Y tu mamá también Essay - How is Gender Represented?

 Gender in Y tu mamá también

- Representations of the male and female characters and their link to 'outsiders'

Alfonso Cuarón's 2001 film 'Y tu mamá también' tells a coming-of-age story of two teenage boys - Tenoch and Julio - that explores a necessary analysis of the adolescent masculinities of modern Mexico, subversively told through the typical Hollywood 'road-trip' trope, in which the boys experience with an older woman - Luisa - on their way to a fictionally named beach called 'Heaven's mouth'. While traditionally these types of stories are told through the voyeuristic male gaze (Laura Mulvey's theory), and while largely the two adolescent characters participate when sexualising, shaming (their girlfriends), and objectifying the female characters they associate with, Cuarón offers the spectator a feminist evaluation of Luisa's character who is used to bring about the change of the boys' naivety into manhood; one that offers a different path away from their expected 'macho' masculine journey traditional to Latin and Latin-American culture, which is revealed at the end. 

While the film is presented from a male perspective - and ultimately is from the male director - the spectator realises that most of the shots are told from Luisa's point of view, and her objectification is only exploited by the boys' gaze, while through the documentary-style cinematography she is shown empathy and respect; she is allowed the space to cry alone (poignant throughout as her sadness is contrasted with the boys' juvenile behaviour, such as when she cries in a phone-box to her husband, while the boys play Foosball in the glass reflection), confront, and come to terms with her terminal illness, marriage, and general unhappiness. The boys, when given a similar space, utilise it to mess around - within a hotel room, shared shower, pool, and country club; argue about sleeping with each other's girlfriends, preferring to derogatorily shame the female participant rather than the unfaithfulness - both to their own girlfriend and to each other's friendship - of each other, solving this issue with macho violence; and act/talk in sexually immature ways with one another. One interesting thing to discuss is the presentations of gender expectations delivered by the named oppositional gendered characters - Luisa and the boys. As mentioned, Luisa is frequently sad throughout the trip, displaying the stereotyped emotional femininity as a reaction to her sadness, whereas the boys are (by their gender role) only allowed to solve their emotional issues through violence, wanting to punch and spit at each other when finding out about their cheating habits; even though Luisa had also been cheated on, her display of emotion is free through her tears yet still constrained to the gendered expectations of femininity, while the boys' emotion is repressed, favouring anger rather than sadness - their masculinity has been bruised as the one thing they prefer to have control over - sex - has been denied to them. The film explores not just the binary oppositions of gender representations, but also the differences between age and thus experience. One crucial aspect of this realism is also through the use of a third-person narrator who acts as an objective teller of the character's reality, feelings, and private external events occurring in their life to ground the narrative as realistic, interrupting fun and relaxed scenes with an omniscient, unemotional voice to offer contextual narrative information to the spectator and further justify the character's self-discovery journey.  

The boys' traditionally gendered representations are established during the first quarter of the film, and the film's heavy dependence on sex is used to exploit this from the very first scene. Committed between Tenoch and his girlfriend, framed in a realistically awkward and raw depiction, this scene confidently establishes the film's awareness of their heterosexuality. The filmmakers are consciously ironic of the homo-erotic subtext despite their enforced - as influenced by their culture - heterosexuality; they are shown to spend more time naked with each other than their girlfriends who are sexually unavailable, competing with each other's defining attributes of masculinity, repressing and stigmatising their homosexual desires until Luisa encourages that space for them at the end of their road-trip. Raw sexual intimacy is employed many times throughout the film, being a crucial element in the film's objective realism and confronting the boys' (culturally gendered) sexual expectations, completely challenged and revealed by Luisa's unfiltered promiscuity and sexual maturity as they are repeatedly unable to satisfy and deliver their masculinity - wounding their developed masculine egos. Yet, as discussed, she is not sexualised by the filmmakers, and her personal complications are explored; she is not just a tool for the boys' self-discovery and homo-eroticism, she is allowed her own version of self-discovery and sexual liberation away from the constraints of her disloyal marriage, one that she had devoted her interest into rather than her own happiness. The beach (imagined by the boys in order to take advantage of Luisa's offer in travelling with them, therefore taking advantage of her potential offering of female sexuality) acts as a physical metaphor for each character's self-discovery; for the boys, this discovery was never realised before embarking on the journey, so when they arrive at the first beach they come across, they are disappointed because they never had a real intention other than gaining sex from Luisa during the journey to 'Heavens Mouth'- they hadn't anticipated a realistic fracturing of their masculinity brought about by Luisa's sexual experience, nor a confrontation at their repressed homosexual desires. Thus, they feel lost once they reach this destination as it acts as a metaphor for their coming-of-age story where they are faced with the harsh realities of adulthood rather than their perceived expectations of macho manhood in sexually conquering an older woman. On the other hand, Luisa feels at peace once she sees the beach, with the camera lingering on her reaction and embarking on the water, finally feeling free from both her gendered expectations of sexuality when with the boys, and her own sense of mortality from her illness. This is why she leaves these words with the boys: 'Life is like the surf, so give yourself away like the sea'. She embraces her life, acting as a mentor to the boys, merging their class and temperamental differences, symbolised through their homo-erotic connection on the final night of the trip.

Both gender representations are shown in full nudity, subversive to films that have sex scenes which usually favour (the male gaze) the female body over male genitalia. During sexual scenes between Luisa and Tenoch/Julio, the camera lingers on the boys rather than objectifying and exploiting Luisa's sexuality, exposing their inexperience and homo-erotic confrontation as all three participate in group sex. The boys abandon this, however, the following morning as they hurriedly get dressed and Tenoch vomits outside, a physical rejection of this sexuality. The final scene shows them parting ways forever, unsatisfying, for the spectator, entering traditional manhood and ending (thus repressing) their homosexual associations once Luisa is no longer part of their lives, and concluding the ultimate realism of the film. Depictions of gender expectations are often told through a female lens, so this film is important for reassessing the equally burdened expectations of culturally gendered masculinity. However, while Luisa isn't overtly sexualised, the other female characters are not allowed the same respect. The boys' girlfriends, Ana and Ceci - granted absent for the larger part of the narrative - are used as tools to represent the boy's possessive masculinity, preferring to dominate their girlfriends and subsequently shaming them, through slurs and abuse, when finding out they cheated on them. The sex scenes with their girlfriends are filmed through the male gaze, eroticising and objectifying their young female bodies; they are mere objects of plot development between the boys as they argue about losing the sexual possession of their girlfriends, and their absence as a reason for them to embark on the road trip in the first place. 

In conclusion, Luisa is the sexually mature outsider to the boys' enclosed naivety and similarly, both oppositional genders are outsiders to each other, both having confrontational expectations of their gender roles that are frequently breached throughout the film; when the film was released, it was radical in presenting this reassessment of masculinity and gender, and so the audiences could be seen as the outsiders in comparison to the character's gender explorations in the film, which is still relevant today.