December 2008
“No man needs curing of his individual sickness; his universal malady is what he should look into.” ---Dr. Matthew O’Connor, in Nightwoord
“The critique of gender norms…must be guided by the question of what maximizes the possibilities for a livable life…” ---Judith Butler in Undoing Gender
The late twentieth, and especially the early years of the present century, are marked by the widespread proliferation and “domestication” of increasingly invasive body technologies, both as a result of rapid advances in biomedicine and genetic research, and through the popularization of scientific discourses and body-modification procedures in/by the media. This essay will discuss the ways in which director Lucía Puenzo inscribes currently prevailing preoccupations with contemporary body technologies in her 2007 feature film XXY, and how the film produces the signifying effect of a sense of doom or ambivalence towards the highly technologized modes of human embodiment available today, through the subject of a young hermaphrodite who refuses technologies indented to polarize or normalize her/his ambiguous sex.
XXY is the story of Alex (Inés Efron), a 15-year-old hermaphrodite whose parents refused coercive surgical sex disambiguation surgery through the amputation of the penis, in Alex’s case, at birth. Though their refusal is not due to her/his parents being a particularly progressive pair who denounce the notion surgery when used as a broad stroke of metonymy pigeon holing all of human variation into predetermined and inadequate categories because of a recognization that “infants with intersexed conditions are part of the continuum of human morphology and ought to be treated with the presumption that their lives are and will be not only livable, but also occasions for flourishing” (Undoing Gender 4)—no. Rather, the story grants Alex more individual agency over her/his morphologic fate. Alex’s parents declined proceeding with the operation for a more discursively mundane reason: because the infant was born “blue” and likely too weak to survive a major operation. The plot sets Alex up with maximum opportunity, despite dueling tension from each parent, to claim agency over her/his own body. This context provides an excellent scope through which one can understand the ambivalence towards biotechnologies, aimed at improving human capabilities to the extent that we can talk about a new and improved human or “post-human.” Here we have Alex who suffers a great deal from the very biotechnologies designed to prevent or alleviate suffering. As a the friend of Alex’s father who underwent coercive gender polarization surgery at birth, having been forced into his female sex, and then later underwent a sex change to become biologically male during his adult life, advises Kraken, “Making her afraid of her own body is the worst thing you can do to your child.” Alex’s mother Suli, (Valeria Bertuccelli) pushes for the surgery because she retains the normative ideal of the immediate family. However, Kraken (Ricardo Darín), Alex’s father, is more sensitive to, should I say “unconventional” diverse natural morphology. His career as a marine biologist has him rescuing injured sea turtles, whose sex can only be determined post mortem as a surgeon exposes the animal’s entrails. The sea turtle is one of many reoccurring symbols bringing attention to the variation and ambiguity of sex as it reoccurs in nature. Kraken, the clearly sensitive father, scientist, and healer of the story, enables Alex to choose her/his own morphologic destiny.
The trajectory of body technologies and the effect on culture is picked up by the film at moment when cosmetic surgery, for example, both empowers consumers to “exercise power under conditions which are not of one’s own making,” and when the technology itself “reproduces the logic of surgical industries accordingly…[producing] the deviant body which generates suffering” (Tait). Writing about cosmetic surgery, Sue Tait, quoting Davis writes, “the domestication of cosmetic surgery is not about subscribing to prevailing standards of beauty, but about performing a more coherent identity”. Having lived as a girl, we find Alex at a time in his/her life when s/he has recently stopped taking the “Corticoids” she’s used all of her life to sustain feminine phenotypes. This Corticoid hormone supplement is intended to suppress the development of what is typically understood as masculine physical traits, such as growing a beard. By flicking the little pill off her/his stomach and dumping the rest of the medicine on the ground as a dramatization of her/his newly discovered agency and refusal to persist as a patient subject, Alex is not only refusing the invasive medical gaze s/he’s grown up with, s/he is choosing to perform a non-coherent identity which Alex’s parents fear will cause lifelong suffering.
The subject of a hermaphrodite brings into focus several flaws with biotechnologies and/or trans-humanism. First of all, to assume that being born into rote medicalization of the body doesn’t cause suffering from the very introduction into the discourse is an inability or refusal to recognize, as Butler discusses, that life is indeed livable even when the life in question is one that resists models of assimilation, such as the hermaphrodite (Undoing Gender 4). Another problem that Alex’s plot illuminates is that the biotechnologies themselves can cause suffering precisely because they reproduce the performance of coherent identity and subsequently, the possibility of “the deviant body”, as Tait discusses. Thus, Alex’s choices are to either be “mutilated” or “castrated” (these are the film’s terms) by the sex polarizing surgery, or s/he may escape the medical colonization of her/his body by the presumably forthcoming and lifelong hormone treatments, ceremonial visits with doctors, runs to the pharmacy, etc., by becoming confined to solitude in order to be a culturally incoherent identity.
The son of the visiting surgeon invited by Alex’s mother to possibly perform the sex polarizing surgery on Alex, Alvaro (Martín Piroyansky), asserts his love for Alex who then initiates the most telling scene that changes the perspective regarding body technologies. With this final scene, the film has established that possibilities for intersexed bodies within the current public consciousness are quite gloomy after all. If that’s the case, then does this film ask us to accept body technologies as indeed positively achieving the intended purpose of improving life for the individual after all? I would argue that what started out as a doom and gloom message about body technologies and biomedicine, is in fact a thoroughly ambivalent message. Alex’s story comes to an open-ended yet gloomy ending. S/he refuses to believe that Alvaro’s intent is innocent. S/he has learned to read anyone who isn’t “special” like her/him as a potential threat, as another intrusive inquisitor who perhaps wants to use Alex as a specimen in order to assuage curiosity at her/his expense; like the doctors hoping to film Alex’s birth for the sake of “medical interest”, or the instance when local hooligans harass Alex by forcibly pinning her/him down to undo her/his pants, just because they want to “see it”, or the fact that Alex is unable to report that s/he is a victim of a sexual crime because her/his ambiguous sex could become subjected to the law. Alex’s refusal of Alvaro’s love based on her/his interpretation of Alvaro’s intent serves as evidence that according the film, there is still little or no space for an intersexed person to exist as her/himself on the level of symbolic representation. XXY implies that the identity for one with ambiguous sex is impossible or nonexistent, unless the subject enters the system of binary sex. This would then require that one must subject oneself to requisite biotechnologies that will exaggerate / omit parts of the self and body, which would thus enable one to measure up to either gender ideal as such.
A mislead and popular reading of the film, which I would argue is influenced by Alex’s charm coupled with an exaggerated zeal towards human variation, is one that withholds a critical eye since a spectator can hardly deny feeling good and relating personally to the film’s portrayal of a cheeky teen that refuses to continue to repress allegedly masculine phenotypes through medication as /he discovers her/his sexuality and instead closes the discussion on the note that this film is a nicely done and sensitive catalogue of another, less popular, kind of existing. Or another possible overzealous reading might be that the film celebrates gender ambiguity since the film showcases through the reoccurring theme of natural instances where sex is unstable or ambiguous. For example, the camera repeats the symbol of clown fish, a creature that switches sex over the course of its life. In this sense the spectator is tempted to sympathize with a protagonist who is granted to opportunity to assert agency over her/his physical and symbolic existence, and is furthermore able to invite unrestricted biological nature to take over her/his development, which results in Alex’s hermaphroditism and ultimately ambiguous gender identity, which many interpret as an expansion of the definition of normal. The problem is that normalcy is never called into question. I agree with Judith Butler who describes the proliferation of identity categories as equally dangerous because this would then mean a proliferation of identity regulation, legislation, and epistemological claims of priority (Undoing Gender 8-9) which ultimately, “in turn, produce new forms of hierarchy and exclusion (Preface to Gender Trouble viii). Just this time, more nuanced. Furthermore, as I’ve already addressed, the film’s goes on to suggest that choosing to remain outside either of the prescribed gender ideals doesn’t really offer a livable life after all, since Alex’s fate is indeed her own choosing. But in whose world can isolation even be considered a viable choice?
Various Internet reviews of XXY, including those submitted by users on rottentomatoes.com, imdb.com, and netflix.com, further emphasize what I understand and will explain as the film’s position on the subject of intersexuality as an impossible state of existing on the level of representation and ultimate ambivalence towards biotechnologies. Reviews claim that the film treats the subject of intersexuality with “sensitivity” and “open-mindedness.” The fact that the film is received as a sensitive representation of intersexuality further emphasizes my argument that the film postulates the inability of an intersexed person to exist as such. Butler writes, “The norms that govern idealized human anatomy thus work to produce a differential sense of who is human and who is not, which lives are livable, and which are not” (Butler 4). If the portrayal of an intersexed person as necessarily isolated from the potentially harmful heterosexual gaze, unable to love someone who isn’t like them, unable to integrate with society because they forever run the risk of suffering, to use Butler’s words, the “violence of gender norms” or suffering condemnation at large; if it is indeed sensitive, in what project does this film engage, or does this mode of representation only sustain the hetero-normative gaze as such? I disagree that this film is “open-minded” to conclude with a protagonist who must refuse acting on romantic desire on the premise that s/he could potentially be subjected to the medical gaze; a film that feigns options and sympathy with the subject when there are no options, and in my reading little sympathy. The translated version conveys that Alex refuses Alvero’s romantic gesture because Alex’s is ultimately unsure if Alvero upon leaving would regret not seeing Alex again or if Alvero would regret having never seen Alex’s genitals. Had such a portrayal been understood as “callous” or “dispassionate”, then this might point to a public conscious that remains open to new possibilities within gender. The largest problem raised by such a reading is similar to the dynamic of the violence of gender, as Butler discusses (xix). Violence is difficult to bring into view if a particular reading is taken for granted as it is here.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge. 1999.
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Tait, Sue. “Television and the Domestication of Cosmetic Surgery.” Feminist Media Studies 7.2 (2007): 119-135.
XXY. Dir. Lucía Puenzo. Perf. Ricardo Darín, Valeria Bertuccelli, Inés Efron and Martín Piroyansky. 2007.
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