All About My Mother Analysis

Borrowing the genre of melodrama, Almodóvar’s award-winning film, All About My Mother (1999), features transgender and post-queer study of sexuality. Apart from presenting two pre-op transgenders, the film renders a variety of “abnormal” intimate relationships, including the protagonist, Manuela’s family without a father, Huma’s ultimately failed lesbian relationship with Nina, and the family formed at the end of the film, constituted by Manuela, Rosa’s baby, and queer girlfriends. These unusual forms of intimacy disturb the hereto-sexist institutions, e.g. marriage and family. Portraying gender, sexuality, and identity as unfixed, the film mocks the conventional perception by interweaving the theatrical performance with the real life: On the one hand, the fixity and stereotype of femininity and masculinity are fostered by cinematic representations, exemplified by Hollywood productions; On the other hand, the reference to …show more content…
In this way, the film becomes very post-queer that everything, including gender, sexual practices, family structure, and personal trajectory, is queered and enunciated from the social norms. Addressing the film as a post-queer text, this essay starts by analysing how the cinematic intertext, camp asthmatics, together with theatrical effects serve as a discursive use of performativity in Judith Butler’s sense, and then moves to discuss how the film not only presents sexual minorities, e.g. transgender and lesbian, but also queers heterosexual mundane. Finally, the essay illustrates how such queering can promote the “pure relationship” in Meeks and Stein’s definition and challenges social norms and legal institutions, as well as the discursive convention.
With the title indebted to the Hollywood classical, All About Eve (1950), the film intensively manifests