Ryan Jones

Department of Latin American History

University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign

(Estados Unidos)

Alfonso Cuaron’s Y Tu Mama Tambien offers excellent opportunities to discuss the intersections of sexuality and identity in Mexico. Previous analyses, unfortunately, have subordinated sexuality to service larger, allegorical or psychosexual arguments; none sufficiently emphasize the homoerotic intimacy of characters Julio and Tenoch. Nor, as in the press, should the film be read as positing a ‘gay identity’ in Mexico. My larger project problematizes the static, essentialized nature of (sexual) identities utilized by previous readings, as well as cultural (and scholarly) norms which deny the characters non-gay, non-straight labeled languages through which to express desire. 

This paper closely reads the film’s use of sexual languages which both comfort and threaten the boys by providing means to express their desires while simultaneously undermining their fragile machismo. Luisa, a woman fluent in the (homo)erotic language the boys are unable at first to recognize in their banter, violence, and physical intimacy, is the catalyst which enables their bodies to ‘misbehave’ by acting upon inherent (homo)erotic (and ironic) tensions within machista culture. 

The action punctures irrevocably their (heterosexual) identities leaving them to confront the social, ethnic, and physical differences which create their desires and ultimately alienate them. The boys remain impotent in resisting homophobic cultural norms, even after their bodies elucidate alternatives; being gay is foreclosed as well. Thus, I read the film through the intimate spaces created and destroyed between men locked within a machista culture rather than through subject positions which replicate (hetero/homo)normativity and elide alternative languages expressed through misbehaving bodies onscreen.

About Ryan Jones