the study of the arts is mandatory and the Brazilian educational system onlyallows specialists to teach K-12 arts classes, there is a network of almost four hundredteacher education programs in faculties, colleges, and private and public universities. Iassume therefore that a conversation about themes of visual culture education and the studyof representations of gender and sexuality can be very productive.190The preceding discussion sets the framework for some understanding oftransculturation as a crucial element for my analysis of fissures/fractures/splits and inbetweenness in the study of gender and sexuality in visual culture representations. For theteaching of sexuality and gender in visual culture education I propose a transculturalpedagogical approach in which association, combination, conversation, diversification, andtransubstantiation ultimately emphasize the body as a place of knowledge, because of itsdirect implication in the transitory human performances of becoming and belonging. Thistranscultural pedagogy:• denaturalizes the places constructed for those genders and sexualitiesexcluded from hegemonic discourses,• opposes itself to fixed identities,• defies the pretense of objectivity and the universality of institutionalizedforms of knowledge,• seeks out principles of knowledge capable of accounting for the historicalagency of subaltern subjects and collectivities, and finally,• creates strategies for the discussion of an asymmetrical distribution ofculture, knowledge and power.The transcultural pedagogic offer is to claim the power of the frontier/border as agenerative epistemological space which can at once accept, understand, recognize, value,contradict, and transpose epistemologies configured by different geocultural positions andhistories. In transcultural pedagogy, border thinking promotes the reallocation of notions ofspectatorship, image analysis, ways of seeing, and issues of positionality; and it intensely191challenges methods of interpretation. Moreover it is not restricted to peripheral sites butaffects all sides in an unrestricted process of shared influences.Gain: Imagining Pedagogical Approaches to Almodóvar’s Queer Discourses.The following is an outline of my pedagogical approaches to Almodóvar’s films. Tobegin with, it is essential to identify students’ needs and to embrace the diversity of learningcontexts such as class, gender, sexualities, race, ethnic origin, language, disability and soforth. Further I attempt to keep the focus on student-based learning to understand how, byencouraging students to actively participate in their own learning and future teaching,education generates locations which make possible emotional and cognitive growth. Of noless importance is a concentration upon the viewer, which can aid us to understand howqueer gender representation in film language can be interpreted from different spectatorpositionings. Intended to be accessible to those who are new to film studies, my pedagogicalapproaches focus on a concise explanation of key ideas in film, analyzing only narrative,genre, and representation.I have also assumed a pedagogical framework that negotiates challenging curriculumareas such as controversies surrounding gender and sexuality censorship in film; accordinglyI invite students to discuss issues like ideology, morality, and systems of beliefs, amongothers. I encourage students to consider for what purposes and by what measures specifictexts are allowed to be used in the classroom, which persons have been hurt by these texts,and which social institutions promote, have interests in and benefit from interdictions ofother texts. It is extremely important that students be aware that “the needs of audiences inspecific contexts inform our choices of what texts we produce and use and how we produce192and use them”(Canaan & Epstein, 1997, p. 112). I encourage students to explore theirpleasures, and to analyze their responses. In the end, I believe, what was so important aboutthe occasion with the graduate students in Education, was not some resolution about thevalue, danger, or importance of Almodóvar’s work, but that it allowed people to articulateand debate ideas and disagreements that were part of their daily readings in the newspapersand part of their daily conversations.I expect that at the end of an entire course students from the teacher educationprogram are able:• to express understandings of their personal and social investment in viewingfilmic representations of gender and sexuality,• to understand social context and cinematic contemporary history, and identifykey themes and preoccupations related to men, women, femininity,masculinity, transgender, queer and so forth, and, additionally,• to associate them with more general issues of class, race, ethnicity, religion,disability, aging, and so forth.Furthermore students should gain experience in demonstrating specific skills relevant to theanalyses of visual representations of gender and sexuality:• by arguing their opinions compellingly.• by writing practical film criticism and narratives about their reception,perception, viewing, interpretation and understanding of films.• by connecting film studies, queer studies, and visual culture education togrowing analytical skills relevant to critical pedagogy and cultural studies.193For such a course I would suggest the educator choose two or three films to show intheir entirety and at least four to five other films to manifest the web of connectionsestablished in a discursive text. Teaching is based around two sessions per week. The firstweek begins with a short lecture and then we watch an entire movie, which we continue todo during the first session of each week. In the second session we watch and discuss scenesfrom the film previously viewed. Lectures at the beginning of the second session of eachweek introduce students to key concepts related to the filmmaker, his social context andpersonal positions, the film genres explored, spectatorship, and other subjects of filmstudies, then to queer studies, and then to visual culture education practices. In thissequence, lectures do not introduce the films; films introduce lectures. While lecturingshould be kept to a minimum, it remains one of the key ways of conveying information. Istart with what the students are familiar with, and then guide them into exploring relatedissues of interest, which may involve dividing students into groups.Careful preparation is necessary to implement a pedagogical viewing, analysis anddiscussion of a given film with gender and sexuality themes. In regard to pedagogical issuesof the teaching of troubled filmic discourses Stockdill, Park and Pellow, and Allen (B. J.Allen, 2003, pp. 149-150; Stockdill et at., 2003, pp. 2 15-216) provide visual cultureeducators with valuable pedagogical tools to make film viewing more valuable for students.The tools comprise a basic series of steps, as follows:• Forewarning— inform students about representations of gender and sexuality.• Selecting- choose an effective film.• Acquaintance— watch and analyze the films.• Timing- identify when to show a particular film.194• Narration — provide students with essential historical information.• Conceptual framework — Provide discussion questions beforehand.• Information — make available for students a network of resources, referralsand contacts with related organizations and services.• Analyzing - study the film with students after viewing.• Discussion - connect student’s conceptual discussion with their emotionalreactions.• Empowering — address frustration, guilt, and other negative emotionsunleashed by the film.• Opening — be innovative in facilitating discussion and experiment with whatthe filmic language can offer.• Film language - keep the constraints of the film form in mind.Also very important for the teaching of film is to provide students with guidelines for theirnote-taking such as: scene—by-scene observations, plot questions and comments, notes oncharacter representation, notes on narrative structure, topics to raise for thematicdiscussions, selection of scenes for detailed analysis, lists of cast and crew, notes on motifs,allusions, symbolism, music, costumes, special effects, and other things related to genderand sexuality.The above framework is fluid, and visual culture educators are invited to add orsubtract steps when necessary. We need to provide students with critical visual thinking thatcan help them recognize negative, genderized, and sexualized stereotypes. Engaging in thepractice of critically viewing a film and analyzing a film is something any student, even ifmisinformed and unaware of the subject matter, can exercise at any moment of the195presentation. Understanding film as a social discourse allows consideration of the filmviewer, the student, as an immediate agent with the power to move between affection andintellection.The critical viewing of films may possibly empower students to change themselvesand their surroundings, but in order to do so, visual culture education--the teaching andlearning of visual culture--has to approach it from an inclusive perspective in whichdifferent forms of social issues can be understood through non-hierarchical categories.Visual culture education poses unasked questions, and visualizes possibilities for educationin general that might never come into focus anywhere else. It can achieve these thingsbecause its primary dialogue leads to critical consciousness that engages in social critique,which leads to understanding, and then action. As Xing and Hirabayashi (2003) comment:Film can break through barriers, giving viewers the opportunity to think about anddiscuss controversial topics that might otherwise be ignored or avoided in arelatively safe environment. Even more important, film can serve as a catalystillustrating interaction among cultures on the screens and, at the same time, in theclassroom.” (p. 10)The best word to describe this process is “agency”, a critical awareness that leads toinformed action to resist processes of domination in our everyday lives. Open to new anddiverse forms of knowledge, visual culture education promotes understanding of hiddenmeans of oppression, rejects the culture of positivism, and above all accepts the idea thatfacts and values are indivisible, and that knowledge is socially constructed and intrinsicallyrelated to power. Ultimately, visual culture education encourages passive consumers tobecome active producers of culture, revealing, and in the process resisting, thehomogenizing structures.196ConclusionAlmodóvar’s queer gender discourses are experiential conduits to a criticalpedagogical practice in visual culture education. In this chapter I:• argue that in order for visual culture educators to engage critically withrepresentations of everyday life, they must combine content and context, andrecognize and value an extensive arrangement of social issues, forms ofexpression, and pedagogical experiences.• assert that visual culture education practices must discover and exploresexuality and gender as involving desire and pleasure.• suggest that it is essential to engage in conversation with students aboutacceptance or rejection of, and difficulties viewing, images.• affirm that queer filmic discourse, not only Almodóvar’s stills or a movie, areable to assist visual culture educators to embrace the study of social issues,specifically gender and sexuality, as instruments of critical pedagogy.• assert that Almodóvar’s discourse works as a pedagogical instrument toprovoke additional discourses, inciting an intense social discussion of itsmeanings.• focus on the study of Almodóvar’s filmic discourse as a site of conflict and asa source of exploration with students of the relations among power,knowledge, social context, subjectivity, visual representation, and desire.• emphasize that Almodóvar’s queer gender representations endorse discursiveambiguity, acknowledge unusual modes of producing and consumingmeanings, and unsettle the harmony of heteronormativity.197• argue that Almodóvar’s queer gender representations incitereconceptualization of commonsense notions about visual representation ofgender and sexuality by encouraging a pedagogy of confrontation as opposedto one of assimilation and uncritical reproduction.• argue that Almodóvar’s queer gender filmic discourses are a privilegedlocation for visual culture educators to rationalize human cultural experiencesof desires, sexuality and gender identifications that rely on fixed fears andsocial moral panics.• suggest that in a transcultural pedagogy, border thinking promotes thereallocation of notions of spectatorship, image analysis, ways of seeing, andissues of positionality; and intensely challenges methods of interpretation.• state my expectation that students from teacher education programs arecapable of expressing understandings of their personal and social investmentin viewing filmic representations of gender and sexuality, to understandsocial context and cinematic contemporary history and identify key themesand preoccupations related to men, women, femininity, masculinity,transgender, queer and so forth, and, additionally, to associate them withmore general issues of class, race, ethnicity, religiosity, disability, aging, andso forth.198CHAPTER 10EmbodimentsEmbodiments is a coming together of critical visual thinking, critical pedagogy,visual representations of gender and sexuality, film, and visual culture education. In it theoryand practice fuse in a liminal space that creates agency for learners, artists, researchers andteachers to turn into dynamic subjects able to transform themselves and society. Here, Iexplore the links between Almodóvar’s filmic discourse on gender and sexuality, and criticalpedagogy; and the multi-possibilities of pedagogical approaches connecting queer genderfilmic discourses and visual culture education. I also explore Almodóvar’s queerrepresentations as sites of conflict and negotiation that give rise to critical pedagogicaldevelopments, new pedagogical approaches, and inquiry about the possible associations andconflicts of queer representation in visual culture education.Hallucination: Critical Pedagogy and Almodóvar’s Genders and SexualitiesAs discussed earlier, art education as a field of study and practice is embarking on aradical change towards visual culture education, and developing new practices that provokedisplacement of rigid notions of spectatorship, image analysis, ways of seeing,epistemology, power, identity, subjectivity, agency, and everyday life. As a consequence,visual culture educators and students make knowledge, as they engage critically withrepresentations of their everyday life, combining content and context, and recognizing andvaluing an extensive arrangement of social issues, forms of expression, and pedagogical199experiences. In fact, the only way I think of and use the term visual culture education is withthe implication that it is a critical pedagogy praxis which neither suggests nor promotes aspecific unified, instructional methodology or particular curricular content. Visual cultureeducational practices are creating the basis for a move from the prevailing patriarchal modelof culture toward an aesthetics of conversation, social justice and responsibility; their aim isto empower and produce the conditions for interactions of students, teachers, andcommunity in achieving greater equity in representation and loci of articulation.As a rule, current art education practices have systematically excluded visual, andabove all filmic representations of troubled genders and controversial sexual preferences. Byembracing the study of visual representation of social issues, including gender and sexuality,visual culture education as an instrument of critical pedagogy could acknowledge differentcontexts and contiguities of viewing and representing of visual imagery. Effectively visualculture education provokes a critical social reconstructionism and shifts from the previousfocus on the art object to the context of the viewing spectator, thereby provoking an eminentpedagogical potential for showing how viewers are framed as subjects, and how artifactsinform and form these subjects at the same time as they are read, reread, produced andreproduced by viewers. Also, this shift endorses film as a powerful instrument forunderstanding cultural representations; one that provokes an enticement of discourses,problematizes the relationship between producer/objecticonsumer, and incites an intensesocial discussion of its meanings. Nevertheless, virtually no practices involving film as acritical tool for visual culture education have been registered in the literature to date. Thusvisual culture educators in practice need to study critically the discourse of film, adoptconcepts of culture that include a constant and contextualized analysis of the relations of200power and knowledge, and consider the contribution of film studies and queer theory to thefield in order to fight the prevailing restrictiveness and censorship within art educationinstitutions.I claim that queer filmic representations, such as Almodóvar’s for example, are ableto offer tools and alternatives for students and teachers in classrooms practicing criticalpedagogy, and can bring empowering projects into more traditional art education classroomsettings. For instance, Almodóvar’s queer discourse, more than simply opening his texts to amultiplicity of interpretations, has emphasized an in-between space of translation wheresubaltern knowledge can be represented and heard. In his filmic discourse the politicaldefines representations of gender and sexuality essentially as the pedagogical requirement toread texts differently, gives prominence to discursive ambiguity, acknowledges unusualmodes of producing and consuming meanings, and unsettles the harmony ofheteronormativity. Thus readings of such film representations can develop sites of politicalresistance to oppressive practices, as Loutzenheiser and MacIntosh (2004) explain:Relying on readings of schools that complicate, disrupt, and note the erasuresinherent within the construction of private (i.e., sexuality) and public (i.e.,heteronormative schools’) realms invites educators to focus on what is present andevident, as well as what is hidden or silent. We argue that queer theories and thequeering of theory offer curricular and pedagogical studies as sites of contestationthat may, in turn, open up pedagogical and curricular projects and unsettleheteronormativity in schooling. (p. 154)Almodóvar’s queer discourse often confuses and provokes because it destroysingrained notions about art, representation, and common sense; that is, integrating severalgenres and genders his films intentionally and effectively repeat, copy, or imitate an originalthat is only a referent of a different reference. The particulars of Almodóvar’s filmicdiscourse on gender and sexuality, the various ways of seeing them, and the interaction201between viewer and object of vision, trace the definition, establishment and development ofa critical pedagogy. Implicit in this framework is a focus on the relationship between theviewer and the object/subject being viewed, because it is put forward as an understanding ofways in which queer representations and spectatorship add to interpretive practices in visualculture education, and influence the dialogue with critical pedagogies.As applied to visual culture education, critical pedagogy is a flexible set ofpropositions aimed at education’s function as a means to liberation and social justice to beimplemented by art learners. These propositions and practices provide students with tools toanalyze critically how texts are constructed and in turn construct and locate viewers, and tobecome responsive to the politics of representations of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality,class, and other cultural differences. In this sense, Almodóvar’s representations of genderand sexuality, through their transgression of boundaries, their rejection of authoritariansystems of control, and their exclusion from socially accepted norms challenge andeventually shape notions of the masculine and feminine that are presented as independentvariables that convey agency. Moreover, Almodóvar’s queer narratives challenge ournotions of gender and sexuality because they continually change concepts of what is orcould be the masculine and the feminine, by representing female and male relentlesslyreiterating and performing concepts of man, woman, masculinity, femininity, maleness,femaleness, and so forth. Queer filmic discourses such as Almodóvar’s can be exceedinglyuncomfortable for teachers, researchers, and students, but I argue that these discoursesprovoke what Kumashiro (2003) describes as a “pedagogy of crisis”, as he explains:Education is not something that involves comfortable repeating of what we alreadylearned or affirming what we already know. Rather it involves learning somethingthat disrupts our commonsense view of the world. The crisis that results fromunlearning, then, is a necessary and desirable part of antioppresive education. Desire202to learn involves desiring difference and overcoming our resistance to discomfort.Consequently educators need to create a space in their curriculums in which studentscan work through crisis. (p. 63)Thus, this pedagogy of crisis aims to enable students, teachers, and researchers to transformthemselves through comprehensive readings of “troubled” discourses. Moreover,Almodóvar’s queer discourse provides tools for students, teachers, and researchers toscrutinize the means of cultural domination, empowering and enabling students to becomecritical producers of meanings and texts, and to be able to resist manipulation anddomination. Almodóvar’s queer discourse as a critical tool for pedagogy encouragesconfrontation, as opposed to assimilation and uncritical reproduction, and above all exposesthe queer body as a dialogical and pedagogical location. Loutzenheiser and MacIntosh(2004) argue that the queer body as socially instituted belongs to a private sphere, where it isconcealed and sexualized; thus understanding, revealing and accessing the queer body aresome of the means to increase agency and social justice. As they explain:Queer citizenship is not part of multicultural or anti-racist teaching as it has beenpopularly constructed. The queer body, in its racialized, class-based, ethnicallydiverse subjectivities, has few access points in this dialogue. Without access, therecan be no discernable voice, no political presence, no “legitimate” civic identity.Consequently one’s identity as citizen proper is greatly compromised. Whileattempts to infuse curriculums with gender and sexuality have met with reasonablesuccess, the recipe is largely an add-and-stir model in which gay and lesbian issuesare treated as pedagogical isolates, focused on just long enough to substantiate apolitics of Otherness. (p. 153)Accordingly, it is common sense that critical pedagogy is about empowerment; that is, thefocal points of critical pedagogy are concern for social justice through the empowerment ofthe subaltern, the relationship between knowledge control and issues of power in theteaching and learning context, and the unequal relationship among different forms ofknowledge. By accepting marginal social types as intrinsic parts of our everyday life203Almodóvar’s films refuse to associate with the established instituted discourses that judgesocial practices; and they challenge and stimulate spectators to reconsider the terms andbasis in which they classify, define, and describe human beings and their practices.Fracturing representations of social categories, displacing subjects, screening sociallyneglected subjects, and assigning meanings to “dangerous and troubled” social contexts,Almodóvar’s films access the depth of social practices and beings, interfering with socialconventions and subverting social and political discourses.Because he is a bricoleur, Almodóvar’s queer discourse blurs the borders of whathave been considered as high and popular cultures, genres, representations of genders andsexuality; and through these performances it acknowledges and accepts everything that isconsidered a contiguity of normal and “non-normal” in everyday actions, performances, andpractices of society, thus creating new forms of knowledge through its emphasis ontransdisciplinary knowledge, and raising questions about dominant powers.Social and cultural experiences are at the heart of the critical pedagogical approachto curriculum. Building on this assertion I argue that Almodóvar’s discourse on the genderand sexuality forms of narratives is a privileged location from which to rationalize humancultural experiences of unsettled anxiety, desires, sexuality and gender identifications thatrely on fixed fears and social moral panics. The transgendered body is the empoweredlocation, in his filmic discourses, in which a series of conversations about what is prohibited,forbidden, illegal, unmentionable, offensive, distasteful, and deviant in gender and sexualpractices takes place.Critical pedagogy challenges essentialist notions of culture, education and society,enabling learners to reflect on their own experience historically, and awakening expectations204of change depending on what issues make the students feel most powerless. Almodóvar’sdiscourse challenges the tendency of mainstream cinema to essentialize and naturalizegender and sexuality as biologically determined. Through idiosyncratic approaches hisdiscourse subverts conservative social and political discourses because while asserting theexistence of transgressive bodies, it functions as a creative strategy to access the depths ofsocial practices’ troubling of social conventions. Thus, Almodóvar’s representations ofqueer gender contribute to constructing a critical cultural space for agency, which isdesirable in education because critical pedagogies need tools to create a more egalitarian andjust society--the conditions for learning how to perceive the social, political, and economiccontradictions which provoke interventions to participate in and transform society.Fragrance: Pedagogical Approaches- Queer Film and Visual Culture EducationSetting aside documentaries, experimental film, and independent productions, mostnarrative films are constituted by a variety of complex processes from film production toexhibition. Films undergo a rigorous preparation in which a screenplay is written andresearch is done to develop staging, acting, and the mise-en-scene, that is, settings,costumes, makeup, and lighting; then it is necessary to bring it all together in space andtime. This part of the film production is the artistic process, in which touch is the privilegedsense. The cinematography, the shooting of a film can only be done from planning thatpresupposes a thorough study of the mise-en-scene. It is the motion photography of imagesthat involves formal aspects such as color, speed, lenses, perspective, framing, and so forth.Shots do not necessarily follow narrative’s time and spaces; therefore it is necessary to relatethe shots through editing, which is a complex conversation involving graphic, rhythmic,205spatial and temporal relations, in order for the shots to convey meaning. The visual andvisualization are privileged in this stage of film production. Separately from the film andcontrolled independently, music and sounds are researched, experimented with andproduced to add to the final edited film. Hearing is the privileged sense at this stage. Theextra contents constitutive of a film include all the frames, spaces and actions not focused onvisually in the film’s main narrative. When all these elements are combined together in amovie all senses are aroused; they are brought into a visualized experience.It seems that the concept of visualized experience is one that is difficult for many arteducators to grasp. The presence of the word visual does not help; it may hinder makingclear that visual culture education is not addressing the experience of vision as a privilegedsense over the others, rather it emphasizes ways of visualizing knowledge through our visualeveryday experiences as a hybrid of text, images, and sounds. Visual culture education aimsits attention not only at the observable visual facts and artifacts, but also at ways and diversecontexts of viewing and representing, and their mediation. Visual culture education extols afeature of visuality that addresses issues of how we gaze at and are gazed at by the world,and how constituting and being constituted by this viewing process is particularly relevantfor the formation of knowledge. There is an obvious interest of visual culture educators inpaying special attention to viewing, interpretation, and construction of meaning throughimages. Thus film, as a visual experience of everyday life, is an advantaged site for visualculture education practices.The process of seeing films, in general, in which viewers make meaning of imagery,is more interactive and dialogical than previously considered, hence in a visual cultureeducational practice teachers engage in intensive interpretive bricolage with students, who206are capable of fragmenting, reconstructing, dialoguing, and fighting for their values andmeanings.By setting out to analyze Almodóvar’s queer discourse, I understood that these visualsystems have a theoretical and practical impact for visual culture education, because filmsrelate to a broad range of aesthetics, play an important role in forming gender and sexualityrepresentations--as well as ethnic, racial, and so forth--and can likewise facilitateunderstanding and communications particularly well in these difficult topics. Moreover, filmis a space in which voices that could not be heard otherwise, are allowed to speak. As Xing& Hirabayashi (2003) further describe:Films can encourage viewers not only to develop empathy for others but also to bemoved into action--recognizing and confronting stereotypes and sometimes evenunlearning them. This is particular true if teachers use supplementary readings,lectures, and thoughtfully designed discussed questions along with the film. (p. 4)Film has a tremendous potential to motivate students because they have prior practice withit, since films have been widely translated into video and digital images. However, despiteall those pedagogical possibilities, film is still a stranger to current visual culture practices.Struggles over meaning and representation are connected to struggles over powerand social agency. Thus queer films as a discursive practice contest institutional gender andsexuality control. Issues of representation and identity offer the opportunity for visualculture educators to explore both the strengths and limits of social issues. Discourses thatfocus on issues of gender and sexuality frequently look at the representations of apparentlyqueer gender subjectivities. In this sense, visual culture education through the viewing offilmic discourses may disrupt students “normal” understandings of the production andcirculation of ‘queer representations” in visual culture. So, teaching with queer film isintrinsically subversive because it interrogates notions of identity, subjectivity, and desire,207and through the intertext they link toward wider investigations in the public sphere:citizenship, race, class, and so forth.These interrogations of notions of identity, subjectivity, and desire are found at theheart of the visual culture education propositions. However--although it is well known thatfilms occupy an advantaged position within visual culture--for moral, practical, and other,more obscure motives the current art education field has been unremittingly neglecting thisoutstanding pedagogical apparatus. Within art education, there is an insufficiency of formaldiscussions around gender and sexuality; and this is quite astounding given the emphasis onrepresentations of sexuality and self-exploration in the existing contemporary visual culture.Xing & Hirabayashi (2003) suggest that:[...] we must seek to understand films that raise both positive and negative feelingswithin viewers, asking how emotional reactions a film evokes can be transformedfrom threats, challenges, or confrontations into opportunities for discussion, self-examination and learning. More specifically, those who use film in the classroomneed to overcome students’ conscious and unconscious inhibitions and biases toencourage honest assessment of and dialogue about racial and ethnic [gender, andsexuality] issues. (p. 6)Based on my experience educating with film at the University of British Columbia,in which a group of students reacted passionately to clips of one film by Almodóvar, I amconvinced that visual culture educators ought to be aware of the emotions that may bereleased as student watch films dealing with unsettling themes, such as gender and sexuality.Students may possibly articulate feelings of acceptance as well as coldness, anger,astonishment, and repulsion. However, film may serve unique functions in exploring genderand sexuality because enabling teachers to encourage students to think more critically,analyzing not only the themes but also the language, context, subject situatedness, issues ofvoice, and so forth. Studying the impact of one kind of Japanese comic, the Yaoi, which208deals with issues of gender and sexual representation, Wilson & Toku (B. Wilson & Toku,2004) faced with the task of understanding how schools do not embrace viewingexperiences that are widely known by youths, clarify:The problematic, subversive, forbidden, and unsanctioned yaoi will probably not bepermitted inside the art classroom. Might it be the case, however, that the lessproblematic forms of visual culture created by youth might stand in for theunacceptable types? If boys’ love provides the means for females to explore genderroles, then perhaps sanctioned forms of visual culture might provide the vehiclethrough which students could practice reading signs in the unsanctioned forms ofyouth culture which exist beyond schools. p. 102)Visual culture educators draw back from screening “dangerous” imagery to studentsbecause I believe they fear to be reinforcing stereotypes. Nevertheless visual cultureeducators often neglect the students’ ability to view films, skills that they have been learningand reiterating in their entire everyday lives. So I argue that visual culture educators miss theopportunity to prepare them to view those images critically.Rumor: Implications for Visual Culture EducationAlmodóvar’s imagery intentionally offers appealing elements of gendertransitoriness and discussions of sexuality in society, denaturalizing genders and revealinghow the dominant sexual order is maintained through performative repetition. Citationalityin Almodóvar’s narratives leads to an endless pattern of reiteration of gender, and throughthis recurrent masquerade occurs modification of the previously performed representationsin earlier movies, which are themselves imitations of the previous “original” referents.Therefore I maintain that there is no original theme prior to these citations, because theperformances of citations themselves manufacture this foundation. Consequently, perceivingvisual culture education to take place as a cognitive and affective process between producer209Éand viewer in everyday life, visual culture educators may consider and reassess imagerysuch as Almodóvar’s, based on the concept that citations themselves construct their ownfoundations: visual discourse on an array of social issues that have an effect on studentnotions, concepts, beliefs, values, appreciations, and so on. In this sense, Almodóvar’s filmrepresentations of gender may become articulated to students through the understanding ofthese foldings, doublings, inventions, and their repetition in the alterations; in short theybecome clear as a repetition in their recurrent citations. So I further suggest that the criticalstudy of visual representation of gender and sexuality, and its forms of production, arecapable of engaging visual culture education with the praxis of social justice.I make this point because positions of masculinity and femininity have been in thatorder fixed on males and females through the power of various gendering discourses, andthese discourses have been used to enforce gender conformity. Butler informs us thatimpersonations of gender such as in drag performance are able to reveal the instability ofthese fictitious binary constructions (Butler, 1997b). Since Almodóvar’s queer filmdiscourse is associated with, and often described, as privileging representations of notions offemininity and masculinity non-normalized in a patriarchal society, and also, through anelaborate masquerade of gender and sexuality, incorporating elements of parody, itchallenges the reproduction of the gender binary, and is a powerful tool for visual cultureeducators to study visual representation of social issues, acknowledging different contextsand contiguities of viewing and representing of visual imagery.The parodic qualities of excess and repetition used in Almodóvar’s discourse confusenotions of what it means to be “real” for us spectators. I add that Almodóvar’s emphasis onthe subjective agency and power, in which reality is performatively constituted through an210imitation of its own desire, reveal that heterosexual identity is constituted through animitation that sets itself up as the origin and the ground of all imitations; thus heterosexualityis always in the process of imitating and approximating its own specter idealization of itself.In this sense, Almodóvar’s films embody the idea that gender is ambivalent, exposing howbodies are critical in the construction of gender; and his heavy-bodied drag queencharacters’ performances play upon the distinction between the sex of the performer and thegender that is being performed, as well as the relationship between sex, gender andperformance. Therefore, by proliferating possibilities of representations of gender andsexuality, Almodóvar’s films increasingly enlarge the possibility of characters’transformations in endless repetitions that challenge simple categorizations. Thesevisualizations of gender and sexual construction and practices assist students to analyzecritically how texts are constructed, to become receptive to the politics of representations ofgender and sexuality, and to inform, construct, unlearn, and situate them.The queer filmic representations of gender and sexuality in Almodóvar reveal theinterdictions that construct identity through the hegemonic and enforced framework ofheterosexuality. While being socially constructed we inflate an inclination to aspire acohesive, logical, and essential self but this propensity conceals the various possibilities ofgender constructions, in which the dimensions of sex, desire, and sexuality and gender donot express or reflect one another. Thus, the gender complexities within queer filmrepresentations and narratives provoke the student to question the traditional genderclassifications and their meanings, clearly disrupting their notions of gender.Another crucial point here is the filmic representation of queer bodies as the abject.Like most monsters the queer body can be characterized as abject in Almodóvar’s filmic211discourse, but he does not represent it fixed in any binary opposition; queer bodies areinstituted as forms of transformative performances that interfere with the notion of thenormalized subject, destabilizing, transforming and redefining the gender and sexual identityof their others. The abject is that which upsets subjectivity, reminding us of our constructionin the symbolic transformation in the encounter with the “other”. Almodóvar’s filmic queerbodies function as symbolic explorations of the subject who is forced to recognize theinstability of gender and sexual identity. As an everyday site of conversation and pedagogicunderstanding the films are a critical tool for visual culture education to further promoteconflict and resistance, contest easy incorporation and uncritical viewing of gender andsexuality, and give access to the queer discourse within the curriculum.ConclusionIn Embodiments I assign positions and set forth findings from this thesis, relatingAlmodóvar’s film representation of queer gender and sexuality, and visual culture education.In summary, this chapter explores how I recognize visual culture education as a process ofcritical pedagogy and in what ways visual representations of gender and sexuality, using as acase the films of Almodóvar, can assist in these critical practices. Here it is important topoint out that although Almodóvar’s filmic discourse has a potential as a tool for arteducation practices I found limitations within queer theory’s approaches to the analysis offilm representations of queer gender such as lack of theorization relating gender andsexuality to race, class, disability, and ageing.I claim that the importance of Almodóvar’s filmic discourse on gender and sexualityfor visual culture education as a critical pedagogy can be listed as follows:212• It can assist visual culture education to embrace the study of visualrepresentation of social issues, specifically gender and sexuality, as aninstrument of critical pedagogy.• As a powerful pedagogical instrument for understanding culturalrepresentations it provokes an enticement of additional discourses, inciting anintense social discussion of its meanings.• It emphasizes the opening of its texts to a multiplicity of interpretationsincluding spaces where subaltern knowledge can be represented and heard.• As a political and pedagogical instrument, it defines representations of genderand sexuality essentially as a possibility to read texts differently.• It gives prominence to discursive ambiguity, acknowledges unusual modes ofproducing and consuming meanings, and unsettles the harmony ofheteronormativity.• It confuses and provokes entrenched notions about art, representation, andcommon sense by continually changing concepts of gender and sexuality.• It suggests the definition, establishment and development of visual cultureeducation practices by promoting various ways of viewing it, andencouraging the interaction between viewer and object of vision.• It encourages a pedagogy of confrontation as opposed to assimilation anduncritical reproduction• It provides tools for visual culture educators to study the means of culturaldomination, empowering and enabling students to become critical producersof meanings and texts who are able to resist manipulation and domination.213• It accepts marginal social types as intrinsic parts of our everyday experiences.• It can challenge and stimulate visual culture educators and students toreconsider the terms and basis in which they classify, define, and describehuman beings and their practices.• It blurs the borders of high and popular cultures, genres, representations ofgenders and sexuality, acknowledging and toleranting of everything that isconsidered a contiguity of normal and “non-normal” in everyday life.• It is a privileged location for visual culture educators to rationalize humancultural experiences of desires, sexuality and gender identifications that relyon fixed fears and social moral panics.• It is a dynamic instrument of visual culture education’s aspiration to promotefluid methodologies or broad curricular content.• It contributes to constructing the conditions for learning how to perceivesocial contradictions in order to provoke interventions to participate in andtransform society.As a final point I stress that the utility of Almodóvar’s queer discourse within thevisual culture education curriculum is less a matter that it has to be privileged because it is aqueer discourse, and more that as a discursive practice it queers the whole curriculum.214CHAPTER 11DeliveranceIn this chapter I provide an overview of the implications border epistemologies suchas transculturalism, alr/tography and queer theory hold for use in visual culture education;and finally suggest further topics and studies concerning the examination of social issues invisual culture education.Noise: Border Epistemologies Informing Visual Culture EducationThis research has made me aware that discourses from a subaltern standpoint, whichare socially constructed as cultural exchanges, by their opposition to fixed identities do thefollowing: denaturalize places constructed for them in hegemonic discourses; advocateagency; and emphasize the body as a place of pedagogical knowledge. Such discourses arethe processes that we act and live in everyday life. AJr/tography and queer theory as criticalpedagogic practices enlarge transdisciplinary ways of knowing, providing visual cultureeducation with the means for a subjective mediation and agency in the practices of research,art, learning, and teaching.There is a powerful reverberation among alr/tlography, queer theory andtranscultural practices as methodological approaches for inquiring into and interpretingvisual culture representations. In their hybridity all these theoretical frameworks areinvolved in promoting critical examination of the complex relationships ingrained in ourdaily visual experiences. To apprehend these everyday life experiences and understandings215through these border practices it is indispensable to situate yourself within the liminal spacesamong artist, researcher, teacher, gender and sexuality, among others, that provoke thesubject to be and become. The interest in everyday cultural life, questioning of socialinterconnectedness, disruption of borders between disciplines, and troubling of normalcythat are objectives of cultural studies, and of my research, are important features inalr/tography, queer theory, and transculturalism.AJr/tography, queer theory and transculturalism, as approaches to analysis ofdiscursive and cultural practices, provide unfolding theoretical configurations for promotingtransgressive inquiries, and assist in unraveling the arrangement of overlapping, ambivalent,and challenging positionalities of visual culture representations. A newly articulatedapproach to carrying out inquiry, alr/tography has been essential in this thesis. It has beenuseful from the initial steps of planning the research, developing research questionsfollowing the flow of changes that they undergo, until I found a wide, comfortable zone tocircle around, collecting data and analyzing data with the involvement of all the faculties ofthe artist, researcher and teacher, to the final writing of the thesis.This thesis, thought of primarily as visual artifact, followed alr/tographical practicesto constantly combine disparate and preexisting elements from images and texts, into newvisual representations, creating pictures, photographs, and clips, and then citing,juxtaposing, and distorting them into new cultural artifacts. Through alr/tographicalpractices the uncertainty of the image and its tendency to attract new meanings became apermanent feature of my lived pedagogical life. Moreover alr/tography’ s provocations todisturb notions of scholarship and knowledge-making in visual culture education motivatedme to deepen the dialogical and pedagogical possibilities that it offers.216Discretion: Last InferencesI have tried to establish a productive and long-overdue conversation, among film,issues of representations of gender and sexuality, and visual culture education. I now turn tofuture possibilities. I encourage visual culture educators to further enlarge this conversation,by researching these topics, adding their own thoughts and circulating their ideas as a workin progress. It is necessary to further explore other queer theoretical frameworks in order toanalyze social issues. Thus, I invite visual culture educators to consider the abovementionedtopics intertwined with issues of class and race. It is necessary to carry out supplementarystudies that empirically examine the changes required in instructional methods in order toinclude these issues in the visual culture education curriculum. I invite visual cultureeducators to additionally explore viewing as art making. And finally I encourage them toexplore a border-queer-alr/tographical pedagogy as a site of confrontations, encounters andconnections among different ways of knowing.217EndnotesI Disciplined-based arts education (DBAE) is a conceptual framework that insurescomprehensively that all students are involved in rigorous study of the arts as a part of theirgeneral education. DBAE means that students study artworks from the following practices:creating or performing, encountering the historical and cultural contexts of artworks,discovering the nature, values and belief of the arts, and making informed judgments aboutthe arts.2 Multicultural art education aims to promote, through art cultural awareness, equalopportunity for learning, and promotion of self and social identity. Multiculturalists arguethat themes relating to diversity in society, culture, and identity are embedded in artpractices, thus art should be looked at as a privileged space for the learning of social studies,and to increase knowledge on issues such as ethnocentrism, stereotyping, discrimination,and racism. Therefore, multicultural art education was considered as an enhancement ofstudents’ appreciation of other cultures, an acknowledgement of racial and cultural diversityin art, and an attempt to put forward cross-cultural understandings within and amongcultural groups. For more details, see Chalmer’ s Celebrating Pluralism: MulticulturalApproaches to Art Learning (1999).Freedman conceptualizes intergraphicality as “the perceptual cross-fertilization of imagesand artifacts.”Only in the summer of 2005, Gender trouble, by Judith Butler, one of the pillars of queertheory literature was published in France. In Brazil despite a strong influence of postructuralthought in the academic system, only now in this century are we seeing the incipientdevelopment of articulated discourses linking Post-structuralism, queer theory, and localsystems of same-sex desires, gender, sex, sexuality and so forth. Note that since colonialtimes French culture has been vital for the development of Brazilian epistemologies and218culture. From monarchy through the military dictatorship of the 60’s, the universities as wellas the basic educational system of Brazil were like a French department of educationoverseas. Between 1964 and 1979, during the military dictatorship, thousands of professors,intellectuals and academics sought refuge mainly in France where they entered into directcontact with structuralist and Post-structuralist authors and knowledge. The impact ofFrench thought was immediate among those Brazilians living abroad. Furthermore it arrivedsimultaneously in Brazil and fostered a change of route and a diaspora of important creativedisruptions that created catalytic effervescent transformations. I highlight these historicalconnections to clarify why the advent of Post-structuralism occurred earlier in Brazil than inAnglo-American or English-speaking cultures. Maria da Conceiçao de Almeida, in Bernvinda constelaçao da desordern: A presença do pensamentofrances no Brasil [Welcomeconstellation of disorder: The presence of French thought in Brasil], Revista FAMECOS,(Vol. 20, April 2003) asserts that the disruption of institutional order caused by Frenchthought was well received in Brazil, even if it was received differently in distincteducational spaces. According to Conceiçäo, Gaston Bachelard, Felix Guattari, GillesDeleuze, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Cornelius Castoriadis, Roger Bastide, ClaudeLevi-Strauss, Pierre Bourdieu, Gilbert Durand, Jean Paul Sartre, Maurice Godelier, ClaudeMeilassaux, Pierre Phelip Rey, Simone de Beauvoir, George Balandier, Michel Serres, MarcAugé, Michel Manffesoli, Eugene Enriquez and Edgar Morin encompass a gathering ofthought that formerly and currently permeates, in multiple ways, the Brazilian graduate andpostgraduate educational system. However, the reception of French ideas in Brazil wasmarked by a dynamics that oscillated, as still it does today, among a critical approval, anuncritical and unrestricted assimilation, and serious suspicion. The readings andinterpretations of French thought in Brazil, differently from the pragmatic readings ofAnglo-American societies (one example being queer theory), have not producedrecognizable bodies of theory that are capable of recognizing its specificities and ofextending, dislocating and defying French thought (See next Chapter: Liminalities).Note that for the time being trans/sexual has been treated as part of the trans/gendercategory.2196A Streetcar Named Desire — Synopsis by T. Dirks (2005). Availablehttp://www.filrnsite.org/stre.html. Directed by independent director Elia Kazan and adaptedfrom Tennessee Williams in 1951, this film tells the story of the desolate mental andemotional fall of a resolute, yet fragile, repressed and delicate Southern lady, BlancheDubois, born to a once-wealthy family of Mississippi planters. Her impoverished, tragicdownfall in the squalid, cramped and tawdry French Quarter one-bedroom apartment of hermarried sister (Stella) and animalistic brother-in-law (Stanley) is at the hands of savage,brutal forces in modern society. In her search for refuge, she finds that her sister lives withdrunkenness, violence, lust, and ignorance. The visceral film, considered controversial,decadent, and “morally repugnant”, challenged the regulatory Production Code’s censors(and the Legion of Decency) with its bold adult drama and sexual subjects (insanity, rape,domestic violence, homosexuality, sexual obsession, and female promiscuity ornymphomania). Ultimately, it signaled the weakening of Hollywood censorship (and groupssuch as the Catholic Legion of Decency), although a number of scenes were excised, andnew dialogue was written. And the Production Code insisted that Stanley be punished for therape by the loss of his wife’s love at the film’s conclusion. In 1993, approximately three tofive minutes of the censored scenes (i.e., specific references to Blanche’s homosexual- orbisexual- young husband, her nymphomania, and Stanley’s rape of Blanche) were restoredin an original director’s version re-release.‘ For historical perspectives on historical Iberian queer culture, see Josiah Blackmore andGregory S. Hutcheson, eds., Queer Iberia: Sexualities, cultures, and crossings from theMiddle Ages to the Renaissance. (Duke University Press: Durham & London, 1999); SylviaMolloy and Robert Irwin, eds., Hispanisms and homossexualities (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 1998); and both articles of Daniel Eisenberg “Cuán queer fue Iberia?”[How queer was Iberia?], La CorOnica: A Journal ofMedieval Spanish Language andLiterature (Vol. 30.1, 2001) and “La escondida senda: Homosexuality in Spanish historyand culture, in David William Foster, ed., Spanish Writers on Gay and Lesbian Themes. A220Bio-Critical Sourcebook (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1999), PP. 1-21. Available:http://bigfoot.comkdaniel.eisenberg8argue that if mixed methods of qualitative and quantitative research were usedcomprehensively in other regions of Brazil, outside the northeast, pnvileging not only theindustrialized cities but also the interior small rural cities, those same systems of same-sexsexuality would be in lesser or larger degree prevalent. I strongly believe that recentlyseveral researchers by overemphasizing the “locality” of the northeast sexualities exoticizedthem, and neglected comparison to similar systems of sexuality operating elsewhere. Sincethe northeast, along with the strategically forgotten southeast, is the place where the Africandiasporic effects are more evident, I believe that those readings of sexuality and gender inthis region are still indebted to wide-ranging critical articulations of race and ethnicconcepts, beliefs, historical positionalities and theories.Marranos are Jews who were forced to become Christians. Forced conversions of Jewsstarted in Spain in the late 1300s and climaxed with the Inquisition in the 1490s in bothSpain and Portugal. Many of the Jews came to genuinely embrace Christianity. Othersoutwardly became Christians but secretly continued to practice Judaism. These becameknown under a variety of names, including secret Jews, crypto-Jews, New Christians,conversos, and Marranos. Rio Grande do Norte, the remote state of northeastern Brazil,whose capital is Natal, was settled by the Portuguese with a large percentage of Marranocolonizers, starting in the 1720s, at the same time that the most intense inquisitorial activitywas occurring in the northeast. It seems likely that the major reason for the Marranossettling in the southwest of this state in the mountains, was that it was too remote anddifficult for the Inquisitorial authorities to reach. My grandmother from my father’s sidecame from one of these Marranos families in this region: The Dias. See Jacques Cukierkorn& Robert H. Lande in Sheaar Yashuv, A Remnant Returns: Searching for BrazilianMarranos (In Karen Primer, ed., Jews in places you never thought of, New York: KtavPublishers, 100-112,1998).22110 To be (spiritually) the lakekere da Taba means to be the little mother (Iya-MäelMother;Kekere- Pequena/Little; lakekere da Taba is the personification of an offering from theOrixds and has the second most important executive position in Candomblé’s hierarchy,Iyalorixd is the first.Note that these characteristics will be fundamental to the construction of contemporaryBrazilian cultural expressions, for example: in music (Bossa nova, Mangue beat andTropicalism), Visual arts (Neo concretism), Cinema (Cinema Novo, Garbage culture),Theatre (the theatre of the oppressed), Dance (Corpo), etc.12 Named “the go-between”, Verger was one of the Brazilian Hermes: the messengerbetween Brazilian and African gods, goddesses and humans. Verger was an outline ofsomeone, a border man, who could not be enclosed by any maps. Verger was a French-Brazilian photographer, historian, and ethnographer and lived in Brazil from 1946 until hisdeath in 1996, at the age of 96.13 See Walter Mignolo, Postoccidentalismo: El argumento desde America Latina [PostOccidentalism: The argument from Latin America] (1998) available:http://ensayo.rom.uga.edu/criticaJteoriaJcastro/14 For more details on Post-Occidentalism versus Post-colonialism see Ramon Pajuelo Teves(2001).15 Amongst the scholars who pursue similar arguments are Alejandro Moreno, AnibalQuijano, Arturo Escobar, Carmen Millán de Benavides, Edgardo Lander, Eduardo Mendieta,Enrique Dussel, Francisco Lopez Segrera, Fernando Coronil, Miguel Angel Porrüa , OscarGuardiola-Rivera, Santiago Castro-Gómez , Walter Mignolo, (as cited in Teves, 2001, note4).22216 Interesting to note that not coincidentally, Anthropophagy shares with queer therevalorization, by contradiction (or inversion), of what had previously been seen as harmfuland detrimental characteristics.17 There is an extensive literature on the relationship of the colonial cannibalism trope toLatin America. See, e.g., Carlos Jáuregui & Juan Pablo Dabove, eds., HeterotropIas:narrativas de identidad y alteridad latinoamericana (Jauregui) (Pittsburgh: InstitutoInternacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2003); Carlos Jauregui, Saturno canIbal:Fronteras, reflejos y paradojas en la narrativa sobre el antropofago (Jauregui, 2000) (Revistade CrItica Literaria y Cultural, 51(2000), 9-39); and also, Sara Castro-Klarén, A genealogyfor the “Manifesto antropófago,” or the Struggle between Socrates and the Caraibe.(Nepantla: Views from South, 1(2), 295-322, 2000).18 Tupi are Amerindians who have been living for centuries in most areas of Brazil, as wellas French Guiana, Argentina, Colombia, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Peru. TupI-GuaranI is oneof the four great linguistic families of tropical and equatorial South America; and the TupIGuaranI family is the most extensive in the number of languages and in the geographicaldistribution of these languages. In 0 Instituto Socioambiental, Available:http://www.socioarnbiental.org). Sara Castro-Kiaren draws directly on the work of EduardoViveiros de Castro concerning a surviving Tupi group, the Arawetë, in from the enemy’spoint of view: Humanity and divinity in an Amazonian society, (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1992).19 Silviano Santiago draws intensely on Brazilian Naturalism as one of the founding pillarsof the homoerotic Latin American literature. A main source is AluIsio Azevedo’s 0 cortiço(A Brazilian Tenement, 1890), which includes scenes of lesbian seduction, male drag andsexual acts, and depicts the issue of privacy/public interrelated with class, sexuality, andrace; 0 Ateneu (The Ateneu, 1888) where the relation between public/privacy and sexualityis further explored, and principally Adolfo Caminha’s 0 Bom Crioulo (The good creole,1895). 0 Bom-Crioulo is considered the first Latin American novel to treat homosexuality223with realistic descriptions in which, in the Navy, a strong black man romantically, eroticallyand sexually meets a fragile white blonde boy. This novel constitutes the beginning of ever-enduring and interrelated discourses on characteristic Latin American same-sex sexuality,which crosses race, gender and sexuality boundaries; and helps create the mythology of theinsertor (masculinity)/insertee (femininity) in Latin America. For more details see AluIsio deAzevedo, 0 Cortico [The Brazilian Tenement], (São Paulo: Atica, 30 ed., 1997); AdolphoCaminha, 0 Born Crioulo [The good creole], (São Paulo: Atica, 2000), and Rai1 Pompéia, 0Ateneu [The Ateneu] (São Paulo: Atica, 16 ed., 1996).20 Almodóvar’s first long movie in 8 mm film Folle, Folle, Folle me Tim [Puck, Fuck, Fuckme Tim] has never been commercially released. Currently, he is finishing production of his16th film called Volver, which has no English title yet, but could be translated as Return.21 So far, there have been more than 88 theses written in European languages as follows: inSpanish 25, Portuguese 16, French 16, English 16, German 6, Italian 6, and Polish. Thiscurrent study will be the thesis finished about Almodóvar’s films or directly related tohis works. I had the opportunity the read all or excerpts of the following theses anddissertations: D. M. Almeida, Ramon del Valle-Inclan and the esperpento tradition in thefilms ofLuis Buñuel, Carlos Saura and Pedro Almodóvar (Unpublished PhD, TuftsUniversity, 1996), J. C. Barbosa A estética do cineasta espanhol Pedro Almodóvar [Theaesthetics of moviemaker Pedro Almodóvar] (Unpublished Mestrado [MA], Faculdade deComunicaçao social Caper LIbero, São Paulo, 1999), S. Bergson, Almodóvar de-generado[A de-gendered perverted Almodóvar]( Universidad Católica del Uruguay, Montevideo,2002); V. R. Calmes, El yo y lafigura de Ia madre en la narrativa espanola del siglo XX(Unpublished Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, CA, 2002); S. M. Carijó, Modernismoe pós-modernismo: Influencias estéticas do cinema contemporâneo [Modernism and Post-modernism: Aesthetics effect on contemporary cinema (Unpublished Mestrado [MA],Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 1999); H. L. Davis, High-heeledsexualities: Representations offemininiry and masculinity infourfilms by Pedro Almodóvar(Unpublished MA, Michigan State University, 1999); E. S. Gunn, The impossible subject:224Reiterating lesbianisms in late twentieth-century Spain (Unpublished Ph.D., The Universityof North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, 2004); M. G. Hernandez, Poetics ofSpanishmodernity and postmodernity: Federico Garcia Lorca and Pedro Almodóvar. (UnpublishedPh.D., Boston University, United States — MA, 2003); L. Lev, Transgressive desire andtextual perversion in twentieth-century Spanish narratives. Unpublished Ph.D., HarvardUniversity, MA, 1992); G. B. d. S. Martins, (1997). 0 espetdculo do grotesco nosfilmes dePedro Almodóvar [Grotesque spectacle in Pedro Almodóvarfilms] (Unpublished Mestrado,PontifIcia Universidade Católica de São Paulo, 1977); A. B. Moreira, A temática daperversão na obra de Pedro Almodóvar [The theme ofperversion in Pedro Almodóvar’swork]. Unpublished Mestrado [MA], Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2000); A. C.M. d. Paiva, Eros e Thanatos: Nelson Rodrigues e Pedro Almodóvar.[Eros and Thanatos:Nelson Rodrigues and Pedro Almodóvar] (Unpublished Mestrado [MA], PUC, São Paulo,2000); C. A. F. Passarelli, A mores dublados: linguagens amorosas entre homens nofilme laley del deseo [Dubbed love: Amorous language among men in Law ofDesire. (UnpublishedMestrado [MA], Pontificia Universidade católica de São Paulo, 1998); G. Ramsden, ManuelPuig, Pedro Almodóvar and the politics of camp (Unpublished Ph.D., University ofCalifornia, Santa Barbara, CA, 2003); Richardson, N. E., Postmodern paletos: The city andthe country in the narrative and cinema of international Spain (Unpublished Ph.D.,University of Kansas, KS, 1998). Sgaravatti, E., La spontaneità del desiderio: Ii cinema diPedro AlmodOvar, dagli asordi al presente [The spontaneity ofDesire: The cinema ofAlmodóvarfrom past to present]. Unpublished MA, Università degli Studi di Roma 2003);E. P. Silva, The re-textualization of cinema in Pedro Almodóvar’s “Talk to Her/Hable conella”. Unpublished Ph.D., University of California, Irvine, CA, 2004); W. H. d. Silva, UmaPoética do Desejo: 0 Cinema de Pedro Almodóvar na Transiçao Espanhola [A poetics ofdesire: The cinema of Pedro Almodóvar in the Spanish transition] (Unpublished Mestrado[MA], Universidade de São Paulo, 1999); E. M. Thau, Screening change: The globalizationof Spain at 24 frames per second. (Unpublished Ph.D., University of California, LosAngeles, CA, 2005); H. H. Wu, (2003). Bleeding through borders: The horrific imagination,melodramatic traditions and marginal positions. Unpublished Ph.D., University of SouthernCalifornia, CA, 2003); A. Yarza, (1994). El Reciclaje de la historia: Camp, monstruos y225travestis en el cine de Pedro Almodóvar [Recycling History: Camp, monsters &Transvestites in Pedro Almodóvar movies] (Unpublished PhD, University of California,Irvine, CA, 1994); M. Yukovic, (2004). Nothing is simple: The unique world created byAlmodóvar (City University of New York, 2004). For an update on the scholarly work onPedro Almodóvar see Centro del Documentación Digital Pedro Almodóvar available athttp://sdogma.uclm.es/uclmfhome.html22 There were four films: Pepi, Luci, Born and Other Girls on the Heap (1980), Labyrinth ofPassion (1982), Law of Desire (1987), and High Heels (1991), Davis draws heavily onLaura Mulvey’s Visual pleasure and narrative cinema ([1975] 1999).226ReferencesAbelove, H., Barale, M. A., & Alperin, D. M. (Eds.). (1993). The Lesbian and gay studiesreader. New York and London: Routledge.Aguirre, I. (2004). Beyond understanding of visual culture: A pragmatic approach toaesthetic education. 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