Intersecting gender, ethnicity, and sexuality in Arantxa Echevarría's film Carmen & Lola (Spain, 2018).

Abstract

Arantxa Echevarría's film Carmen y Lola (2018) takes a groundbreaking new approach to intersectionality and lesbian identity contextualizing a lesbian coming-of-age-story and its multicultural background and context. Owing to the colonial gaze and the outsider's perspective in the story telling, the film makes some major missteps in its representation of the Romani community in Spain. But nonetheless, the intersectional presentation is groundbreaking in terms of representation of lesbian diversity and experiences, since it portrays the lesbian subject as a triple minority: woman, lesbian, and Roma - a minority ethnic group still discriminated against in Spain. The story of two female Roma adolescents coming to terms with their mutual homoerotic desire intertwines with the marginality of their community and a conservative and homophobic environment in which lesbianism does not find a space. I argue that Echevarría's film explores the topics of minorities both in terms of ethnicity and sexual orientation. The director aims to represent this otherness as a marginalized and decentered subjectivity that intersects with other axes of discrimination. It is from this marginal position that the film explores the forms of resistance against the control of the lesbian body that women directors are carrying out in Spanish cinema.