On Accordions, Kisses, and Foot Odor: The Gendered and the Cosmic Body in Mazzaropi’s Films

Abstract

Aquick review of any of Mazzaropi’s films will show that there are no naked bodies, or even improperly dressed ones. Furthermore, the bodes are kept at a distance from one another: parents do not touch their children; husbands and wives are never seen embracing. Brides and grooms do not kiss as they do in other films. All manner of dressing is chaste, even when the characters are poor. And yet, the movies are fascinated with bodies and find many forms to discuss them as a vehicle for the presentation of gender— how men and women fit in society and what their role is. Each woman and each man in these films have been constructed through extremely complex dynamics that reveal dimensions of the body as the site where economic, class, and racial ideologies struggle for preeminence. In the process of pre-senting these ideologies, the films construct the body as a physical (cosmic), a spiritual, and a political (Brazilian) entity.

[a]ny theory that asserts that signification is predicated upon the denial or repression of a female principle ought to consider whether that femaleness is really external to the cultural norms by which it is repressed.

—Judith Butler, Gender Trouble