XXY by Lucía Puenzo: the sectioned body or the forbidden double in Latin American Cinema

Abstract

XXY is a 2007 full-length film by Lucia Puenzo. It tells the story of Alex (Inés Efron), 15 years old, whose life in Uruguay's coastal countryside already means something: the refuge of his family from Buenos Aires. The reason for such welcome escapades is Alex's intersexuality which was diagnosed and was physically apparent at his/her birth, even before. This essay will try to examine four fundamental hypotheses. 1. Alex's drama does not lie in his/her sexual ambiguity but in the demand for him/her to self define as soon as possible: either masculine or feminine. 2. Alex's choice is an imposition placed on his/her body, to refuse it does not seem possible and to make a decision is to allow a fracture, a split from his/her own double nature which is forbidden by society. 3. Alex's double nature faces, as a historical heritage, a judicial and biological order in total contravention of the laws in civilian institutions and that resists the normalisation of the body. 4. Alex's case is embedded into three of the major models or dominions about the body concept in the history of modern Western thinking.  The body machine (Cartesian metaphysics), the political body of the 'divisive practices' (Michel Foucault) and the intersexual, duplicate body according to its ambiguity or bimorfity. This essay propounds a philosophical analysis of such issues arising from the aesthetical and political interrelation exchanges in XXY.