After watching Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In (2011) and reading Xavier Reyes “Skin Deep? Surgical Horror and the Impossibility of Becoming Woman in Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In,” I found myself reflecting on society’s obsession with the corporeal. While this text emphasizes the possibility of a clear disconnect between body and self, it does not seem to equally consider the obsession with the body as self. In the beginning of this text, the author mentions that Almodovar’s film fits into the discourse of the commodification of women’s bodies. Reyes brings up Susie Orbach’s idea of “beauty terror,” where the achievement of beauty is essentially impossible due to a constant need for improvement. His main focus, however, seems to be the separation of interior and exterior. In The Skin I Live In, Vera/Vicente does not incorporate this new imposed physicality to their identity. This pushes the conception that gender identity is completely separate from the body.
While I do agree with all of Xavier Reyes’ arguments, there seems to be a lack of consideration on the importance of appearance to a person’s selfhood. A simple physical feature can be crucial to one’s mental health and their battle with gender identity. For instance, certain women deal with alopecia, which can cause severe psychological impacts including anxiety, depression, and a lack of confidence. Breast cancer survivors who must undergo mastectomies or double mastectomies also often suffer through body image issues. These feminine-coded features can thus play a role in gender identity. With the massive rise of cosmetic surgery, keeping up appearances seems to be crucial in today’s culture. Not fitting into the beauty standards can be so mentally taxing that plastic surgery is the only way to feel worthy. For certain transgender individuals, the sight of a body that does not match their interior selves can be debilitating. When Vicente sees a picture of himself in the paper, he clearly longs for his past self. This makes the ending unclear on whether he will accept his fate in this new skin. Reyes poses the questions “will he live his life as a lesbian woman, as the last scene seems to suggest? Or is this going to be a much more nuanced case of a man desiring a woman through a woman’s body? Perhaps a lesbian man? Or a man who will need corrective surgery to embody masculinity again?” (829). Thus, while our identity is so much more than our mere appearance, the body can play a major role in the conception of self.
Works Cited
Reyes, Xavier. “Skin Deep? Surgical Horror and the Impossibility of Becoming Woman in Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, vol. 90, no. 7, Jan. 2013, pp. 819–834, https://doi.org/10.3828/bhs.2013.50.