What Bitch You Are, Right? Camp and Queer Performativities in the Almodóvar´s First (1980-1982)

Abstract

The characters and personalities performed by Fabio Mcnamara in Pepi, Luci y Bom y otras chicas del montón (1980) and Laberinto de pasiones (1982) perfectly exemplify the camp postulates coined by Susan Sontag, audiovisual representations where the boundaries between masculine and femenine are not exist, linked to queer theory in the early nineties. Mcnamara goes beyond an ontological behavior exclusively of gay men, dynamiting the stereotypes of heteropatriarchal cis identities. This text is not intended to be a theoretical debate and discourse about “camp”, it is an article analyzing the reasons that will determine that the characters played by Mcnamara are camp, in spanish “marica loca”, in the (homophobic) colloquial language of this time, characters that are characterized by their exaggeration, theatricalization or frivolity that challenges the model of masculinity. This theatricalization is noted some scenes such as the Roxy´s arrival at Casa Costus in Pepi, Luci y Bom or the final scene of the soup opera in Laberinto de pasiones. Mcnamara´s interpretation contrast with the gay´s representation in the late seventies´s spanish cinema called “cine de mariquitas” (“sissy cinema”) that singled and ridiculed gays. The Almodóvar´s cinema importance lies in the social and cultural context, called la Movida madrileña, specially subsequent political reappropriation trying to sell abroad a new image of the country, the “new gay Spain” arising from the political Transition.