“’To be or not to be…’: Identity Lost or Identity (Re)Gained in Pedro Almodóvar’s \'La ley del deseo\' (1987) and \'La piel que habito\' (2011)?”

This interdisciplinary book chapter analyses the representation of transgenesis and transgenderism in Pedro Almodóvar's "La ley del deseo" (1987) and "La piel que habito" (2011). Of particular concern is how either forced or voluntary transsexuality in these films affect the identity of the male turned female protagonists. Is their identity as transformed as the postoperative body they both inhabit or is an original identity left intact and thus to be seen as a free-floating entity independent of the, at times, imprisoned physical shell? In the two Spanish films, the female body can be seen as a construct that partly mirrors the fluid reality of our postmodern era, defined as one of "perpetuum mobile" (Bauman, "Culture in a Liquid Modern World", 2011:18), or "the eventuality of of existing in a constant state of flux" (Bauman, "Postmodernity and its Discontents", 1997: 21). As the physical space of our global habitat has become ever more artificial, fragmented and unfixed, so, too, the - on and off-screen - individual is a "floating and drifting self". With regard to male and female gender notions in the film, stereotypes are challenged when the two concepts merge into one through the transgender persona of the screened transsexual. The viewer explores a fluid corporeal and gendered territory as the protagonists undergo an either voluntary sex change, rendering them female in appearance although their thought patterns are still partly male. Gender and body are hence open to new interpretations as we witness how the human body, and skin, in a sexually permissive, socially and culturally less rigid era, is bio-medically altered through a number of surgical procedures - a process which, by its end result, at times reminds of a Deleuzian "becoming". The screened body and mind become unfixed concepts as one identity is left behind and another is, apparently, adopted. Or is this indeed the case?Hard copy book chapter in "Probing the Boundaries: Beyond Present Patient Realities: Collaboration, Care, Identity". Edited by Peter Bray and Ana Maria Borlescu. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Oxford, UK, September 2015, pages 67-84.