Three Boys and Their
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Has Tina changed so much? Is she now the same person as the choirboy
was? Like Father Constantino, the "changed" image of desire seizes
the spectator: How could this beautiful woman be the chaste soloist of
the boys' school? In Almodovar's Tina, the physical woman is located
within the boy's psyche and, reciprocally, the boy's psyche is located
within the physical woman: Tina's body and yearning connect a boyhood past
with a womanhood present. Quite vividly, she underscores the possibilities
inherent to the breakdown of mental dams that prevent an expression of
sexual irregularities. One need only reflect upon Freud's link between
women and children in his discussion of polymorphous perversity to follow
this line of reasoning: "Children behave in the same way as women in whom
the same polymorphously perverse disposition persists. Under ordinary
conditions she may remain normal sexually, but if she is led on by a clever
seducer she will find every sort of perversion to her taste, and will retain
them as part of her own sexual activities." 17
Within the confessing walls of the rediscovered boyhood chapel, Tina is
now a "deviant" woman whose present was orchestrated by the clever seductions
of her father and priest, in body and in spirit. While Father Constantino
seduced Tina through the power of faith and liturgical music, Tina's biological
father abducted her to Morocco in the role of sexual slave. When
this biological father threatened to leave Tina for a "real" woman, she
embarked upon her surgical path of transformation. (The fathers who attempt
to ensure consolidation in "Little Hans" and "Tupik" become the agents
who create a "deviant" womanhood in the Tina story.) Tina functions
as a filmic embodiment of polymorphous perversity; in this character, Almodovar
fuses the category of perverse child—the paragon of vice rooted in the
developing sexuality of Little Hans—and the category of perverse woman
into the maturation narrative of a troubled transsexual.
Is Tina the same person "deep down"? Rather than escaping from
her past, she revels in the joy of its remembrance: she tries to integrate
her choirboy past into her woman present. Stripping away ironic nuances
and kitschy details, Tina exists in a realm of gender fluidity. When
she enters the chapel, she not only defines herself through a boyhood past,
she also boldly asserts her womanhood present—at the periphery of her exchange
with Father Constantine lurks an idolizing daughter and an The Lesson of an Earlier Sister Behind—in both place and time—this fragmented boyhood tour resides the
nineteenth-century figure of Herculine Barbin, whose words have served
as a preamble to this essay. The journal of this hermaphrodite, as
presented by Michel Foucault18
with a series of medico-legal and fictional annexes, highlights points
of each moment in the tour. From early childhood to the age of puberty,
Herculine lived as a girl in a convent. Her girlhood world came to
an abrupt end when her Mother Superior caught her in the act of "making
love" to another girl. (Prior to this vignette of coitus interruptus,
all were blind to the presence of Herculine's tiny penis.) Only after
the Mother Superior's discovery was Herculine turned over to a team of
doctors and jurists, who collectively decided that she was, and would therein
be, a man. (In effect, the hermaphrodite's sexual acts determined
his/her sex.) Despite the fact that this hermaphrodite conceived
of herself as the girl Herculine (even after her official change,
she uses feminine adjectives to describe herself), the medico-legal apparatus
compelled her to become the man, Abel. In Foucault's reading of the
Barbin case, the discourse of sexuality—and most specifically hermaphrodism—
demanded that all individuals, regardless of behavioral or anatomical dispositions,
should have a single sex. How do Little Hans, Tupik, and Tina fit
into the hermaphroditic frame? How does the nineteenth-century sister
inform the narratives of her twentieth-century brothers? As the factors
that determined Herculine's man fate exist beyond her, so it is ordained
that Little Hans serve as an exemplum of "less roundabout proof," that
Tupik misread a disparate collection of signs and myths, and finally, that
Tina be denied access to her primal scene of seduction. Through the
growing-up performances of Herculine, Little Hans, Tupik, and Tina we must
begin to address the pernicious logic that compels individuals to assume
roles and identities that are determined by the socially constructed reality
of body parts.
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estranged female lover. The troubles of transsexuality are not at the heart
of Tina's lament; she suffers because the consolidating norms of church
and society cannot accommodate her, at least "Not here, please!"
Benton Komins