Queerying and Locating Pedro Almodóvar’s ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!!

Pedro Almodóvar’s ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto!! (1984) is, aside from being his first international success, a film that has often gone unmentioned in the storied director’s career trajectory.¹ The film enjoyed academic attention in the mid to late 1990s, but has only appeared as a footnote or in passing in more recent critical works about the development of the director’s cinema over the past thirty years.² Perhaps more mystifying is the film’s anonymity in recent critical interventions about a ‘Queer’ Spanish cinema, especially since the film ends with the return of the seemingly homosexual youngest son of the family to occupy the patriarchal position of the “man of the house.”³ While criticism has been timely and lucid in analyzing films such as Kika, Todo sobre mi madre, and La mala educación from a Queer studies perspective, ¿Qué he hecho yo . . . !! has, instead, mainly been evaluated in regards to its stylistic evolution and stark social commentary.⁴ Chris Perriam’s recent Spanish Queer Cinema (2013), for example, only mentions the film once, in a short commentary of Veronica Forqué’s casting in several Almodóvar films.⁵ Working through the current critical positionings of the film, I want to undertake in the following pages a detailed study of the potential of a Queer reading of the film.⁶ On the one hand, I will attempt to insert the film within a genealogy of ‘Queer’ Spanish cinema, to reorient, in some regards, the reception of the film in current debates vis-à-vis Almodóvar and Spanish ‘Queer’ cinema, keeping in mind the problematic of using specific Anglo terminology. Part of this process includes a reconsideration of Anglo terminology in the Spanish context. On the other, I will analyze the construction of gender expressions in the film, paying particular attention to the female protagonist, Gloria, and submit that the film’s Queer potential lies entirely in the systematic subversion, in symbolic and spatial terms, of heteronormativity.

Critical intervention to establish a genealogy of Spanish Queer cinema is problematic at best. Perriam acknowledges that any such exercise is “unfortunately slippery” (3). Ramiro Cristobal succinctly addresses this disconnect, by rhetorically posing if it is, indeed, “lícito hablar de cine homosexual” (7). What arises in such an exercise is the inevitable question of cultural imperialism, or in this case, its variant—academic imperialism; where notions of subjectivity and identity politics from an Anglo North are applied to real Othered spaces of cultural production, wherein the critical interest is to establish a global cultural topology of synonymous referents. Perriam, in a sense, highlights this process in the introduction to his otherwise excellent analysis of homosexual-themed Spanish cinema of the late 1990s onwards, when he attempts to create a definition of Spanish Queer cinema through a studied juxtaposition with definitions of British and French Queer cinemas.⁷ What is important to note, however, is the critic’s own affirmation that very few of the films included in this particular genealogy “are not, in the main, politically ‘queer’” (4). This note brings us to the core of my argument regarding the reception of ¿Qué he hecho . . . !!, as what defines its readings is really an understanding of the term ‘Queer.’

It is useful, here, to examine David William Foster’s definition of the Queer in Hispanic cultures (in opposition to Perriam’s and Gema Pérez-Sánchez’s reliance on Anglophone Queer theory). He argues that the Queer is:

todo aquello que instaura una postura desafiante a la heteronormatividad patriarcal. Puede ceñirse, primordialmente, a la legitimación del deseo homoerótico—mujeres que desean mujeres, hombres a hombres—pero no se limita solamente a esta cuestión, sino que lo queer puede representar la legitimación de la promiscuidad, la prostitución en todas sus manifestaciones, el matrimonio que se niega a procrear, la pasión de la tercera edad y toda una gama de prácticas del amor entre seres humanos que no cumplen con los preceptos...