Resumen de The donzella who became a gentleman: representations of gender in "Sea purple"
The term ‘cross-gender’ can indicate ‘serious attempts to pass as a member of the opposite sex’, including anendeavour ‘to live as a member of the [male] sex’ (Bertoletti 1994: 56). Judith Butler analogously defines the word‘transgender’ as referring to ‘those persons who [...] live as another gender’ (Butler 2004: 6). In Donatella Maiorca’s2009 Viola di mare (Sea Purple), the protagonist Angela’s cross-gender act epitomises Butler’s notion of trans-gender.1 By analysing representations of gender and sexuality in this film, I will consider her choice as an impositionto which she succumbs and not, quoting Bertoletti’s definition of cross-gender in The Feminist Encyclopaedia ofItalian Literature, as a ‘rejection of attributes traditionally considered feminine’, or as a successful ‘form of resistanceagainst’ a male-dominated society (Bertoletti 1994: 58). In Viola di mare, trans-gender does not signify liberationfrom fixed gender boundaries; conversely, it aims at avoiding social exclusion. As I will show also in relation to theother protagonists of this film, gender is here portrayed in Butler’s terms; that is, gender is a performance, a part oneplays: ‘the terms that make up one’s own gender are, [...] beyond oneself in a sociality that has no single author’(Butler 2004: 1), what philosopher Roberto Esposito’s refers to as communitas. In analysing Angela’s choices, I willalso briefly look at feminist Adriana Cavarero’s idea of otherness, as this concept is explored in her discourse onlanguage.
