Es un asunto privado: Género y la mirada en El último verano de la boyita/ (In English) A Private Matter: Gender and the Gaze in 'El ultimo verano de la boyita'
Faculty Mentor Name
Traci Roberts-Camps
Research or Creativity Area
Humanities & Arts
Abstract
(In English for Review Purposes. This oral presentation will be given in Spanish.)
This oral presentation deals with the relationship between gender expression and socioeconomic status, and explores how this dynamic is represented through an oscillating subjective and objective narrative gaze in Julia Solomonoff's film, The Last Summer of La Boyita (2009). With this coming-of-age story, Julia Solomonoff not only reflects on her own youth to recount her personal journey with femininity, but also tells a fact-based story of an intersex boy in conflict with his gender expression and his own body. Because this story is outside the writer-director's personal familiarity, the narrative approach of The Last Summer of La Boyita effectively fluctuates in its level of subjectivity and objectivity in the interest of respectfully representing a sensitive subject without imposing her narrative voice as an outsider to the intersex experience. In interviews, Julia Solomonoff talks about how The Last Summer of La Boyita is based on her personal experience in her father's ranch when she was a child, and mentions that Mario's story is based on one of her mother's patients. Because of this, I identify The Last Summer of La Boyita as a semi-autobiographical film that also takes on the responsibility of sensitively representing the experience of a young intersex person.
An intersex person is someone born with anatomy that does not resemble what is normally found in a male or female body, and can take various body forms that are not necessarily obvious from birth. Intersex is not a third sex or gender, and an intersex person is not necessarily considered nonbinary. It is important to understand that intersex people have historically faced medical discrimination and informational suppression for the purpose of denying their existence. The Last Summer of La Boyita demonstrates how the gender binary poses a disruption in gender expression for pre-teens universally by shifting between the filmic approaches of a semi-autobiography and an observational documentary—through this mix of narrative form, the film blurs the lines between a fixed, definitive definition, ultimately reflecting its thematic argument about gender expression itself.
Purpose
(In English for Review Purposes. This oral presentation will be given in Spanish.)
The purpose of this oral presentation is to demonstrate how the film, The Last Summer of La Boyita, which explicitly deals with the theme of gender expression as existing beyond the traditional Western conventions about gender, implicitly reflects its themes by breaking traditional narrative conventions with its editing and mise-en-scene. I will approach my argument by giving textual evidence from the film in the form of clips (editing) and images (mise-en-scene) which express this “breaking of traditional narrative conventions” and compare this to the text of film theorists and my own analysis of the themes in the film.
The possible outcomes of this study are to offer a framework for audiences to observe film as a textual medium which begs active engagement with its formal elements, as well as to convey a perspective on gender expression that exists beyond fixed definitions in our Western society, a perspective which can be reflected in other aspects of our culture, including film form.
Location
Room 211B, University of the Pacific, DeRosa University Center
Start Date
26-4-2025 11:30 AM
End Date
26-4-2025 11:45 AM
Es un asunto privado: Género y la mirada en El último verano de la boyita/ (In English) A Private Matter: Gender and the Gaze in 'El ultimo verano de la boyita'
Room 211B, University of the Pacific, DeRosa University Center
(In English for Review Purposes. This oral presentation will be given in Spanish.)
This oral presentation deals with the relationship between gender expression and socioeconomic status, and explores how this dynamic is represented through an oscillating subjective and objective narrative gaze in Julia Solomonoff's film, The Last Summer of La Boyita (2009). With this coming-of-age story, Julia Solomonoff not only reflects on her own youth to recount her personal journey with femininity, but also tells a fact-based story of an intersex boy in conflict with his gender expression and his own body. Because this story is outside the writer-director's personal familiarity, the narrative approach of The Last Summer of La Boyita effectively fluctuates in its level of subjectivity and objectivity in the interest of respectfully representing a sensitive subject without imposing her narrative voice as an outsider to the intersex experience. In interviews, Julia Solomonoff talks about how The Last Summer of La Boyita is based on her personal experience in her father's ranch when she was a child, and mentions that Mario's story is based on one of her mother's patients. Because of this, I identify The Last Summer of La Boyita as a semi-autobiographical film that also takes on the responsibility of sensitively representing the experience of a young intersex person.
An intersex person is someone born with anatomy that does not resemble what is normally found in a male or female body, and can take various body forms that are not necessarily obvious from birth. Intersex is not a third sex or gender, and an intersex person is not necessarily considered nonbinary. It is important to understand that intersex people have historically faced medical discrimination and informational suppression for the purpose of denying their existence. The Last Summer of La Boyita demonstrates how the gender binary poses a disruption in gender expression for pre-teens universally by shifting between the filmic approaches of a semi-autobiography and an observational documentary—through this mix of narrative form, the film blurs the lines between a fixed, definitive definition, ultimately reflecting its thematic argument about gender expression itself.
