The Mute Female Body and narrative Dispossession in Pedro Almodóvar'sTalk to her
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4516700 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Carla Marcantonio (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 19-36 |
| Publication date | 2007-03-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Women & Performance a journal of feminist theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0740-770X • E-ISSN: 1748-5819 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/07407700701246257 |
| OpenAlex | W2079262880 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 7 |
Pedro Almodóvar and Judith Butler's respective projects have long shared an interest in the performativity of gender. More recently, Butler has turned her attention to thinking of rupture as constitutive of identity. Talk to Her reveals a similar turn in the director's work. This essay argues that Talk to Her employs the figure of a comatose woman who awakens in order to investigate the condition of wakefulness as a newly achieved consciousness. In doing so, the director also investigates the parameters of his own authorial condition: alternately embodied and disembodied, he reveals it to be effectively dispossessed. This essay rotates around the opening five minutes of the film, which introduce, in parallel, the space of the theater and that of the hospital–one a space of silence and the other a space for ‘talk,’ a place where the impetus of narrative cures. I argue that these two spaces underscore our condition of existing as bodies. I furthermore consider the role that melodrama–a genre described by its inclination toward embodiment, muteness, and excess–plays in articulating these themes
Aesthetics · Art · Consciousness · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Performativity · Psychoanalysis · Silence · Sociology · Cinema and Media Studies · Gender Studies · Media, Gender, and Advertising · Philosophy · Psychology · Spanish Culture and Identity
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2025 (1) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |