The cinema of Pedro Almodóvar: from optic to haptic, from gay to new queer

Abstract

This essay addresses the shift in Pedro Almodóvar’s cinema from an attempt in his early films to deconstruct the hegemonic cinematic gaze through an inversion of traditional gender roles, to an effort to reproduce a tactile visuality that characterizes his later works. Both the destruction of scopophilia in his first (pink) pe­riod, and the hapticity of his blue period, correspond to two different moments of resistance in the hegemony of the heterosexual male gaze. This evolution parallels an epistemological shift towards a new reconfigura­tion of sexual identities. By abandoning his early essentialist discourse, which was based on playfully rigid gender categories (i.e. homosexuality vs. heterosexuality) and which sought to subvert the heteronormative status quo, Almodóvar embraces a new antiessentialism that points towards a more complex destabilization of identities. He overcomes gender binarism through his “pan-sexualization”: the crossing of gender divi­sions and the positioning of sexual identities within ambivalent contexts, moving toward the indeterminacy of the new queer.