Abstract
When Una mujer fantástica reached the height of Oscar success in March 2018, Chilean trans populations were fighting to secure legal recognition, and they were doing so at a time of political transition from a leftist to a rightist government. The film’s international success ensured that the gender identity bill remained on the table. Use of the concepts of intimate citizenship and frame resonance to analyze the social and political role of the film’s trans representation shows how they offer visual framing and visual resonance for Chilean activism. The protagonist’s story created a visual frame to reinforce trans activist claims at a key moment in the congressional debates as the soft power of the Oscars was brought to bear on them.
Cuando Una mujer fantástica alcanzó la cima del éxito en los óscares de marzo de 2018, las poblaciones trans chilenas luchaban por asegurarse reconocimiento legal en un momento de transición política—el paso de un gobierno de izquierda a uno de derecha. El éxito internacional de la película aseguró que el proyecto de ley sobre identidad de género permaneciera sobre la mesa. El uso de los conceptos de ciudadanía íntima y resonancia de marco para analizar el rol social y político de la representación trans en la película muestra cómo esto nos brinda tanto encuadre como resonancia visual al activismo chileno. La historia de la protagonista generó un marco visual que refuerza las afirmaciones de activistas trans en un momento clave en los debates del Congreso, los cuales se vieron influenciado por el poder blando de los óscares.
Across Latin America, trans rights to legal recognition have been increasingly enshrined in law, from Argentina in 2012 to Brazil and also Uruguay in 2009 and 2018. Chile followed suit in December 2018. The passage of Chile’s gender identity law through Congress was, however, in doubt when Sebastián Piñera replaced Michelle Bachelet as president in March of that year. As president-elect, Piñera had vowed not to support the bill (Fernández, 2018). That stance changed when Sebastián Lelio’s Una mujer fantástica (2017) won the Oscar just a week before the presidential inauguration and the soft power of the golden statue began to take hold. This paper explores the unique social and political roles that the film and its trans representation, as well as its Oscar win, played in creating visual resonance for trans activist claims and in helping to keep the gender identity bill on the table. Lelio’s film brought the trans lived experience to a wider public, providing an important visual portrayal of the complexities of living as a trans person in Chile. By exploring the interplay between the film’s visual content and trans activist testimonies, I argue that these representations provided visual resonance to the gender identity law being debated at the time and reaffirmed the less widely accessible trans activist stories.
The film opens with Marina Vidal, a young trans woman, celebrating her birthday with her cisgender partner, Orlando, a businessman in his fifties. Her happiness is short-lived, since Orlando dies that night. The film then uses his death to demonstrate the extent of her exclusion from Chilean life: she is criminalized (accused of being involved in his death), verbally and physically abused, and denied her right to dignity and self-determination. The telling of such previously “hidden” stories, the sociologist Ken Plummer (1995) argues, plays a central role in constructing what he calls “intimate citizenship” as they start to form the basis of LGBTQ+ 1 rights claiming. This paper examines how Marina’s story resonates with existing Chilean trans realities and activism. It also explores the film’s political reach in helping to secure the passage of Chile’s gender identity law, serving as a cinematic visual frame to reinforce trans activist efforts to do so.
The film’s success was cumulative, beginning with its being awarded the Silver Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2017 and culminating in the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in March 2018. It thrust both protagonist and director into the global limelight. Daniela Vega was interviewed by the world’s media (Romney, 2018; Sáez, 2018; Stefansky, 2018) and became the first trans actor to present one of the golden statues at an Oscar awards ceremony. Its continued success served to broaden the film’s domestic reach through media reporting, political events, and the return of the film to Chilean cinemas in 2018. Domestic viewing figures almost doubled following its rerelease, rising from 43,842 in 2017 to 75,377 on March 31, 2018 (Estádisticascine.cl, n.d.: 9). A key outcome of the film was sensitizing Chileans and others to elements of trans people’s realities.
The film’s gentle advocacy for a trans woman addresses the invisibility that still surrounds trans lives in Chile and elsewhere. Though trans perspectives are expanding politically and in scholarship (Berkins, 2006; Cabral and Viturro, 2006; Creative Commons, 2017; Hiner and Garrido, 2019; Valdés, 2019; 2021; Zelada and Neyra, 2017), they have been historically peripheral within broader LGBTQIA+ activism and scholarship (Corrales, 2015; Del Pino and Verbal, 2015; Miles, 2011). Yet testimony has been a key activist strategy for sensitizing politicians to the complexity of trans lives with the objective of securing legal recognition (Andrés Rivera, interview, Santiago, December 2015; Fundación Selenna and Organizando Trans Diversidades [OTD Chile] activists, Santiago, January 2018). Similarly, as Marina’s voice and action are thrust into the public domain through the cinematic screen, Chilean and wider publics are exposed to the complexities of everyday life as a trans person through a visual telling of such stories. Expanding the visibility of these oft-hidden lives and enhancing understanding of them came at a crucial time in the gender identity law debate (Miles, 2018) and served to counter the lack of wider understanding of trans lives in Chilean society (Del Pino and Verbal, 2015; Campos, 2021).
Though Koch-Rein, Yekani, and Verlinden (2020) point to the limitations of the social reach of trans representations in the media, Miller (2012: 4) argues that film can “communicate messages about what it means to be transgender.” In the Chilean case, Campbell (2017) notes that “while trans activists . . . have been very successful in inserting trans issues into the public discourse, the general public’s understanding of ‘a man who wants to be a woman’ or vice versa is woefully undernuanced.” This sentiment is reinforced by the activist Constanza Valdés, who argues that a lack of awareness of trans issues exists even among legislators (Campos, 2021). The film therefore facilitates understanding of trans lives by creating visual testimony. For example, it sheds light on the violence that Marina is subjected to by Orlando’s family and the verbal and physical aggression she faces from his son. In one scene she is physically forced into a car and her face covered with Sellotape to silence and degrade her.
This social exposure to trans lives extended beyond the life of the film, as Daniela Vega and her father, Igor, became unexpected advocates for trans rights in her country, bringing her personal story to bear on the gender identity law debate (Atarimae, 2018). In Vega’s visit to the Chilean Presidential Palace, La Moneda, and her father’s appearance before the congressional Mixed Committee, they used their personal stories in a political capacity. This testimony added a layer to the interplay between Vega’s on-screen portrayal and the aforementioned off-screen declarations and further cemented the importance of her protagonism as a trans actor. While this film is a work of fiction, it does draw on Vega’s own experiences (Lelio and Maza, 2018). In Cowan’s (2009: 88) words, “The things that film can teach us about our legal and social world” also extend into the wider Chilean social and political sphere through Vega’s and her father’s testimony.
Theory and Methods
Plummer’s (1995: 151–152) notion of “intimate citizenship” is concerned with the way sexual and intimate stories relating to people’s desires, relationships, control over their bodies, and identities, gender, and sexualities come into being. He claims that “a new set of claims around the body, the relationship and sexuality is in the making” (157) and links the emergence of previously undisclosed stories to the social and political role that they play, for example, in the subsequent expansion of rights and citizenship (151). It is this intersection between stories and rights that will be analyzed here through Una mujer fantástica. Though we are given insight into Marina’s intimate, sexual sphere through her intimate relations with her partner, the film centers on the denial of her rights as a Chilean citizen. Plummer contends that “for such stories to be ‘successful’, there need to be social worlds embodying a strong community of support waiting to receive them” (16). In other words, the activist community needs to have created sufficient spaces for these stories to be heard. Among the factors that have helped the domestic audience to assimilate Marina’s story are the growth, consolidation, and diversification of the trans movement since the 2000s and the advance of trans rights across the continent.
Despite such activism’s having paved the way for such stories to be heard, its influence has remained limited. Sebastián Lelio enlisted Vega’s help as a consultant for the film in order, in his words, to “rid my mind of the clichés that filled it, a product of the scant representation of trans lives in popular culture” (Lelio and Maza, 2018: vi). Latin America’s combination of religiosity, in the guise of an ingrained Catholic legacy and emerging evangelical Protestant forces, and deeply entrenched patriarchy (Del Pino and Verbal, 2015: 156) continue to affect those who contravene traditional gender roles (Berredo, 2018). These conservative forces have also been felt in the Chilean political realm. The country’s position as a laggard in securing LGBTQ+ legislative change is a recurring story, with bills languishing for long periods in Congress (Díez, 2015). The 2012 antidiscrimination law had spent six years on the table, its delay being largely attributed to right-wing and religious factional opposition to the inclusion of gender and sexual orientation as protected characteristics (Miles, 2011). 2 Ironically, it was then passed during Piñera’s first term in office (2012–2016)—in other words, by the same right-leaning coalition that had previously opposed its passage through Congress. As indicated by Piñera himself in his presidential speech in May of that year (Miles, 2012), the law was a response to the murder of Daniel Zamudio in Santiago in March 2012. Both legislative advances adopted under right-wing rule occurred following “critical moments,” albeit divergent ones.
Marina’s position as a trans woman therefore places her at odds with the hegemonic social and cultural practices of Chilean life and politics. It is precisely these contraventions that we witness Marina battling in the film. Whittle (2000: 5) argues that the gender binary is
From a social movement perspective, one theoretical approach to understanding activism and its success relates to the way activists frame their causes and the resonance of those frames in the wider sociopolitical context (Snow and Benford, 1988). Here I argue that the film’s trans representations provided visual frames that reinforced arguments emanating from the trans movements that were seeking to pass the gender identity law. It rendered certain aspects of trans people’s daily lives more visible and differently visible through dramatization via the cinematic screen. The film therefore created visual resonance for trans demands and their reception by the wider society and the polity. I contend, however, that the visual resonance of these stories was also related to their acceptability. As de Waal and Armstrong (2020) argue, the focus on a middle-class trans woman served to augment the acceptability of the stories presented. Because trans activism has perhaps one of the most intersectional activist bases, particularly along lines of age, class, gender, gender identity and expression, race, and ethnicity, the film is limited in the trans-related visual frames that it presents (for example, they do not extend to the Chilean travesti population).
The interdisciplinary approach adopted here to combine film representation with ethnographic data on trans activism allows for theory building around visual framing. In their work on trans representations, Koch-Rein, Yekini, and Verlinden (2020: 1) explore the importance of “media representations that connect the question of visibility to political debates,” asserting that “trans representation shapes public discourse and affects politics.” The Chilean case offers a unique insight into the extended political consequences of trans filmic representation, given the convergence of Una mujer fantástica’s visual themes with activist contestation in the latter stages of the debates of the gender identity law in 2017 and 2018 and the political transition from left to right. This paper, therefore, fuses cinematic representation with socio-legal ethnography to explore how the “contemporary politics of transgender identity, and struggles for citizenship, can thus be seen within the cinematic portrayal of sex/gender” (Cowan, 2009: 95–96).
The analysis therefore draws on ethnographic and interview data collected between 2008 and 2018 with 9 trans men and women who were claiming gender recognition through the courts and 15 others who were involved in trans activism. The ethnographic component involved following 20 legal recognition cases presented before the courts, including interacting with and interviewing claimants, lawyers, and judges, scrutinizing documentation, and accompanying claimants to court and to the Servicio Médico Legal (Legal Medical Service—SML), one of the state institutions featured in the film. Cowan (2009: 92) advocates ethnography for understanding both “the desirability of legal reform and the effectiveness of legal regulation of sex/gender identity.”
Ethnographic observation thus presented me with field-based visual representations of the social and institutional violence faced by trans people, arising from both their gender expression and the divergence between lived and legal identities as they interacted with state organizations and actors and were recorded in legal documents. I use the umbrella term “trans” as an expression of “nonnormative gender identifications and embodiments” (Love, 2014: 172) throughout. The term reflects the dominant terminology used at the time the ethnographic research was undertaken (2008–2012) and resonates with Marina’s identity. Furthermore, it aligns with the constraints of the 2018 law, which does not recognize nonbinary and gender-fluid identities. 3 However, the article concludes with a travesti critique (Berkins, 2006) of the film’s trans representations in relation to their reception and resonance.
Social and Political Stories in Una mujer fantástica
Plummer’s (1995: 19) work on telling “sexual stories” is concerned with the social role of stories—how they are produced, the work that they perform in the wider social order, and their participation in the political process. Here I focus on the role that both Marina’s (protagonist) and Daniela’s (actor) stories perform in the social and political orders. In social terms, Marina’s story reflects Chilean trans realities through the abuse and criminalization that she faces, thus bringing previously marginalized visual narratives to the attention of new audiences comprising both non-trans and trans people (Miller, 2012). In dramatizing these stories through the cinematic screen, the film creates visual frames that accompany trans demands for legal change. The dual political and social elements of this storytelling intertwine through the restrictions on Marina’s ability to partake fully in Chilean life because of the incongruence between her gender identity and expression and the legal documentation assigned her at birth—a consequence of the absence of a gender identity law prior to December 2018. 4 Existing outside the gender binary has historically meant a lack of access to education, employment, and social inclusion in Chile (Miles, 2013; Berredo, 2018).
Whether or not Una mujer fantástica was produced with effecting political change in mind, Marina’s experiences throughout the film are significant in highlighting how the social and the political intersect for trans Chileans, for example, how her social exclusion is reinforced by her lack of legal recognition. We see the first hostile actions directed at Marina in the hospital, by the attending doctor and then, in more brutal fashion, by the police officer. Both question her name and identity, and the latter uses her identity (ID) card to reinforce the incongruence between her gender identity and the name/gender assigned at birth (and etched on her ID card). This scene, therefore, highlights the implications of the lack of an effective gender identity law in Chile at the time of filming.
The gender identity bill presented to Congress in 2013 sought to simplify and standardize the legal recognition process and make it more equally accessible. The preexisting judicial processes for securing recognition had created a state of differentiated citizenship among trans claimants (Miles, 2013). Rulings varied considerably, since some claimants were granted name and gender recognition and others just name recognition, often along gender lines, with trans men being afforded more favorable and expansive outcomes than their trans female counterparts in the cases that I studied. Judicial access also depended on financial resources to undertake partial or full reassignment surgery (and a willingness or desire to do so) and to secure legal representation (Miles, 2011). While a gender identity law is not a panacea for trans exclusion, facilitating the alignment of legal and lived identities can foster inclusion. One trans activist explained that “with a gender law many things will change. For example, the way we are treated can change. Stigma and discrimination will take years to change, but the way we are treated will change, as will trans people’s rights. It will reduce the level of discrimination that we face, even if it doesn’t completely eradicate it” (Sindicato Amanda Jofré [SAJ] activist 1, interview, Santiago, July 2009). The importance of legal recognition for trans people was reiterated in a 2017 study reporting that 76 percent of the 315 participants surveyed wanted to obtain name and gender recognition. Only 9.5 and 8.9 percent of those surveyed, respectively, had already been granted name and gender recognition (Creative Commons, 2017), highlighting the complexities and potential inaccessibility of that process.
Platero’s (2011: 600) research illustrates how trans people’s documentation becomes a site of contestation and exclusion: In the case of transgender people, all too often the official documents that mark sexual identity become a battlefield for political and personal struggles. Documents such as passports, National Identity Documents, driving licences and other official paperwork serve to establish identity. They contain names, which . . . clearly imply a gender that must coincide with the box marked “sex.”
These physical and symbolic markers therefore mean that everyday life becomes a source of constant distress, repeated exclusion, and permanent reaffirmation for trans people. The film highlights this consternation as Marina faces significant psychological violence once she produces her ID card. In the first instance, the police officer uses her ID to confirm the gendered “other” that he suspects when questioning her about Orlando’s death. Despite referring to her as “Miss” (22.38), when she confirms her name to be “Marina” he asks, “Your ID card, do you have it?” (22.48). As she passes her ID card to the officer, she preempts the questioning that might follow by saying, “That issue is being dealt with, sir” (23.04). This suggests that she is seeking legal recognition through the courts to align her legal and lived identities. This does not deter the police officer from saying, “Until you change it, this is your legal name” (23.10), referring to the (male) name on her ID card. Marina responds in a manner that indicates that she has had to defend her position on repeated occasions: “My name is Marina Vidal. Do you have a problem with that?” (23.16). Had she already secured legal recognition through the courts, both her name and gender identity would have been reflected on her ID card, and the officer would not have had cause to try to use her legal name against her.
Ethnographic and interview data from Chile in 2008–2009 revealed that trans people dealt with the divergence between self and legal identification in different ways. Some avoided situations in which legal and not social names would be called out, such as in medical waiting rooms, or in which they would have to present themselves as a gendered “other,” such as in voting booths, which were divided according to legal gender (Emmanuel, interview, Rancagua, May 2009). One activist reported that some people defaced their cards because of the disquiet that they produced (Mariana, interview, Santiago, July 2009) as constant physical reminders of this incongruence. I observed one individual managing the lived-legal identity divergence by claiming that she was acting on behalf of the person who figured on the ID card. Her negotiation of the situation to avoid the questioning of her own identity in the rather hostile Chilean climate of 2009 seemed a learned response for managing such situations. One interviewee said, “I’ve been in the legal process for a year now, trying to fight for what is my person, my essence” (Juliana, interview, Santiago, November 2008). The emphasis on personhood and “essence” here reiterates the centrality of such markers in many trans people’s lives. 5 The film, importantly, provides a visual narrative or frame to accompany these experiences of habitual marginalization.
In a different form, the film also addresses one of the processes that was historically central in enabling trans people to secure legal recognition through the courts: physical medical examinations. Judges ruled that (invasive) physical examinations should be undertaken by the SML to confirm that trans bodies conformed to their gender identities (Rivera, 2012). This process is presented through an alternative context in the film—Marina’s suspected involvement in her partner’s death. However, the degradation she experiences at the hands of the investigating officer and the assisting medic is indicative of the harrowing procedures that trans people were subjected to in order to secure the relevant medical certification to proceed judicially (Open Society Foundations, 2018; Rivera, 2012). The recurrent theme of physical and symbolic state violence (Hiner and Garrido, 2019) that Marina faces and the denial of her right to dignity, couched in terms of a broader lack of rights, is very present in this scene.
The suffering in the aforementioned hospital scene pales in comparison to the violence endured at the SML. Instead of a discreet examination (by a female medic) to ensure that she has no lesions consistent with having inflicted Orlando’s injuries on him, she receives a very public and degrading checkup in front of two state officials and authority figures (one male and one female) that is recorded photographically. Instead of support and protection in the aftermath of her partner’s death, the state offers her suspicion and derision. This scene demonstrates that, despite the existence of an antidiscrimination law in which gender identity is a protected principle, these rights are all too frequently infringed upon, notably by state actors (Hiner and Garrido, 2019; Miles, 2012).
The extremity of the degradation in this scene is hard to watch. Marina is forced to stand naked and be photographed in a series of poses in front of both doctor and police officer. While the (female) officer feigns offering protection by remaining in the room, her insistence that Marina be subjected to the examination is at odds with any understanding of, or compassion for, her predicament. Consequently, Marina’s gender-dissident body is publicly exposed and recorded photographically. We see her trying not to reveal her intimate-self, but she is forced to do so. Despite the apologies emanating from the medic taking the photos, he asks her to uncover herself completely and assume certain poses. Perhaps the most disturbing feature of this scene is that, as claimants have reported and legal documents revealed, similar practices have been replicated when trans people have sought legal recognition through the courts (Rivera, 2012; Open Society Foundations, 2018). One activist exclaimed, “In the SML we are subjected to the worst possible treatment” (interview, October 2008). Such practices not only dehumanize and objectify trans people but also strip them of their dignity. Hiner and Garrido (2019: 195) speak of “the structural and symbolic violence that is gender assignment,” and these practices certainly support this assessment. As Sharpe (2002) noted, historically legal recognition has tended to be bestowed only on gender-conforming bodies. In Chile, these examinations supposedly sought to provide evidence that an individual was sufficiently (biologically) male or female to be granted legal recognition.
Though the 2018 gender identity law will protect future trans generations from having to undergo such examinations, the visualization of this “silenced” story provides an insight into the structural violence that trans people endure. The “outing” of Marina’s gender-fluid body in this scene renders a complex, shifting, and inherently personal process (Green, 2006) visible and public. It castigates Marina for her perceived difference. A main objective of the gender identity law is to depathologize Chilean trans people and move away from a medicalized judicial process that required gender-affirming treatment to an administrative one.
The film’s appraisal of this scenario as unnecessary, extremely violent, and dehumanizing provides a hugely important visual reference not just for the general public but also for legislating politicians. It places the violent social realities of trans people, which are often not visible to others, firmly within the public domain. Una mujer fantástica, therefore, becomes an effective tool for activists to sensitize others to practices occurring in legal recognition cases. It also creates empathy for Marina as the audience is forced to observe her shame and frustration and her seemingly needless and violent objectification. The timing of the film is hugely significant in relation to the meaning imbued in these scenes and its translation into support for an effective gender identity law. This is a clear example of the way the social and political roles of Marina’s story intersect. In responding to Plummer’s focus on the social role of stories, Lelio demonstrates that they also have political resonance. His visual portrayal of Marina’s anguish can act as a point of reference for other trans stories in the public domain. The visual narrative serves to strengthen existing trans stories of degradation and bring these hitherto silenced indignities into the public imaginary.
Perfect Timing
Plummer’s (1995: 145) assertion that “sexual storytelling is a political process” takes on a double meaning in the Chilean context of March 2018. Unearthing these stories as the first step toward making rights claims is reinforced by the second, which relates to the political impact of the Oscar win on the gender identity bill. The latter includes Vega’s political activism around the same topic after the film’s triumph. The timing of this success has thus been central to enhancing the political resonance of the stories told through the protagonist Marina and the actress Daniela Vega. The overlap between reality and fiction regarding trans lived experience has been reaffirmed by both actor (Stefansky, 2018) and director (Romney, 2018). Vega and Lelio have indicated that some of Marina’s experiences correlate directly with Vega’s own; according to Romney (2018), “Lelio tells me that many of the hostile things people say to Marina in the film—for example, that she’s a chimera or a monster—came from a list of insults that Vega told him she’d had thrown at her.”
Crucially, the film’s success kept trans voices in the domestic and international public eye at a pivotal time in the political debates on the gender identity bill. One week separated the Oscar win (March 4) from the Chilean government’s transition from left to right (March 11). This transition signified a shift from a supportive executive to a hostile one vis-à-vis the gender identity bill (Miles, 2018). While the outgoing President Michelle Bachelet (2014–2018) had intended to approve the legislation before leaving office and employed presidential privilege to attach “extreme urgency” to it, her successor, Sebastián Piñera (2018–2022), had publicly declared his opposition to it, indicating that his cabinet would not be supporting “bad” legislative proposals such as the gender identity bill (Fernández, 2018). In December 2017 he was also quoted as saying, “Gender can’t be something that you change every day, like a shirt,” and “In many cases gender dysphoria is corrected with age” (Fernández, 2018). After the Oscar win he performed an about-face, openly pledging his support for the bill. One of his ministers said, “The problem is that the last government left this [bill] on the table. But we weren’t responsible for the timing, or for what happened with the film” (Fernández, 2018).
The political role of the film’s stories continued into the film’s postproduction phase, as Daniela Vega’s own narrative began to intersect with Marina’s story. When Una mujer fantástica returned to Chilean cinemas in 2018 there was a peak in viewing; 10,380 Chileans watched the film in the week following the Oscar win (March 8–14) compared with 4,142 the previous week (Estádisticas.cl, n.d.). In social terms, this served to maximize visibility of trans issues, generate public and political support, and expand knowledge of the barriers to trans people’s social inclusion, all at a time of extreme contention in the congressional debates. Importantly, Bachelet capitalized on the Oscar win to invite the film’s production team to La Moneda just days before leaving office (Atarimae, 2018). Daniela Vega was given this politically symbolic platform, in terms of physical location and executive support, from which to advocate for the bill. As we have seen, her father also provided his personal and familial testimony before the Mixed Committee convened to assist in advancing the bill through Congress on April 16, 2018.
In one sense, therefore, the film was visual testimony for the trans lived experience. Testimony has been central to advancing LGBTQIA+ rights across Latin America (Brown, 2002), from the civil union bill passed in Buenos Aires in 2002 to the decriminalization of sodomy in Chile in 1999 (Miles, 2004) and beyond. As an effective means of sensitizing politicians and later judges (Miles, 2011), it brings otherwise less visible lived experiences to the attention of legislators. In a similar vein, trans people were able to provide testimony during the gender identity debates. The SAJ activist Aneth Miranda spoke before the Human Rights Committee on December 18, 2017. In dramatizing these testimonies through the film, Lelio provided a key visual aid to accompany these stories. This facilitated broader comprehension of trans exclusion, discrimination, and lack of legal protection through the visual resonance that the film offered. As Vega (quoted in Stefansky, 2018) has indicated, “The fact that I am trans provides the script and narrative with a higher level of truth. . . . But, more importantly, it opens a door into the movie world that had never been explored before, because I am a trans actress playing a trans woman.” The importance of her protagonism as a trans woman in these multiple domains cannot be overstated and requires further study.
The Reception of the Stories
“The legal recognition of trans people is meaningful only when it is part of a larger cultural transformation” (Currah, Juang, and Minter, 2006: xxiii). In other words, prior trans activism has been central to both enabling these stories to be “heard” and for them to be “successful” (Plummer, 1995: 16). Initially incorporated within broader LGBT organizations such as the Movimiento Unificado de Minorías Sexuales (Unified Movement for Sexual Minorities—MUMS) in the early posttransition period, from the early 2000s on trans women formed independent organizations such as Traves Chile and Sindicato Amanda Jofré. Their objectives were twofold: to advance a gender identity bill (SAJ activist 1, interview, Santiago, July 2009) and to provide practical and social support to trans sex workers denied access to state services and the formal labor market (SAJ activist 2, interview, Santiago, June 2009). Trans male activism emerged in the mid-2000s through organizations such as Organización de Transexuales por la Dignidad de la Diversidad (Rancagua) (Organization of Transsexuals for the Dignity of Diversity [Rancagua]—OTD), 6 the Grupo de Apoyo a Hombres Trans (Trans Male Support Group— GAHT), and the Agrupación de Apoyo a Disforia de Género (Gender Dysphoria Support Group—AADGE). Though much action centered on securing legal recognition through the courts given its centrality to many people’s lives, organizations such as the SAJ and the GAHT also sought to provide social and familial support systems. Effective use of the media to challenge trans male invisibility helped to consolidate trans male activism (Miles, 2011), as has occurred in more recent years with trans children (Fundación Selenna and Renaciendo activists, interviews, Santiago, January 2018).
This collective action therefore helped to pave the way for the successful reception of Marina’s story and for the cultural transformation required to solidify social and political support for the gender identity bill. This continued as the movement diversified geographically and substantively through the 2010s with the emergence of organizations such as Arcoiris in Antofagasta and Nerfertiti in Iquique (Hiner and Garrido, 2019), with trans social and political activism ranging from participation in the passage of the gender identity law through Congress (Constanza Valdés, trans activist, interview, Santiago, January 2018) to securing political representation through local council members such as Zuliana Araya in Valparaíso and Alejandra González in Lampa. Emilia Schneider has also come to play a visible role in Chilean politics as the first trans leader of the Federación de Estudiantes de la Universidad de Chile (University of Chile Student Federation—FECH), elected to that position in 2019. Latterly, she stood as a candidate for Chile’s constituent assembly, and in 2021 she was elected to Congress. She was joined in her candidacy for the constituent assembly by the trans activist Constanza Valdés.
Despite the rising profile of trans lives in the public realm, Vega argues that “cinema has shown more openness to transsexuality than society has” (EFE, 2018). The assertion by the SAJ activist quoted earlier pointed to the slower pace of social change than of legal change. She recognized that, even with the enactment of the gender identity law, social and physical violence against trans women, in particular, will continue. The high figures reported in Transgender Europe’s study on trans murders in the Americas attest to this (Balzer/LaGata and Berredo, 2016). The relationship among visibility, legal recognition, and social change remains a complex conundrum. As a result, the violence suffered by Marina in this film is perhaps a pale reflection of what many trans people face, especially those who are exposed on the streets at night undertaking sex work (Berkins, 2006).
While not negating the importance of Marina’s and Vega’s stories, the extent to which they are representative of the wider Chilean trans female population remains a complex conundrum. Valdés (2019) has recently reported that as of March 2019, 90–95 percent of trans women were still working selling their bodies. The “vicious circle” highlighted by Berredo (see Miles, 2013) is that without a gender-confirming ID card access to education, health, and, most important, employment are frequently denied to trans people. It is difficult for trans women, especially those of lower social status, to find other forms of employment. Aneth Miranda’s heartfelt speech before the congressional Human Rights Committee on December 18, 2017, reiterated these points: “I am a transsexual woman. I am a sex worker as well. . . . I have to work in the sex trade to survive. . . . There are very few trans women working professionally. . . . I had the good fortune to finish school . . . [but] my compañeras couldn’t finish their education.” She continues, underscoring the extent of the violence directed at them: “Where is it that our human rights are violated? On the streets, in people’s [clients’] homes, in cemeteries. . . . My compañeras have ended up in a mass grave. No one remembers our colleagues, but they are part of our memory” (Miranda, 2017). Aneth attributed their social exclusion in part to both familial and educational rejection. She later extended this to include the worlds of work, health, and legality, discussing the harmful impacts of self-medication with hormones and industrial silicone and the extreme loss of life within their communities. While this is not to play down the violence we see directed toward Marina in the film, the fact remains that instead of inhabiting the world of sex work she is in stable employment, sings on the stage, and spends much of her time in upmarket districts of Santiago such as Providencia. The cinematography does not seek to visualize these more marginal urban realities. Intersections of class and gender identity therefore become a central element in relation to the reception of the stories told.
Aneth Miranda’s testimony resonates with Lohana Berkins’s (2006) early work on travesti identities and politics. The travesti is a reclaimed identity that explores the intersectional dimensions of the structural exclusion along lines of “gender identity, sexuality, race, social class, ethnicity, religion, age, ideology” that trans sex workers such as Aneth face. Her testimony relates the same educational, familial, and labor market exclusion, state and social abuse, and survivor status that Berkins attributes to the travesti population. For trans women or travestis forced to engage in sex work, their criminality, restricted social and physically mobility, and disreputability are exacerbated (Berkins, 2006). In contrast, in the film we observe how Marina’s employment, her participation in “high culture,” familial inclusion, and even her romantic partnership afford her some respectability and social mobility.
One strength of the concept of intimate citizenship is its capacity to link the collective experiences of diverse trans (and LGBTQIA+) populations. The recurrent themes of discrimination, social exclusion, and othering dealt with in the film are pertinent to numerous gender-diverse populations. However, this unifying element glosses over the way trans identities intersect with class, ethnicity, race, age, and age at transition. While we must celebrate the protagonism of a trans woman, herself a victim of being both trans and female (Taylor, Hines, and Casey, 2011), we also have to consider the acceptability and thus the reception of her story. Marina’s story is not shared by the majority of trans women in Chile or by those involved in historical activism such as the SAJ and Afrodita, both of which emerged from sex-work-related activism. Their reality does not see them singing or with their families or actively incorporated into the wider labor force as wait staff as Marina is. The middle-class status indicated by these characteristics may facilitate a more acceptable narrative than that of a trans woman selling her body for survival.
Conclusion
Rather unconventionally, this paper explores the relevance of Plummer’s notion of intimate citizenship in relation to the social and political stories emerging from Sebastián Lelio’s 2017 film Una mujer fantástica. The political storytelling in this instance, emphasized through the emergence of Daniela Vega’s own voice in public and political domains, is certainly unique to Chile in terms of the film’s timing and success vis-à-vis the passage of its gender identity bill. In social terms, however, the film also becomes a wider reference point as trans people see elements of their intimate lives represented before them on screen, with Vega’s participation lending greater depth and realism to the meanings established through the on-screen interaction. Lelio’s visual “unearthing” of trans stories was therefore central in rendering these stories more visible. Plummer views this stage as a crucial one in the rights-claiming process. However, the film also provided an important visual narrative to accompany activist claims for a gender identity law at a crucial time in the political debate. Chile’s first Oscar win certainly increased pressure on the Chilean political right, which previously had intended to deny the bill passage through Congress. This is not to deny the importance of the years of activism and lobbying that had occurred previously or the impact of the flourishing of trans rights regionally.
The social and political resonance of the film’s stories is not confined to the Chilean context but extends everywhere that identity cards play a central role in regulating life and access to basic services (Platero, 2011). The physical marker displayed on the card reinforces the incongruence between legal and lived identities. The visual narratives of the film provide the audience with insight into the lived experience of trans phobia and microaggressions. Although the gender identity law is far from a panacea and has the drawback of reinforcing gender binarism, it does represent an important legal step toward trans citizenship.
Perhaps the starkest appraisal that Una mujer fantástica makes is not that the state is incapable of protecting trans people but that the state is often the perpetrator of these rights violations. In this instance, the actions of both police officers stand out. Instead of offering Marina solace in view of the recent loss of her partner, the police officer at the hospital immediately suspects her of wrongdoing. The very authorities that are charged with upholding her right to be free from discrimination, as set out in the 2012 antidiscrimination law, become the perpetrators of discrimination. While legal change may have been achieved, the related social change necessary to ensure that trans rights are protected lags behind.
In sum, the film offers important insights into otherwise invisible lives that, despite gains in legal recognition regionally, remain marginalized and misunderstood (Campos, 2021). The focus on a trans woman’s life is important in redressing the balance in relation to an LGBTQIA+ movement that has historically been dominated by gay male experiences (Corrales, 2015). Daniela Vega has thus become an inadvertent advocate for trans women not just in Chile but also across Latin America and indeed farther afield. Lelio himself argues that “the film has been instilling this conversation wherever it has been shown . . . and I think that the Oscar [win] is an important catalyst for a conversation that is urgent and irreversible” (Saure, 2018). While Vega’s experience is still a considerable distance from that of trans women such as Aneth Miranda, who are further marginalized by ethnicity, class, and occupation, discussing and being able to provide visual resonance for trans activist claims certainly contributes toward expanding trans people’s citizenship both politically and socially.
Footnotes
Notes
Penny Miles is a lecturer in Latin American politics at the University of Bath and a former consultant human rights researcher at the Universidad Diego Portales, Chile. She would like to thank those who contributed to this work historically in different ways: Sindicato Amanda Jofré (now the Corporación Chilena de Personas Trans Amanda Jofré), Lukas Berredo (Grupo de Apoyo a Hombres Trans), Andrés Rivera and Víctor Hugo Robles. In more recent times, she thanks and recognizes the important work of Constanza Valdés and activists from Fundaciones Selenna and Renaciendo and the Asociación OTD Chile (Organizando Trans Diversidades.) She also thanks the reviewers for their insightful comments in helping to improve this manuscript.