Reframing My Dearest Señorita (1971): Queer embodiment and subjectivity through the poetics of cinema

Featuring a provincial spinster named Adela, who eventually becomes a man named Juan, Jaime de Armiñán’s My Dearest Señorita (Mi querida señorita, produced by José Luis Borau, 1971) became the first Spanish film to deal with the topic of transsexuality. Resorting to allegorical readings, previous scholarship has associated the film’s hermaphrodite with the Francoist cultural and ideological anomaly. While acknowledging the film’s progressive political critique of the Francoist regime, others have seen the protagonist’s eventual integration into heterosexuality as a symptom of the film’s conservative gender and sexual politics. This article moves from a focus on identity politics to an emphasis on queer subjectivity and from an allegorical reading to an emphasis on the film’s revolutionary stylistic choices. I read the film from a queer subject position that points towards a political form of a ‘becoming subjectivity’ that escapes, if only partially, a representational form of politics and the logic of identity. By focussing on seemingly inconsequential fragments and transitory details, this article explores how the film self-referentially mobilizes a queer body and subjectivity at key moments.