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Introit Queer Difference
- University of Texas Press
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Introit Queer Difference This tale is dedicated to all people who have the courage to be different in order to be themselves. DEDICATORY NOTE ADDED AFTER TITLE CREDITS TO THE ENGLISH-SUBTITLED RELEASE OF DE ESO NO SE HABLA (I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT) Charlotte’s a metaphor for anybody that’s different: a dwarf, black person, a young homosexual, even a big, fat ugly woman, who like anyone else has the right to a place in the sun. MARÍA LUISA BEMBERG, QUOTED IN CALEB BACH, ‘‘MARÍA LUISA BEMBERG TELLS THE UNTOLD,’’ 27 Approximately ten minutes into María Luisa Bemberg’s De eso no se habla (1993), Leonor, the mother of the central character, Charlotte, awakens the boy who runs errands and helps out in the general store she owns and orders him to hitch her sulky, and she rides out into the countryside. There, ax in hand, Leonor approaches the home where she knows the parish priest is spending the night, asleep in the arms of his foreign Protestant concubine. She then proceeds methodically to smash the kitschy statues of dwarves that decorate the top of the wall marking the perimeter of the property; she proceeds to bury the statues in an overt act of closeting what they signify. Leonor returns home and makes a bonfire out of her daughter’s books about little people: Tom Thumb, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, and Gulliver’s Travels. The violence of these acts, the fury on her face, the determination with which she wields the ax, and the intensity in her eyes as she contemplates the fire consuming her child’s fairy tales all set the tone for the way in which she approaches difference in the face of Charlotte’s manner of being in the world (Jenckes, in ‘‘Identity, Image, and Sound,’’ 61, points out that Bemberg’s key films all deal with issues of identity). Charlotte is a dwarf, quite an unmistakable condition of difference, and the remainder of the film follows the various ways in which her mother denies this difference, defying those around her to mention the fact, and the way in which Charlotte herself deals with her mother’s denial while at the same time charting, finally, her own life in terms of her body. Leonor’s anger is that of someone faced with radical difference, a 2 Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema difference that must be denied because it cannot in any way be accommodated by the hegemonic structures of society. It requires little effort on the part of the spectator to understand what is going on here, with the result that Bemberg’s film focuses directly and intently on the dynamics of the denial of difference, without having to do much semiotic work to convey to the audience the principle of difference involved. Bemberg cleverly sets her film in the period of the 1930s, at the time of the first fascist government in Argentina (De eso no se habla was filmed across the river from Buenos Aires in Colonia, Uruguay, a town that retains much of the architectural trappings of the period, from the modest one-story houses to the seignorial Belle Époque walk along the riverfront). Bemberg’s film career comes out of and is in many ways part of the process of cultural redemocratization that follows the neofascist tyranny of the previous two decades.1 Here, she is clearly figuring a dominant principle of Argentine society as confirmed by the trenchant display text of the public militarization of the 1930s, to the effect that there are only limited responses to difference: that which is different may be eliminated , as was the practice of tyrannical regimes through the arrest, incarceration , torture, and eventual murder of those deemed different along a number of possible axes of nonconformance; that which is different may be denied (the option Leonor pursues, using the influence of her commercial prosperity to impose silence on others); or that which is different may be put on parade, obliged to display its difference, while at the same time being ridiculed and made an object of verbal and physical abuse for the difference that one is obliged to display (as in the infamous incident of the forced public display of forty-one Mexican transvestites in the early twentieth century; see Monsiváis...