Narrative and Sexual Excess
- ISSN: 01622870
- DOI: 10.2307/778400
Abstract
The principle protagonist of In a Year of Thirteen Moons is a transsexual, someone who has crossed an absolute border, transgressed the fundamental divide of gender upon which, according to psychoanalytic theory, all society - the systems which compose it, including language itself- is based. Such a thor- oughgoing anomaly would seem to demand an extraordinary restructuring of the narrative form which tells it. Instead, Thirteen Moons exhibits a balanced, stubbornly rectilinear form apparently indifferent to the transgression which, by an ordinary logic, should constitute the collapse of its classical symmetry. This essay examines some of the strategies by which, like the secondary revi- sion of the dream text, the film binds the threatening and potentially disruptive sexuality to a plot all too familiar, a scenario all too recurrent.
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