Melancholy gender and its effects: abjection, crystallization and violence in the film El lugar sin límites

Abstract

This essay proposes to revisit the concept of melancholy gender (Butler, 2019a; 2019b; 2022), as well as its consequences, based on Arturo Ripstein's film El lugar sin límites (1978). Based on Gayle Rubin, who defends the anteriority of the taboo of homosexuality in relation to incest, and Sigmund Freud, who proposes that melancholy arises from the loss of a love that cannot be mourned, Judith Butler argues that heterosexuality and the genders associated with it are based on a primary homosexual love loss that could not be mourned. Thus, heterosexuality is melancholic because it results from the impossibility of initial homosexual love. We will investigate three consequences of gender melancholy based on an analysis of the film El lugar sin límites: abjection in the scope of the subject's desire, the crystallisation of gender that leads to hyperbolic masculinity, and the tension between desire and rejection, which culminates in violence against the beloved homosexual object.