Before & After: Plasticity, Plastic Surgery, and Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In

• Published in: University of Toronto quarterly Vol. 94; no. 2; pp. 217 - 233
• Main Author: Morrison, Paul
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01.05.2025
• ISSN: 0042-0247; 1712-5278
• DOI: 10.3138/utq.94.02.07

Although Pedro Almodóvar is generally celebrated as a champion of gender and sexual “plasticity,” The Skin I Live In raises the possibility that we are less “plastic” than we care to acknowledge. “Plasticity” has emerged as a dominant theoretical concept in these postmodern times – the work of Catherine Malabou has been particularly influential – but Almodóvar’s study of non-consensual gender reassignment surgery challenges the contemporary paradigm. “Plasticity,” the ability of material to receive a new form, is conventionally opposed to “elasticity,” the ability of material to return to an original form. The Skin I Live In testifies to the heteronormative power of the latter. Even plastique, what Malabou terms “destructive” or “explosive” plasticity, is powerless “to cut the tread of life into two or more segments,” to elude the ideological hold of the continuous, self-contained subject.