Publication Title
Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies
Document Type
Article
Department or Program
Hispanic Studies
Second Department or Program
Latin American Studies
Publication Date
1-5-2020
Abstract
In Pedro Almodóvar’s 1999 film Todo sobre mi madre and Claudia Piñeiro’s 2015 novel Una suerte pequeña, female Argentine protagonists encounter strangers who quote to them, ‘I have always depended on the kindness of strangers’ from Tennessee Williams’s 1947 play A Streetcar Named Desire. The line serves to offer new forms of kinship and solidarity to Almodóvar’s Manuela and Piñeiro’s Marilé/ Mary, two mothers whose lives are nearly destroyed by the tragic loss of their sons. In both cases, the reading, discussion and/or performance of Streetcar and other texts helps these women to heal from their loss and to create new families of their choosing, less constrained by accidents of birth. Almodóvar’s and Piñeiro’s uses of intertextuality thus serve to explore what it means to be a woman beyond the heteronormative limits of conventional motherhood.
Recommended Citation
“‘The Kindness of Strangers’: Kinship and Intertextuality in Todo sobre mi madre and Una suerte pequeña.” (Co-authored with Katherine Ostrom, Emory University) Bulletin of Contemporary Hispanic Studies 2.1 (2020): 69-84.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Copyright Note
This is the author's version of the work. This publication appears in Bates College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner.
Comments
Original version is available from the publisher at: https://doi.org/10.3828/bchs.2020.5