Reflections of Nonnormativity: Photography,Childhood,and Belonging in Mariana Rondón’s Pelo malo

Constructions of Normativity in Venezuela

The importance Junior gives to the image of himself to be constructed through the glamour shot is significant in the light of assertions that photography has served as a vehicle for subject constitution (Barthes, 1981; Silverman, 1992). Specifically, Roland Barthes (1981: 12) argues that photography permits the constitution of “myself as other: a cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity.” For Junior, the image symbolizes the possibility of overcoming the difficulties in his life by constituting himself as a good and beautiful subject who belongs—a normative subject. In an early scene in the neighborhood photographer’s studio, two photographs on display show the options of subjecthood available to him (00:13:01–00:13:15). One image is a fair-skinned boy with long straight hair, dressed as a civilian, smiling happily and broadly in front of a waterfall. The other is a more serious dark-complexioned Afro-descendant boy dressed as a Venezuelan soldier holding a rifle in front of a row of tanks in a military parade. ³ The fair-skinned photographer symbolically interpellates Junior by placing a beret on his head and telling him he will be dressed as a lieutenant colonel in his glamour shot. Pointing to the image of the Afro-descendant boy, he says, “You will look just like him.” Junior rips off the beret and says that he will look like the fair-skinned boy with straight hair in front of the waterfall.

These two photographs highlight the complicated place of race in normative subject formation in Venezuela. While the government has recently begun to acknowledge racism as a social problem, “Afro-descendants are still not constitutionally recognized” as a racial or ethnic group by the state (García, 2007: 223; Ishibashi, 2004: 33). The national discourse has historically constructed the country as a “café con leche society,” thereby perpetuating “the myth of racial democracy” through a hegemonic ideology of mestizaje that boasts a triracial origin and has “served to mask racial discrimination” (Herrera Salas, 2005: 76; Wright, 1993: 12). Instead of erasing racial difference, mestizaje actually centers whiteness and devalues indigeneity and blackness (Ishibashi, 2004; Ochoa, 2014; Wright, 1993). ⁴ In his study of racism in the national media, Jun Ishibashi (2004: 16, 23, 25) explains that there is clear “racial stratification” in Venezuelan beauty standards that centers a “Eurocentric beauty canon”—an “aesthetic of exclusion” defined by a “phenotypic hierarchy” in which a “‘white’ physiognomy signifies beauty and a ‘black’ one represents ugliness and non-sophistication.” Similarly, in her analyses of national racial formation through the beauty pageant, Marcia Ochoa (2014: 32, 34) recognizes “the overwhelming Eurocentric aesthetic of belleza venezolana” that results in a “rejection of what are considered ‘African’ features.” She argues that “the body of the miss mediates race in Venezuela” as the beauty pageant “privileges mixture” while simultaneously “favor[ing] whiteness—meaning . . . profiled noses, thin lips, straight hair, and small hips,” thereby “miss-ing race” (36).

The racialized construction of belleza venezolana that defines idealized subjecthood is not only gendered but also classed. In her study of Venezuelan rap, Sujatha Fernandes (2012: 72) explains that “images of blackness in hip-hop represent . . . an everyday understanding of race as integrally connected to poverty.” This intersection of race and class points to what Jesús María Herrera Salas (2005: 76) identifies as the political economy of racism in Venezuela, whereby the “African-origin population and the indigenous people continue to belong predominantly to the oppressed popular sectors.” The historical construction of normative subject formation in Venezuela as racialized, gendered, and classed became even more salient when Hugo Chávez became president in 1999. As Herrera Salas explains, the opposition’s critiques of the political and social changes Chávez enacted as part of the Bolivarian Revolution were conveyed in explicitly racist and classist terms. Chávez’s “curly hair, full lips, and dark skin—features that he attribute[d] to his African and indigenous ancestry—became targets of ridicule and name calling from the elite and middle-class sectors of the country” (Gillam, 2017: 51). ⁵ Chávez responded by reframing the racist and classist insults used to describe him as “positive qualities of which one may feel proud” (Herrera Salas, 2005: 86). In doing so, he challenged “ethnic shame and endoracism in the popular sectors,” thereby confronting the ideology of mestizaje that privileges whiteness and devalues blackness and indigeneity. ⁶

Junior’s rejection of the image of the Afro-descendant boy at the photographer’s studio is thus mediated by the hegemonic devaluation of blackness in Venezuelan mestizaje. As the son of a dark-skinned Afro-descendant father and an olive-skinned mestiza mother, Junior experiences the persistence of a normalized racial discrimination perpetuated by the myth of a racial democracy. He observes and internalizes the Eurocentric aesthetic of beauty that is pervasive both on the national level in televised beauty pageants and in the intimacy of his home. Whereas his mother treats his fair-skinned, straight-haired baby brother with love, she rejects and reprimands Junior. In his view, the salient feature that distinguishes him from his mother and brother and characterizes him as an Other is his curly hair—a socially devalued mark of his Afro-descendance. Thus the photograph represents an opportunity to transform himself into the ideal of Venezuelan beauty and normative subjecthood by straightening his curly hair, which he has learned to interpret as pelo malo. By straightening his hair he aims to erase the blackness that has survived mestizaje and make whiteness the focal point of his photograph in order to properly belong to his now solely Eurocentric family and earn his mother’s love.

Furthermore, Junior’s positive valuation of the image of the fair-skinned boy and rejection of that of the dark-skinned boy highlight the implications of the racialized aspects of idealized subjecthood for the construction of normative boyhood. The film’s focus on childhood is important because, according to Rocha and Seminet (2012: 17), it constitutes “an allegory of the nation, a site where a panorama of difference—sexual, ethnic, class, and political—must negotiate a complex, and often hostile, social landscape.” This negotiation represented by the juxtaposition of the boys in the two photographs—one smiling broadly, dressed as a civilian, standing gleefully against a leisure backdrop, the other serious, dressed as a soldier, holding a rifle against a military backdrop—reveals that boyhood is a privilege that is not afforded to Afro-descendants. The photograph of the Afro-descendant child places him on a path toward accelerated adulthood. ⁷ It also calls attention to a soldier’s responsibility to uphold and defend the project of nationhood with his life even though it is a classed, racialized, and gendered normative order that excludes and/or oppresses him. Moreover, the photographer’s distinction of the Afro-descendant boy as not just a soldier but a lieutenant colonel reifies the construction of black masculinity as hypermasculinity. The juxtaposition of the two photographs shows that via the racialized construction of normative boyhood Afro-descendants are constructed as nonnormative subjects from a young age. This is important considering Roderick Ferguson’s (2000) studies of the convergence of race and sexuality in African-American racial formation in the United States. He argues that in the mid-twentieth century African-Americans were socially constructed as irrational and pathological and thus “outside the bounds of the citizenship machinery.” As their familial forms and gender relations were classified as perversions, “straight African-Americans were reproductive rather than productive, heterosexual but never heteronormative” (Ferguson, 2000: 423). ⁸

Although Ferguson’s analysis is specific to African-American racial formation in the United States, studies of Venezuelan racial formation and the place of Afro-descendants within the nation reveal the ways in which Afro-Venezuelans have also been historically constructed as non-heteronormative. In his analysis of the Venezuelan school curriculum, the prominent Afro-Venezuelan activist Jesús (“Chucho”) García (2007: 229) notes that history textbooks show images of “families [that] are mainly white and Western, that is, the family nucleus of ‘mother, father, and children,’” thereby sustaining and perpetuating “Eurocentric, sexist, machista, and racist” values, prejudice, and norms. This racialized construction of a normative family unit is rooted in colonial imaginings of Afro-descendants as subhuman and wild that positioned them as incapable of being productive or heteronormative (García, 2001; Herrera Salas, 2005). ⁹ García (2007: 229) explains that the positioning of a Eurocentric family as ideal cultivates an endoracism or “racial embarrassment” in children who are socialized in a context that rejects Afro-descendant values, cultures, and histories and represents Afro-descendants “as enslaved, a labor force without any cultural, social or political contribution.” This learned social devaluation of blackness informs Junior’s desire to straighten his hair. As a mixed-race boy, he sees his curly hair as “bad,” a marker of ugliness. He sees straightening his hair as a path to constituting himself as a normative and therefore beautiful subject for and through the photograph. However, in attempting to attain belleza venezolana, Junior is instead further marked as Other for transgressing gender norms. His pursuit of straight hair identifies him socially as a nonheterosexual subject and further relegates him to the non-heteronormative. His focus on self-constitution as a normative subject through photography is especially significant given Barthes’s (1981: 6) assertion that “a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see.” Throughout the film, instead of the photograph the audience sees Junior’s efforts to attain it as he observes his reflection in different mirrors. Through those reflections, we see more than the photograph; we see the dominant construction of normative subjecthood in Venezuela as racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized. We see why Junior’s pursuit of the glamour shot is a painful and impossible endeavor.

Reflections of Nonnormativity

Although Junior’s desired glamour shot is financially unattainable for him, he persists in his efforts to constitute himself as a normative subject through the image by constantly asking his mother for money to pay for the photograph and remains focused on preparing himself for it by attempting to straighten his hair throughout the film. The camera frames Junior’s reflection in the mirror as a portrait each time he attempts to straighten his hair. These reflections can be read as live snapshots or previews of the photograph. Each time Junior stares at his reflection he is mirroring the act of posing, which is important because Barthes (1981: 10) argues that subjects constitute their selves in posing for a photograph: “I instantaneously make another body for myself, I transform myself in advance into an image.” The pose that Junior adopts each time he stands in front of the mirror symbolizes for him the transformative possibilities of the photograph he desires. Yet, those possibilities are problematic because each mirror reflection represents a failed attempt to embody his desired normative image of the straight-haired singer and instead highlights his constitution as a non-heteronormative subject. Furthermore, the mirror reflections underline Junior’s position as both focalizer and focalized. Rocha and Seminet (2012: 4) explain that “the former term indicates the perspective, or point of view, from that something is being seen, and the latter is the object being seen or focused on.” Junior’s mirror reflections are thus key to the cultural work that the film does as the child focalizer/focalized forces adults to question their own ideologies by scrutinizing their actions.

The first time Junior’s reflection enters the frame is early in the film, before any mention of the objective that anchors the plot. Junior stands in front of the medicine cabinet mirror above the sink in his humble apartment bathroom. He has parted his medium-length curly hair down the middle and holds down the hair on the left side with one hand while attempting to straighten the right side with a thin comb. He looks focused and frustrated as he struggles with the comb. His efforts are interrupted as his mother, Marta, yells, “Stop messing with your hair.” Junior lies, replying that he is urinating, but then quickly moves to the shower and picks up a bottle of shampoo. He leaves the bathroom hurriedly after being interrupted once more by Marta’s angry command, “Get out now.” She then enters the bathroom and is upset to find the comb with a few strands of Junior’s hair in it as well as in the sink (00:05:48–00:06:37). This scene presents a brief yet telling introduction not only to Junior’s fixation with straightening his hair but, more important, to the complicated aspects of his relationship with his mother. Junior’s efforts to straighten his hair are interpreted by his mother as transgressions of gender norms. Subtle mentions of his focus on straightening his hair throughout the film highlight the stigma it carries in the eyes of his mother and other adults. Marta cannot see Junior’s attempts to straighten his hair as efforts to fit in racially, especially within his family. Instead she interprets them in conjunction with other behaviors of which she disapproves—such as singing—as expressions of nonnormative sexualized desires. This leads her to visit a physician’s office twice to seek help and advice from a medical authority for correcting her son’s nonnormativity.

The visits to the doctor highlight the historical biomedical pathologizing of sexual difference and reveal the imbrications of race, gender, and class in sustaining sexual difference as a marker of nonnormativity. During the first visit, Junior’s fair-skinned doctor conducts a routine physical examination that focuses on an exterior reading of his body (00:29:57–00:31:01). At the end of the exam, Junior remains sitting upright on the exam table and shares a concern with the doctor. “My mom says I have a tail,” Junior explains. The doctor examines Junior’s exposed back by running his hand down his spine and then explains, “Some people have larger bones than others. That’s normal.” As Junior gets dressed in an adjoining room, he faces his reflection in a mirror and attempts to smooth down his curls. This reflection is framed by the conversation the doctor and Marta have in the exam room. The doctor tells Marta that there is nothing wrong with Junior and asks her not to bring him in if he is well. This voice-over effect is important, since Marta resorts to the doctor’s biomedical authority for guidance regarding what she perceives to be the physical marker of her son’s nonnormativity. This scene highlights the historical social construction of sexual difference as a reading of deviance on the body (Foucault, 1990; Somerville, 1994). While the doctor assures Marta that Junior is a normal healthy boy, his biomedical reading of Junior’s body does not take into account an examination of his behavior, and so Marta returns to the doctor’s office to ask if Junior’s tail is the reason he is raro (odd) (00:52:53–00:54:23). This time there is no physical exam, since Junior is not present. Marta attempts to make a case that there is something wrong with her son by disclosing what she perceives to be the physical and behavioral markers of his nonnormativity: that he is always singing and brushing his hair. The conversation highlights that what Marta perceives to be her son’s difference-deviance is not only sexualized but also gendered and racialized; she uses terms such as el negrito (the little black one) and marico (fag) when referring to Junior’s transgressions of normativity. The doctor is annoyed because Junior is not ill and Marta is keeping him from devoting time to other patients who are. He does not, however, completely invalidate Marta’s concerns about Junior’s nonnormative behaviors. Instead, he instructs her to spend more time with Junior, find him a masculine role model, and show him that a man and a woman can have a loving relationship so that he may learn by example how to behave like a normal boy.

Marta’s visits to the physician reveal, on the one hand, her efforts to correct Junior’s nonnormativity and, on the other, her determination to assert control over her circumstances as an unemployed single mother and resist the exacerbation of her own nonnormativity. This is significant because in films “children and adolescents are used as the agent through which the desires and fears of adults are manifested” (Rocha and Seminet, 2012: 1). Through this lens, the visits to the doctor reflect Marta’s anxieties about her son’s nonnormativity and constitute her attempts to maintain some form of normativity by asserting that she herself is what Charles L. Briggs and Clara Mantini-Briggs (2003) call a “sanitary citizen.” In their study of the cholera epidemic that resulted in the death of the Warao indigenous people of Delta Amacuro, Briggs and Mantini-Briggs introduce the term to denote “one of the key mechanisms for deciding who is accorded substantive access to the civil and social rights of citizenship” (10). They argue that sanitary citizenship is mediated through “modern medical understandings of the body, health, and illness, practicing hygiene, and depending on doctors and nurses” to treat illnesses and contend that unsanitary subjects are those who “are judged to be incapable of adopting this modern medical relationship to the body, hygiene, illness, and healing—or who refuse to do so.” In her analyses of belleza venezolana, Ochoa (2014: 49, 40) highlights that sanitary citizenship “is a kind of racialized citizenship” marked by the “willingness to subject the body (and be subject to)” technologies such as “diet, surgery, and cosmetics to create the miss body.” Thus Junior’s focus on straightening his hair constitutes an attempt to attain sanitary citizenship by erasing his curly hair as a marker of blackness. However, because belleza venezolana is a gendered construct, Marta interprets Junior’s attempts to become a sanitary citizen as indicators of unsanitary subjecthood because his transgressions of gendered scripts socially construct him as a sexual Other. For Marta, Junior is subscribing to feminine norms in attempting to straighten his hair, and this violation of heteronormativity marks him as a marico (fag) in her eyes. During the consultation, she asks the doctor if she is responsible for Junior’s difference—by not showing him enough physical affection—and wonders if he will suffer. Marta links Junior’s tail (a bodily marker of difference) to his fixation on his hair (a behavioral marker of difference) as expressions of a specifically sexualized manifestation of being raro (odd) which she worries will cause him future suffering. She fails to recognize the ways in which he is already suffering not only for being socially read as Other because of his desire to straighten his hair but, more important, from her own rejection of him—constantly experiencing a sense of nonbelonging in his own family.

While Marta’s condemnation of Junior’s attempts to straighten his hair causes her to closely monitor and limit the time he spends in the bathroom, Junior finds a more permissive environment at the home of his paternal grandmother, Carmen. The only place he is able to constitute the image of himself to some extent as a singer with straight hair is in Carmen’s home. He finds a hair dryer in her bathroom and turns it on, looking enlivened at his reflection in the mirror as he points the hair dryer toward his curls (00:21:21–00:21:33). Once his mother has left the apartment, Junior tells Carmen about his desire to look like a singer with straight hair in his school photo, and she straightens the hair on the left side of his head. He rushes to the bathroom and for the first time is able to see a reflection of himself with straight hair (00:25:39–00:26:01). He appears pleased as he contemplates his reflection in the bathroom mirror, tilting his head slightly to the right to highlight the straightened half of his hair. He then slowly turns to the left and looks frustrated as he stares at the curly half of his head. He turns his head slowly back to the right to observe his newly straightened hair again, this time smiling as he gleefully caresses his hair with his left hand. However, instead of transforming him into a normative subject, Junior’s mirror reflection shows that he exists at the intersection of social categories of difference that situate him outside the bounds of the heteronormative. His efforts to constitute himself as normative only affirm his non-heteronormativity, since his straightened hair denotes a feminine gender expression. Although his smile indicates a sense of accomplishment at being one step closer to becoming the beautiful subject of the glamour shot, that moment of joy is abruptly interrupted by his mother’s voice yelling his name. He then quickly wets his hair at the sink before heading back home with his mother. The fact that he is able to attain and enjoy a partial image of himself with straight hair only in Carmen’s home is important, since she is the only one who accepts his non-heteronormativity. Speaking of his difference, Carmen tells Marta, “He only wants to primp himself up and be pretty.” Whereas Marta sees Junior as raro, which has a pejorative connotation, Carmen classifies him as distinto (different).

Carmen’s home is significant because it represents a non-heteronormative space reimagined as a space of possibility, a space of memory and subjectivity centered around a positive valuation of Afro-descendance. This is evident from the first time it appears on screen. The camera focuses on a framed photo of her son, Junior’s father, beside three candles on a small table in her living room. Carmen’s keeping her son’s memory present in her apartment through his photograph highlights its notable absence in Marta’s home. Carmen also displays pictures of Afro-descendant musicians from the 1960s and 1970s such as Los Dementes, Wladimir y Su Constelación, and Las Cuatro Monedas on her walls. These images are extremely significant given the role those musicians played in the affirmation of blackness and Afro-descendant cultures in the Venezuelan cultural, social, and political landscape of that period. Throughout the film Carmen’s home is the only space, private or public, where images of Afro-descendants are displayed in a positive manner. Her acceptance of Junior’s non-heteronormativity is also mediated by her recognition that his difference might allow him to have a different trajectory from that of her son. Carmen tells Marta that she understands that Junior is different and sees that difference as something positive because he is not drawn to guns (alluding to her son’s murder). Moreover, she interprets Junior’s desire to straighten his hair not as a rejection of his blackness but as a manifestation of his non-heteronormativity. It is also possible that as an elder she understands, through her own lived experiences, that Afro-descendants cannot be heteronormative Venezuelans. It is probable that she accepts and embraces Junior because she understands the difficulties her grandson faces in a society that devalues Afro-descendants. When he is in her home, she provides him with opportunities to find different possibilities for constituting his self from within the non-heteronormative.

However, Carmen’s acceptance and support of Junior’s endeavors to straighten his hair and be photographed as a singer in his school photo are not enough to combat his internalization of the social stigma associated with the non-heteronormative. Carmen tries to embrace Junior’s desire by making him an outfit like that of the Afro-Venezuelan singer Henry Stephen, whose 1968 hit “Mi limón, mi limonero” she has him memorize and perform. Nevertheless, the limitations of her home as a non-heteronormative space quickly become evident given the pressure Junior faces to conform to heteronormative scripts as a condition of receiving his mother’s approval and affection. The last time Junior is seen in his grandmother’s home, he and Carmen dance and sing in her bedroom as he wears the singer’s outfit she has made for him (00:54:25–00:55:57). Junior first laughs joyfully as he sees his reflection in the mirror. Then he slowly realizes that the 1960s singer’s outfit will further mark him as nonnormative in the eyes of his mother and asks Carmen, “What if my mom doesn’t like it?” He stops dancing and becomes upset by his reflection in the mirror. Carmen holds onto his hands and forces him to continue dancing. Unfortunately, their dance parallels an earlier tense dance between Junior and his mother that culminated in his being reprimanded for his nonmasculine behaviors. In a turning point for his relationship with Carmen and her apartment as a space of possibility and non-heteronormativity, Junior breaks free of her hold and screams at her, “I’m a boy, and I don’t want your dress!” He runs away from Carmen’s apartment saying, “You smell bad!”

This is a pivotal and difficult moment for Junior, since Carmen’s home is the only place where he has been able to partially constitute himself as a straight-haired singer—the only place where he laughs freely and experiences joy upon posing in front of the mirror. When he realizes that his grandmother’s vision of his desired self-constitution will be interpreted by his mother as yet another transgression, he attempts to assert his belonging in relation to Marta by permanently distancing himself from Carmen. His accusatory statement regarding her smell symbolizes a rejection not only of her blackness but of his own as well as he repeats a racist condemnation that marks her as Other.

Junior leaves Carmen and the safe space of non-heteronormativity constituted by her home when he realizes that being in that space means rejecting normativity and letting go of ever being able to assimilate to the idealized subjecthood that has motivated his pursuit of the glamour shot. Although his trajectory throughout the film is marked by attempts to constitute himself as the smiling fair-skinned boy pictured in the photographer’s studio, as the film concludes he realizes that there is no real choice for him. As an Afro-descendant boy, he has only one socially acceptable mold: that of the serious dark-complexioned boy dressed as a soldier. As he attempts to straighten his hair twice more after rejecting Carmen, he recognizes that attaining normative subjecthood is an impossibility for him. These last two mirror reflections represent his failure to make his own path to subjecthood alone and highlight his social position as an orphan. Although Junior has a mother and a grandmother, he does not properly belong to his family, and this makes him an orphan. As Dan Russek (2012: 136) explains,

To be an orphan is a metaphor for an existential void, a state in which one suffers the painful effects of the absence of an authority figure (be it familial, cultural, national, etc.). In this regard, orphanhood is functional: one parent, or even both of them, may be alive, but it is as if they did not exist for the child.

Although Marta is present in Junior’s life, she is not the loving, accepting parental figure he seeks and needs. Russek notes that an orphan’s experiences are marked by feelings of vulnerability, abandonment, neglect, helplessness, and hopelessness—all of which describe Junior’s experiences throughout the film and become ever more salient during his final attempts to straighten his hair. In the first of these, the mirror reflection shows the result of trying to straighten his hair with mayonnaise after watching an instructional video at an Internet café (00:59:10–01:00:33). This results in a physically violent encounter with Marta, as she forcibly rinses Junior’s hair in the kitchen sink and cuts off a chunk of his hair with a pair of scissors. Although afterward she tells Junior that he does not have bad hair, this does not translate into a meaningful message of affirmation for him because he still faces her rejection for the other nonnormative behaviors that mark him as odd in her eyes. As he attempts to straighten his hair once more, he tries to constitute himself differently. The morning after he sees Marta sleep with her boss in order to be reinstated as a security guard, Junior looks at himself in his bathroom mirror as he soaks his hair with cooking oil (01:17:51–01:18:43). He then walks out and poses aggressively in front of a mirror in his living room, wearing a hoodie as a marker of masculinity. ¹⁰ This leads to a subtler form of violence as Marta ignores him when he asks her to look at him and yells the lyrics of a popular song. As each failed attempt to straighten his hair results in his being reprimanded by Marta, Junior finds himself in the difficult position of having to choose between his desire to straighten his hair and his desire to belong to his family, realizing that the two are incompatible.

At the end of the film, Junior is disillusioned over his conclusion that rejecting himself and suppressing his desire is his only path to belonging—or perhaps simply surviving—in his family. Marta gives him an ultimatum when she buys a razor and makes him choose between shaving his head and staying with her or keeping his long curly hair and going to live with Carmen (01:26:03–01:28:27). While living with his grandmother would mean that he could finally have straight hair and embrace the non-heteronormative, he cannot contemplate accepting this option, since it would be an acknowledgment of his difference—of the intersecting racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed differences that mark him as nonnormative.

Although Junior’s experiences situate him in relation to other young people represented in Latin American films that explore children’s subjectivity, who share an “impulse to become agents of their own desire, often in the face of hardship or antagonistic situations” (Rocha and Seminet, 2014: xv), he ultimately suppresses that impulse in an effort to conceal his difference and attempt to belong. As Reighan Gillam (2017: 59) notes, “Junior cannot experience his mother’s love and be himself.” When he takes the razor and shaves off his hair, he signals to Marta that he understands that following heteronormative scripts is a condition of belonging to his family. However, in one last act of resistance, he tells Marta, “I don’t love you.” She responds, “Me neither.” The image of Junior unwillingly shaving his head stands in stark contrast to an earlier scene in which he and his mother sit in their living room watching news footage of people eagerly shaving their heads publicly as acts of solidarity with Chávez during his battle with cancer. Although Junior carries out a parallel action to that of many Chávez supporters, it only further sediments his orphanhood, as he is clearly positioned outside of the imagined community of the nation—whether that of those who support Chávez or that of those who oppose him. Accordingly, the film concludes with a scene that shows Junior at school with his head shaved (01:28:49–01:29:12). He stands sternly in line wearing a school uniform as a marker of national and social belonging, but he refuses to sing along with the national anthem with the other students. Although on one level the scene signals sameness, since it appears that, externally, Junior has assimilated to the mold of Afro-descendant boyhood, on another level it highlights Junior’s nonnormativity in that his actions, facial expression, and body language indicate that he does not belong. Junior’s nonbelonging reveals the interconnectedness of the racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized constitution of normativity; his attempting to erase one marker of difference by straightening his curly hair did not grant him access to his idealized subjecthood. This last scene thus cements Junior’s condition as an orphan of the heteronormative.

Conclusion

Junior’s attempts to constitute himself differently, as a good and beautiful subject, for and through the school photograph are consistently painful and impossible. Pelo malo presents a vision of hopelessness for non-heteronormative subjects that, as Nicolas Balutet (2017) points out, contradicts Rondón’s own call for tolerance of difference. The filmmaker herself has wondered whether the film offers any reason for hope or simply reveals her own pessimism, but she has also expressed a desire for it to generate dialogue in an extremely polarized country (García and Belinchón, 2013). The focus on Junior’s experiences is significant because, as Rocha and Seminet (2012: 3) contend, “as young characters move the story forward, they are usually objectified as vehicles of adult anxieties over the nature of civic society.” They add that “beyond simply representing adult anxieties, [films] may actually attempt to produce, play with, or reshape these anxieties.” The film’s heartbreaking resolution may thus be more effective than a positive one at generating a productive dialogue through which social anxieties pertaining to nonnormativity can be reshaped toward an acceptance of it.

However, the limitations of these possible conversations are highlighted by Rondón’s framing of the intolerance represented in her film as a product of what she characterizes as a war generated by Chávez (García and Belinchón, 2013). By situating racism and homophobia as specific products of Chávez’s government, the filmmaker’s view of intolerance limits the capacities of thinking outside the heteronormative. Race and sexuality were being used to exclude people from the imagined community of the nation long before Chávez became president (Castrillo, 2012; García, 2001). Krisna Ruette-Orihuela and Hortensia Caballero-Arias (2017: 327) explain that the perpetuation of the myth of racial democracy and the “exclusion of Afro-descendant peoples [is] a structural problem in Venezuela that [goes] beyond political or party affiliations or left-right ideological divisions.” Rondón’s condemnation of Chávez as the locus of intolerance in Venezuela is limited given the film’s depiction of Junior’s experiences as shaped by the hegemonic ideology of mestizaje that perpetuates a racialized, classed, gendered, and sexualized construction of normative subjecthood as a foundational narrative of the nation. Farrell (2016: 381–382) aptly notes that “as the camera briefly shows the pro-Chávez speeches, television shows, and billboards decorating the main streets of Caracas, the viewers soon realize that official institutionalized politics and the messages of the Opposition are both far from Junior’s reality.” She concludes that Rondón’s focus on Chávez obscures the fact that “Pelo malo’s critical look at pervasive intolerance does not present a solution to Venezuelan challenges. Instead it is an intimate story that leaves more questions than answers.” Thus, instead of presenting an intervention that dismantles the political economy of racism in Venezuela, the film reproduces “the kind of pessimistic functionalism” or “feedback loop” that “reproduces a social order that values European bodies over those of Others” (Ochoa, 2014: 38). ¹¹

Pelo malo is nonetheless an important film in that its representations of Junior’s endeavors to constitute himself for and through a photograph further complicate understandings of racial prejudice. His failed attempts to become a normative subject position him as a young subject marked by his existence at the intersections of race, sexuality, gender, and class as social categories of difference that intertwine to sustain heteronormativity. This is important given that in 2013, the year the film was released, “the state created the National Institute against Racial Discrimination (INCODIR), which has as its main objective the execution of public policies oriented toward preventing and eradicating all forms of racial discrimination” (Ruette-Orihuela and Caballero-Arias, 2017: 330). This was a result of the recent cimarronaje institucional of Afro-descendant activists and their long struggle for legal recognition as an ethno-racial group and acknowledgment of racial discrimination (Ruette-Orihuela and Caballero-Arias, 2017). In this context, the film’s portrayal of Junior as an orphan of both his family and the imagined community of the nation offers the state, social movements, and activists in general an opportunity to rethink the pueblo as a social construct at the intersection of multiple categories of social difference. Thus Pelo malo does present possibilities for new types of dialogue. Given that the country has only become further polarized in recent years, meaningful dialogues about social change that center intersectional and decolonial approaches are increasingly important. While the film may not provide explicit hope for Junior and other nonnormative subjects, important work to challenge racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia continues to be carried out by activists, organizations, and networks such as the Network of Afro-Venezuelan Organizations, the Venezuelan Afro-descendants’ Network, the Venezuelan Afro-descendants’ Social Movement, and the Sex-Gender Diverse Revolutionary Alliance.

Finally, at the end of the film the credits begin to roll on a black screen, but 25 seconds later they are accompanied by images of Junior in front of a blue screen in a smaller frame. He smiles and dances happily for 44 seconds with straight hair, wearing the outfit Carmen made for him. This sequence is interrupted several times by the sound of a camera click that captures a photograph of him against the waterfalls backdrop. These images, which appear after the credits have begun to roll and may go unnoticed by many viewers, can be interpreted as a possible alternative ending that presents the possibility of revaluing the non-heteronormative.