Name Student: Anneloes Engels
XXY
The movie is about a girl, Alex who is hermaphrodite and lives in a quite place in Uruguay with her parents. One day old friends of her parents are coming with their son, Alvaro. Their visit has a purpose; to transfer Alex with a surgery to a girl (the father of Alvaro is a doctor). At the moment they are coming Alex stopped taking her medication and a decision has to be made soon…..
The movie has a quite heavy subject; hermaphrodite. It is also the first movie with this subject, but the movie handles this subject in a perfect way. The movie is not too heavy, the subject of the movie is already heavy enough. This is a very strong point of this movie.
The sex of Alex is based upon biological criteria; ‘boy’ and ‘girl’, her chromosomal typing is; XXY.
The environment of Alex see her as a woman/girl because from the day she was born her parents raised her as a girl; her parents gave her the identity/gender of ‘girl’. However her parents let her free in choosing her own identity because they did not choose for a sex operation at her birth. In this way Alex is able to choose her own gender at a later age. I like this because her parents have not taken her choice away.
So the environment knows not better than that Alex is a girl; Alex displays herself as a girl. Alex has to take in account the normative conceptions of attitudes and activities appropriate for her sex category. Alex has to play a certain role in order to be linked with her sex. Off course this brings ‘role conflicts’; Although she has developed breasts and has a girl’s voice, we eventually discover that she has a penis. Her masculinisation may not yet be visible in facial hair and other signs, but her male aggression has already landed her in trouble. As the story begins, she has overreacted to the curiosity of a close male friend about her sexuality and has broken his nose. So she has also behavioural verbal responses of males.
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