The Law of Desire; post-francoist masculinities, liberated homosexualities

Abstract

Gender is a cultural construction (Butler, 1990) and, thus, it is a product of a variety of social technologies such as cinema (Lauretis, 1989). Within gender studies, analysis of masculinities in media products has gained importance; if traditional hegemonic masculinity is not questioned and old patriarchal values are not deconstructed it will not be possible to propose non-stereotyped models that reflect the plurality of men in society and, therefore, to achieve equality (Zurian, 2011; 2013, 2023). Throughout Pedro Almodóvar’s filmography, male characters have gained weight and complexity, with new masculinity models being proposed, although academic studies do not capture this in its entirety. Accordingly, this article will focus on the analysis of the male protagonists in The law of desire (1987) to determine which type of masculinity is constructed and proposed by Almodóvar in El Deseo’s first production. This is not only his first film premiered outside our borders, it is also the first one with male leads and the first part of the self-fiction trilogy that it makes up together with The bad education (2004) and Pain and Glory (2019).