Identidad e ininteligibilidad en "Un año con trece lunas" de Fassbinder

• Atilio Raúl Rubino Universidad Nacional de La Plata

Keywords: Rainer Werner Fassbinder, In a Year with 13 Moons, post-war German cinema, New German Cinema, sexual dissent

Abstract

In a Year with 13 Moons (1978) is one of the most personal film in Rainer Werner Fassbinder's extensive production. And it is the only one that has a trans woman as its main character. From a queer perspective (Butler, Preciado) this article addresses the complex tension between the attempts to define Elvira's identity, which, on the one hand, is characterized by a profusion of discourses that seek to give meaning to her person and an origin and explanation for her sex change, and on the other hand, a body that is unintelligible (Butler) within the framework of a biopolitics that establishes the lives and bodies that are livable and those that are not (Agamben, Foucault, Kristeva). Based on the multiple connections established with Germany's past, the film turns the individual memory into a collective memory of the bodies and identities exterminated by Nazism and, later, by post-war biopolitics.

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