Making intersexuality visible through the circulation of Lucia Puenzo's XXY

Resumen

This article looks at how the film XXY (Lucía Puenzo, 2007) makes intersexuality visible and transmits to the public identities that question the binaries man-woman and homo-hetero by means of its circulation. By acknowledging the challenges of assessing the film’s sociological impact without carrying out audience research, this is a study that analyses the importance of the film’s form in normalising intersexuality as well as its effect in helping the film circulate across various film festivals. Since film exhibition and circulation are emerging academic fields, this research also needs to look at unconventional sources in order to argue that the film’s circulation enables it to be discussed across multiple platforms and to different audiences. By considering the film’s funding, this article argues that film festivals are platforms which allow films to obtain distribution agreements, and therefore increase their exhibition windows, and also have an important and often unacknowledged role in promoting progressive thinking into society. The article ends by examining how through fiction discourses normally restricted to the academic and medical fields can be mediated to general audiences as exemplified by XXY. In addition, the film’s availability under different genre categories makes it accessible to diverse audiences.