The phantom of the body

sexuality as a device of biopower in The skin I inhabit (2011)

Abstract

Contemporary historiographical studies launched the body into problematizations that, from different angles, observed the behaviors, practices, forms of interaction and constitution of the subject-body. Their representations and meanings enter the scene in historical research, and in the wake of the elaborations, this article proposes to understand sexuality as a device of biopower and the body as a biopolitical investment surface, from the film A Pele que Habito (2011), by Pedro Almodóvar. To this end, six frames of the film were selected in acts by the character Vera / Vincent in which, in the light of what Michel Foucault understands as a biopolitical device, he presents how sexuality acts as an element of scanning, capturing and controlling bodies, in a first debate. Then, following the question proposed by Espinosa “What can a body”, a debate is outlined about the constitution of identity as an enclosure apparatus, the idea of ​​representation as the image itself maintained to stop the movement of creating possibilities for life and, finally, how the character who plays this body is able to direct us towards another possibility of an ethical-aesthetic reading of living.