Second Skins: A New Look at Male Bodies in Spanish Cinema (2008-2022)

Abstract:

More than two decades ago, Santiago Fouz Hernández and Alfredo Martínez Expósito started a collaboration that included a teaching exchange in the early 2000s, panels at international conferences and public talks culminating in a co-authored book Live Flesh: The Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema, published in 2007. The collaboration has continued since with further co-authored work (contributions to books and journals), public engagement events and institutional visits in both directions. A lot has happened in Spanish society and cinema and in men and masculinities and screen studies since the first co-authored monograph was published, starting with the financial downturn of 2008 and the recent pandemic. In the period 2008-2022 the Spanish state has seen social, political, economic, and public health upheavals which have had a considerable impact on ideas of gender and sexuality, as well as the political dimension of the body. Simultaneously, a new generation of actors and filmmakers have enriched Spanish screens with new images and embodiments.

In this talk we will present our second co-authored book project on the topic of male bodies in Spanish cinema, this time focused on the idea of ‘crisis’ and how it affects the depiction and perception of male bodies on the screen. Where in the first volume we focused on ‘national bodies’, ‘muscular bodies’ or ‘young bodies’, this new volume will turn attention to categories such as ‘ageing’, ‘fatness’, ‘sickness’, ‘monsters’, ‘freaks’, ‘transnational’ and ‘trans*’ bodies. The talk will provide an overview of the project, focusing in particular in the category of ‘ageing’ with films by Pedro Almodóvar and Catalan filmmaker Ventura Pons as case studies.

Speaker:

Santiago Fouz Hernández is Professor of Iberian Studies and Film Studies at Durham University. His research explores issues of gender, the body, sexualities and national identities in contemporary Spanish cinema. He is the author of Cuerpos de cine (Bellaterra, 2013), co-author (with Alfredo Martínez-Expósito) of Live Flesh: The Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2007) and editor of five books including Spanish Erotic Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and Mysterious Skin. Male Bodies in Contemporary Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2009).  Fouz has been visiting scholar at the universities of Queensland (2002, 2005), CUNY Graduate Center (2010), Harvard (2012), U C Berkeley and Pittsburgh (2015) and François Chevalier fellow in residence at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study (2021). Currently he is Walter Mangold Fellow at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Since 2015 he coordinates (with Betty Bigas) ‘The Bigas Luna Tribute’, a series of retrospectives, exhibitions and other events to help promote internationally the work of the late Spanish filmmaker. He also produces and co-presents the podcast ‘El legado cinematográfico de Bigas Luna’, which shares title with the book he edited for Tirant lo Blanch in 2020. He is currently completing a monograph on filmmaker Bigas Luna for Manchester University Press.

Alfredo Martínez Expósito is Professor of Spanish at the University of Melbourne. His research explores issues of gender, the body, sexualities and national identities in contemporary Iberian and Latin American cinemas. He is the author of the books La poética de lo nuevo en el teatro de Ramón Gómez de la Serna (Universidad de Oviedo, 1994), Los escribas furiosos: configuraciones homoeróticas en la literatura española (University Press of the South, 1998, 2019, 2021), Escrituras torcidas: ensayos de crítica queer (Laertes, 2003), Cuestión de imagen: cine y Marca España (Academia del Hispanismo, 2015), Disidencia e hipernormalización: ensayos sobre sexualidad y masculinidades (Icaria, 2021), co-author (with Santiago Fouz Hernández) of Live Flesh: The Male Body in Contemporary Spanish Cinema (I. B. Tauris, 2007) and editor of the collective volumes Gay and Lesbian Writing in the Hispanic World (Antípodas, 2000), Repensar los Estudios Ibéricos desde la periferia (Biblioteca di Rassegna Iberistica, 2019, con José Colmeiro), and La vida iba en serio: autobiografías hispánicas de la diversidad sexual (Universitat de Lleida, 2022). He has been visiting scholar at the universities of Columbia, Durham, Complutense and Vienna, Chair of Excellence at Universidad Carlos III, and fellow in residence at the Madrid Institute for Advanced Study.

Please note: only Santiago Fouz Hernández will be presenting the seminar