Content area
Full Text
XXY (Puenzo, 2007) constitutes a landmark intervention in Latin American queer filmmaking.1 Arguably, it has opened up, as Tretorola has rightly put it, "a new phase in the representation of sexual difference in Argentine Cinema" (363). A pioneering piece not only because it was the first movie to put the intersex sexual subject in the cinematic agenda, but also due to a refreshingly positive and complex perspective to sexual diversity and queer childhood/adolescence that was able to attract LGBTI as well as wider audiences, being particularly popular amongst gay audiences (Puenzo, "XXY: Interview"). The movie is about 15year-old intersex Alex and her parents, who decide to move away from Buenos Aires to the isolated surroundings of a Uruguayan coastal town (Piriápolis) in order to protect her from urban inter- and transphobia. It focuses on five crucial days in which they receive the visit of a family friend, a doctor, who would assess the viability of a surgical intervention to "normalize" Alex as female. Ramiro, the surgeon, comes with his wife Erika and his sensitive 16-year-old son Alvaro. Alvaro bonds with Alex and, after having sex with her, he experiences first hand her closeted intersex condition, along with his own self-discovery of his pleasure of being penetrated. Alex is then assaulted and victimized by a group of teenagers after being outed by her school friend Vando. The spatial configuration of closetedness and the open secret can thus be read as central to the narrative as well as a paramount example of heterotopian space in its ambivalent capacity-I wish to argue-of both enclosure and opening itself up to non-normative encounters with the (queer) other.
My reading of this film foregrounds its depiction of adolescent encounters and teen-teen bondings as enabling alliances and connections that are capable of triggering processes of becoming and agency through liminal sites. These sites of liminality-mirrors, windows, screens-are also passages to "another world," thus figuring ways out of heteronormative power relations and the models of identification associated with them, as well as pointing to new, selftransformative "queer utopias." Teenage relationality is central to this process, albeit this is not only achieved through solidarity and bonding, but also through early adolescent expression of the closet's structural and contained violence, insofar as these enactments bring...