Michael Gill
Antonio Naharro and Álvaro Pastor’s film Yo, también (Me Too, 2009) allows viewers to question expectations of competence, citizenship, ability and sexual attractiveness. The protagonist, Daniel (Pablo Pineda) falls in love with his co-worker, Laura (Lola Dueñas). Despite the standard formula of the film – man meets woman and falls in love – Daniel’s intellectual disability and Laura’s lack of such means that viewers are allowed to imagine how disability enhances and complicates expectations of love, intimacy and sexual activity. During a moment of illustrative dialogue in the film, where Daniel and his older brother, Santi (Antonio Naharro) are discussing Daniel’s love of (and attraction to) Laura, Santi bluntly tells him that no woman with 46 chromosomes will ever love Daniel. Santi advises him to fall in love with another woman with Down syndrome. Daniel’s chances at love are clinically reduced to genetics, where chromosomal matching is assumed to be necessary in order to obtain companionship. Tellingly, Daniel refuses to let this sexually ableist assessment direct his chances for love and intimacy. Daniel’s continual assertion of his desire, while working with and against systems that seek to qualify his competence, helps to complicate reductive assumptions about which types of partners are appropriate for disabled individuals.
In this chapter, expanding on the work of Benjamin Fraser (2013), Victoria Rivera-Cordero (2013) and Rachel Adams (2015), I argue that Daniel’s assertions of his heterosexual masculinity work to secure him as a desiring and desirable subject. More explicitly, Daniel’s statement that he is Down syndrome from head to toe centres his medical diagnosis allowing for a disidentification between the assumptions about the condition to foreground Daniel’s epistemological insights. In addition, the film challenges assumptions of inclusion and citizenship based solely on economic or political means; rather, the film argues that the sexual and reproductive desires of intellectually disabled individuals have to be recognised as valid and are central to discourses of citizenship and rights. In this chapter, I compare three pairings that appear in the film: a disabled couple, a non-disabled couple and a couple where one individual has an intellectual disability and the other does not. I argue that while the film transgresses representational patterns by showing a love story between an intellectually disabled protagonist and his non-disabled partner, ultimately, their relationship is not granted wider familial and cultural legitimacy.
Questions of Identity and Inclusion
Alongside questions of inclusion – one of the central themes in Yo, también – the film also invites a critique of how assumptions of ability and labels of disability impact attempts to secure rights under the banner of a common humanity. As such, the film begins with Daniel’s voiceover, as part of a speech he is giving:
Es como el cuerpo humano. ¿Qué sería del cuerpo sin sus miembros? Sí, son frágiles. Porque aquellas sociedades que dividen y apartan a las minorías son sociedades mutiladas. No están unidas. Parece como si cada uno fueran islas desiertas. Eso es lo que no se pretende. Lo que se quiere es todo lo contrario. Es unir. Aquí no hay ni mujeres, ni negros, ni homosexuales, ni nada. Aquí todos somos personas. Por eso, el trabajo nos ayuda a sentirnos parte de esta sociedad, porque lo somos, siempre lo hemos sido, y queremos tener voz en esta sociedad que para eso se llama democrática. Muchas gracias.
(It is like a human body. What would it be without limbs? They’re fragile. Because all those societies that divide and isolate minorities are mutilated societies. They’re not united. It’s like each one was a desert island. That is not what we’re aiming for. We want just the opposite, we want to unite. Here there aren’t men or women or Blacks or homosexuals or anything. Here, we are all people. So, work helps us to feel part of this society. Because we are. We have always been. And we want to have a voice in this society. That’s why it’s called democratic. Thank you.)
1His speech, which lasts a little over three minutes, is intercut with shots of commuters in the present (including Daniel), sights and sounds of Seville, audience members listening to his speech in the past and a dance class attended by disabled dancers. Daniel’s speech blurs temporalities where he addresses past failed democracies (‘desert islands’), while also advocating for a more equitable and accessible future. In between these gestures to the past and future, the camera shows the present with his commute to work and the shots of the dance class. The mixing of temporalities signals the political project of the film to explicitly argue for equity and inclusion under the banner of human rights; in addition, the film highlights how discourses of human rights, which often depend on discourses of a more repressive past and equitable future, can obfuscate how various minorities are not able to access full rights.
Of Daniel’s speech, Fraser writes: ‘The topic of disability, here, is not explicit, but instead implicit in the speech – it is embodied in Daniel’s performance’ (2013: 5). One could argue that Daniel’s speech doesn’t mention disability, perhaps because the audience during his address, and the viewer through the camera, make an explicit link between markers of Down syndrome and Daniel. Yet Fraser’s analysis highlights the tension in the film: to what extent does disability matter? Or, more explicitly, how does a democratic society centre the needs and concerns of a diverse population, including those with intellectual disabilities, when citizenship might be predicated on an ability to work, live independently, or be constructed as ‘rational’? Tellingly, assumptions of intellectual disability are central to this scene in the film given what Adams has identified as ‘an immediately legible signifier of a disabled mind and body’ (2015: n.p.). She continues: ‘The most visually recognizable and deeply stigmatized of all intellectual disabilities, Down syndrome brings questions about consent, sexual rights, and ableist disgust sharply into focus’ (ibid.). The disabled embodiment of both the actor and the character he plays results in a verisimilitude where Pineda’s disability adds to the realness of the performance, and perhaps also to the veracity of the claims in the film.
In his speech, Daniel does mention gender/sex (‘men’ and ‘women’), racial categories and sexual minorities (‘homosexuality’). His language of impairment (‘mutilated’) constructs an experience of oppression or discrimination as not only isolating, but also harming the integrity and unity of the body politic. Daniel’s call for inclusion, here the ability to work, becomes part of the project of unity. Beyond a call for inclusion, his speech is also a call for recognition: ‘Here, we are people. So, work helps us feel part of this society. Because we are. We have always been. And we want to have a voice in this society. That’s why it’s called democratic.’ An argument linking work (and its association with productivity, paying of taxes and, in a time of austerity, not being supported by welfare) to humanness and citizenship thus becomes one of the central themes of the film. Daniel’s speech prompts an interrogation of the relationship, if any, between disability and citizenship.
Discussing citizenship in the United States, Allison C. Carey remarks:
Despite the long history of exclusion, the story of citizenship and intellectual disability is not one-sided. If people with intellectual disabilities were in fact naturally and categorically unable to exercise rights, we would see no significant debate about rights for this population. This is not the case, however; throughout the twentieth century advocates for people with intellectual disabilities and people with intellectual disabilities themselves engaged in many successful attempts to claim rights and support their active participation in society. (2009: 6)
Carey then proceeds to illustrate how various actors, even during moments of segregation and sterilisation, sought to make citizenship claims for people with labels of intellectual disabilities (2009: 6–11). She writes that often efforts to expand rights and citizenship are set up against efforts to restrict rights: ‘At no point in history has there been a clear resolution of the “problem” of intellectual disability as related to rights, toward exclusion or inclusion’ (2009: 9). In Yo, también, Daniel is the first person in Europe with Down syndrome to have graduated from university (see Fraser 2013: 1). The film invites an interrogation of how discourses of rights, citizenship and inclusion are only available to those that work (or graduate from university) or if the promises of citizenship are available to all regardless of labels of disability (or other markers of identity). In addition, it highlights the failures of securing sexual and reproductive rights, especially for those labeled with intellectual disabilities (see Gill 2015). Individuals with labels of intellectual disabilities often are sterilised, prescribed birth control without their knowledge or forbidden from participating in sexual activities (see Shildrick 2009; Desjardins 2012; Gill 2015). Fraser compellingly argues that the success of Yo, también ‘lies in its ability to use the themes of love to draw attention to the way in which the needs, desires, and the very autonomy of people with disabilities are habitually subjugated to a clinical view of disability’ (2013: 13).
As an opening framing mechanism, Daniel’s address nicely illustrates Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell’s examination of ‘ablenationalism’ that ‘involves the implicit assumption that minimum levels of corporeal, intellectual, and sensory capacity, in conjunction with subjective aspects of aesthetic appearance, are required of citizens seeking access to “full benefits” of citizenship’ (2010: 124). Snyder and Mitchell continue: ‘As such, most people with disabilities are excluded by falling short of this participatory bottom line and, as such, key guiding principals of democracy are left unrealized’ (ibid.). It is tempting to read Daniel’s success as a university graduate and temporary worker as a marker of inclusion, and by extension, citizenship, especially if his employment can become more permanent. The most hopeful reading of the film, as a text, makes an argument that disabled individuals can
access the academy and workplace. In the age of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), we might assume that the academy has expanded its admissions procedures to include those with labels of Down syndrome, and by extension, shifted ableist assumptions of rationality that in the past have actively excluded cognitively disabled individuals from participation and success (see Price 2011: 25–57). However, these assumptions are predicated on a narrative of progress where the expansion of rights facilitates new levels of engagement and inclusion.
As Snyder and Mitchell assert, in this process, there is the potential to uphold ‘crip normativities’ which signal the ‘able disabled’ (2010: 118) – ‘celebrated by capitalist commodity cultures and communist governments alike as symbols of the success of systems that further marginalise their “less able” disabled kin in the shadow of committed researchers conjoined to “creaming” practices for the non-impaired’ individual (2010: 117).
2 Fraser remarks how the film is ‘far from presenting a self-congratulatory view of the state of Spanish integration. Integration, after all, may not be enough if it is accompanied by a perspective that denies true autonomy and independence to people who become systematically identified by their disability alone’ (2013: 7). This tension between the state’s desire to celebrate the disabled subject as covered under (and protected by) human rights regimes, including the UNCRPD and optional protocol, which Spain ratified and signed in 2007, and the various levels of segregation that exist alongside discourses of inclusion illuminate how a discourse of rights is selectively applied. Is the category of ‘human’, in human rights regimes, flexible enough to include those constructed as ‘unfit to work’ and ‘undeserving’? Are intellectually disabled individuals afforded citizenship in practice, or just in name? And, as explored below, does the promise of citizenship extend to expressions of sexuality?
Down Syndrome from Head to Toe
After graduation, with a degree in teaching and educational psychology, Daniel works as a temporary employee in the General Office for Disabled Persons. Initially, his duties consist of clerical work including answering phones and making copies. On his first day, he is sitting at a desk looking through a smoking cessation manual and listening to a motivational speech, via headphones. As the voice on the tape announces to ‘concentra tu inteligencia en tu frente’ (‘concentrate your intelligence in your forehead’) and to do the same in the eyelids, we first encounter Laura entering work late. The camera first shows her high heels and legs covered in jeans, before panning up to show her back and dyed blonde hair with dark roots showing. Her pace is rushed as Laura sees Daniel sitting in her desk. Laura immediately tells Daniel he is lost, as she doesn’t seem to remember that Daniel would be her co-worker. After Consuelo (Consuelo Trujillo), the head of the office, corrects the misrecognition, Laura apologises to Daniel.
3In a matter of minutes we are introduced to both Laura, through her late arrival and correction of dress, and Daniel, through his speech and exploration of Laura’s desk. Daniel is the disabled university graduate asking for inclusion and Laura is the wild, seemingly unreliably social service worker. While narratives of reformation are standard cinema fare, usually where an ‘active’ bachelor settles down with a ‘moral’ woman, or a ‘wild’ woman is tamed by the unconditional love of a man, Yo, también alters this narrative slightly where Daniel’s intellectual disability (and Laura’s lack of such) have to be negotiated as part of Laura’s reformation and redemption.
The film quickly contrasts Daniel’s work goals with those of marriage/ companionship and sexual intercourse. For example, after Daniel’s first day of work, his parents, María Ángeles (Isabel García Lorca) and Bernabé (Pedro Álvarez-Ossorio), give him a new briefcase. After receiving the gift, Daniel remarks, ‘Ya solo falta casarme’ (‘Now I just have to get married!’). Next, the camera cuts to Daniel opening a folder on his computer labeled ‘Daniel’s personal file’ and two sub-folders titled, ‘Apuntes Facultad’ (‘faculty notes’) and ‘Diagnóstico en Educación 2 elementos’ (‘educational diagnosis’). We next see Daniel, in his room, watching pornography presumably hidden in these computer files. Later Daniel has an erotic dream about his female co-workers, including Laura. When two of his co-workers see him laughing at work, they comment to each other how ‘cute’ he is, not realising, of course, that the previous night they were actors in his erotic dream. The comment regarding his ‘cuteness’ helps illustrate the ableist assumption of Daniel’s innocence at the expense of his sexual desire. These brief moments work to assert Daniel as an individual with sexual (and relationship) desires, which then become a key driving force as he actively flirts and develops a friendship with Laura.
Away from work, Laura is shown drinking and having seemingly unfulfilling sexual encounters with men she meets at local bars. The differences between Laura and Daniel’s lives are striking: Daniel lives with his parents, both educated individuals who have taught Daniel how to appreciate art, speak English and have an ostensibly well-rounded social life. Daniel is also close to his brother Santi and his wife, Reyes (María Bravo). Laura is estranged from her father and brothers. She tells Daniel at one point she is an orphan, although her father’s hospitalisation and death provide much of the dramatic conflict in her life during the film. In addition, while the details are unclear, it seems Laura was sexually abused when she was younger.
4 Laura’s world is presented as wild, while Daniel’s parents (and their educational and class privilege) protect (or shelter) Daniel. While a reading of the gendered relationship between Laura and Daniel could be made that argues Daniel’s disabled heterosexual masculinity tames (or reforms) Laura’s ‘fallen’ femininity, I want to make a more nuanced argument about their relationship where both are mutually constructing an interdependent relationship based on expressions of love. This reading would ignore Laura’s declaration that she does not want a relationship with Daniel. In fact, the uniqueness of their relationship is what renders it as simultaneously temporary, but also as timeless in a sense: both are working against ableist assessments of the appropriateness of their relationship, and the film suggests that this will be one of the greatest loves of both characters’ lives.
After the initial case of mistaken identity at work, Daniel and Laura’s friendship quickly develops partially because Daniel feigns ‘ignorance’ to be close to Laura. As part of his ruse, she helps him find another copy machine, when the one in the office is broken, and how to manoeuvre the operating system on his work computer. Daniel accompanies Laura on her smoke breaks and the two share a meal at a local restaurant. And while Daniel is increasingly attracted to Laura, telling his brother all about her virtues during their workout sessions, Laura continues her social habits, especially after news of her father’s hospitalisation.
At a pivotal moment in their friendship, Laura and Daniel take a daytrip to the beach. Under the watchful protective eye of his mother, Laura picks Daniel up for their outing. After a drive in her car, the two are shown frolicking in the water. An upbeat soundtrack adds to the playfulness of their interactions. From a distance the two seem like any other couple on the beach playing and flirting. Among diegetic sound of waves crashing and seagulls calling, both Laura and Daniel are holding up one hand to the blue sky. Laura remarks, about Daniel’s fingers, ‘Son gorditas, no?’ (‘They’re chubby, aren’t they?’); ‘Si, bueno, ese es un rasgo de síndrome de Down, una característica’ (‘Yes, but that’s a feature of Down syndrome, a characteristic’), Daniel replies. ‘Luego, también tenemos más características, sabes? Por ejemplo el paladar, es más estrecho. Eso también afecta al habla, porque se nos pueda se nos traba la lengua, y nos cuesta mucho hablar’ (‘And we’ve got other characteristics, too, you know. For example, the palate. It’s narrower, and that affects how we speak because it makes us tonged-tied and it’s hard for us to talk’). Laura questions, ‘Por qué eres…así?’ (‘Why are you…like this?’). As Daniel is discussing the impacts of his impairment on his embodiment, Laura is reconciling her assumptions of Down syndrome with her experience of Daniel. Her question about origin and cause is also one about intelligence as she wonders why Daniel is ‘smart’.
Fig. 1: Daniel and Laura holding up their hands to the blue sky to compare the size and shape of their fingers.
Daniel shares with Laura how his mother talked to him throughout his childhood, discusses art, politics and history and fought to get him into school. Daniel’s inclusion into Spanish society was enabled by his mother’s advocacy and will. The call for universal inclusion, regardless of identity, from Daniel, in the beginning, is marking a time in the future, not in the present or past. His goal of inclusion has not yet arrived. Laura discloses that she thought Daniel had slight mosaicism (a potentially ‘mild’ version of Down syndrome). Daniel, refusing her assessment, asserts, ‘No, no, para nada. Yo soy síndrome de Down de los pies a la cabeza. No…entero, entero’ (‘I’m Down’s syndrome from head to toe. I mean…the whole way’). He continues: ‘Y eso que dicen muchas veces de que hay dos edades, que si la cronológica, que si la mental. Eso, qué va, ni mucho menos. Yo teñgo 34 anos y sé atarme…los cordones, pues desde los 10’ (‘And they often say there are two ages, the chronological and the mental, but that’s not true. I’m 34 years old, and I’ve been tying…my shoelaces since I was 10’).
5 Clearly surprised (and perhaps feeling duped), Laura tells Daniel he has ‘morro’ (‘nerve’). He replies that nerve, too, is another characteristic of Down syndrome.
This moment of dialogue is striking in that Daniel refuses to downplay his diagnosis – or even distance himself from assumptions, even ableist ones, about Down syndrome. His declaration of ‘head to toeness’ of Down syndrome, rather, means that Laura must confront her expectations of intellectual disability as she negotiates Daniel’s sexual desire (and later her own). This isn’t a story where one protagonist enters into a relationship ‘despite’ another being disabled, or where one remarks to the other that they didn’t realise the other person was disabled. Fraser remarks that this scene, in particular, powerfully disrupts ‘the clinical paradigm of disability’ allowing Daniel the ‘opportunity to control his own self-representation’ (2013: 11, 12). Rivera-Cordero writes that the ‘directors here invite viewers to look more carefully at the body of this young man in order for us to see in a neutral way his slightly different hands. These hands are presented neither as especially attractive nor unattractive, they simply are’ (2013: 67). As such, Daniel’s Down syndrome is rendered ‘visible’, in a sense – as corroborated through his response to Laura – making disability legible. As such, the continual reminders of Daniel’s intellectual disability mean that when the protagonists engage in sexual relations, the camera is unable to document their actions because of the potentially jarring and controversial nature of their relationship.
6A later scene involves Laura and Daniel photocopying their hands thus carrying on the comparison between these two protagonists. Later, in the mirror to herself, Laura manipulates her eyes and tongue to approximate the visual markers of an embodiment sculpted by Down syndrome. These comparisons, importantly, are not simulations where Laura (and potentially the viewer by extension) is allowed to ‘experience’ intellectual disability. Rather, as Laura and Daniel’s relationship develops and becomes more complicated, because of external assessments from family and co-workers about the appropriateness or potential success, Laura explores her own embodiment (and what she assumes is Daniel’s) before they have a sexual encounter near the end of the film. Laura and Daniel are disidentifying with clinical assumptions, especially around ‘mental age’, associated with a diagnosis of intellectual disability.
7 In a society that constructs cognitive or intellectual disability as needing ableist protections, often in the name of paternalism, disidentification becomes not only a survival strategy, but also perhaps an effective mechanism to counter ableist assumptions that too often deny rights. As explored below, this mode of disidentification allows for Daniel and Laura to transgress cultural prohibitions of sexual activity, perhaps provided they only engage in sexual activity once.
Toward Inclusion?: Comparisons Between and Among
In the introduction, I briefly mentioned a moment of dialogue between Daniel and his brother, where Santi tells Daniel no woman with 46 chromosomes is ever going to love Daniel. This moment of dialogue occurs tellingly after Daniel tries to kiss Laura while they dance at a club, and then asks to come home with her. Laura tells him she wants to go home alone, effectively denying his invitation for sexual activity and seemingly the opportunity for a relationship. Drunk and rejected, Daniel attempts to enter a brothel where the bouncer refuses him entry. Daniel replies that he has two credit cards, seemingly a sign of his independence, adulthood and financial security. Despite these assurances, the bouncer calls him a ‘kid’ and refuses his entry into the brothel. Daniel replies: ‘Tengo 34 anos! ¡No soy un niño! ¡Soy un hombre! ¡Soy un hombre! Soy un hombre…y puedo entrar ahí, si quero. ¡Soy un hombre!’ (‘I’m 34! I am not a child! I am a man! I am a man! I am a man…I can go in there if I want. I am a man!’). Despite his protest, Daniel is not allowed to access the brothel. Adams writes that in this scene, ‘it is clear how the denial of sexual agency is tied to the denial of his status as a person’ (2015: n.p.). Daniel’s repetition of his status as a man illuminates how sexually ableist assumptions of intellectual disability function to actively deny opportunities for sexual activity, especially with women without intellectual disabilities.
8 These relationships accordingly ‘raise concerns about the exploitation of a partner who may not fully understand the meaning or implications of his or her actions. They also elicit ableist disgust at the capacity of people with intellectual disabilities to feel, act on, and become the subjects of erotic desire’ (ibid.).
Daniel’s inability to enter the brothel serves to contrast his ability to act on his desires with that of his brother. After Daniel’s attempt to enter the brothel, the camera fades to show Santi and Reyes engaging in sex on the couch in their living room before being interrupted by Daniel’s late night knock on the front door. The disabled brother is denied the ability to engage in sexual activity, while the bodies of the couple without intellectual disabilities are shown engaged in passionate, apparently pleasurable sexual activity.
9 Visually, then, the sexually ableist prohibitions are confirmed where Daniel’s isolation and sexual desire not only show him alone on the street but also interrupting the sexual activities of his brother and sister-in-law.
It is at this moment when Santi tells Daniel: ‘Mira Daniel ninguna mujer con 46 cromosomas se va a enamorar de ti, y tú no paras de fijarte en mujeres así, ¿cómo no vas a sufrir? Enamórate de mujeres a tu alcance, hombre. Porque es que así no vas a conseguir nada’ (‘Look, Daniel, no woman with 46 chromosomes is going to fall in love with you, but you keep going after them. You’re bound to suffer. Fall in love with women you can get, because you’ll get nowhere like this’). Santi is reducing Daniel’s chances at partnership (‘love’) and sexual encounters to an issue of chromosomal pairing. Daniel’s impairment, here as a marker of an extra chromosome on the 21st pair, according to Santi, is the central issue that disqualifies Daniel’s chance with Laura (or another individual without an intellectual disability). Recalling Daniel’s opening address of inclusion puts into question how the process of attainment of rights and general discourses of inclusion can be actualised when sexually ableist forces constrain one’s ability to be considered as having rights, when discourses of protection (or even more repressively suppression) emerge to limit sexual, reproductive and marriage focused desires.
Daniel’s brother and sister-in-law run a dance company for disabled individuals, based on Danza Mobile, a contemporary dance company of disabled and non-disabled dancers in Seville. As part of his job, Daniel convinces his brother to accept Pedro (Daniel Parejo) into the dance company, despite not being authorised to accept him because of funding limitations and waitlists. It is at Danza Mobile that Pedro meets Luisa (Lourdes Naharro). Both Pedro and Luisa have intellectual disabilities. Almost immediately they also become attracted to each other and sensually dance, while also being reprimanded by Reyes for making out. Reyes simultaneously calls Pedro and Luisa ‘chicos’ (kids) and tells them it is fine to want to kiss and touch each other but that they need to do so in private. Her use of ‘kids’ is significant in that because of their status as being labeled intellectually disabled neither is automatically afforded privacy or given status as an adult. In fact, Luisa’s mother refuses to tell her about the death of her father further linking Luisa’s status as needing to be ‘protected’ from news of death. Luisa’s mother pulls her daughter out of the dance programme because of concerns of her daughter’s interest in Pedro (and his sexual desire for Luisa).
The lack of privacy, family support and cultural legitimacy for their relationship forces Luisa and Pedro to run away. In one of the more comical but also poignant moments of the film, Pedro shows up outside the bakery run by Luisa’s mother. Luisa takes money out of the cash register and a display wedding cake and runs off with Pedro. At the dance company, Luisa’s mother confronts Reyes. Looking down on the scene of confrontation, Daniel and Santi discuss sexual rights and access. Referring to Pedro and Luisa, Daniel tells Santi: ‘Solo quieren estar juntos’ (‘They just want to be together’). Santi replies that they didn’t go to university, effectively linking levels of rights (and inclusion) to education. Daniel remarks: ‘Pero no hace falta estudiar para tener necesidad!’ (‘You don’t have to study to have needs!’). Santi replies that they can masturbate if they have needs. As Daniel responds, we get the sense he is talking about his own desires in addition to Luisa and Pedro: ‘Pero eso no es todo. Es tener compañía, es tener afecto, es tener algo’ (‘That isn’t everything. It’s having company, having affection, having something’). Santi is acknowledging their right to solitary sexual release through masturbation, but this articulation further extends sexually ableist assumptions where sexual activity (read: masturbation) becomes a solution to ‘needs’. Daniel, rather, challenges this limited construction to link discourses of inclusion to only non-reproductive solitary sexual activity. Daniel even challenges his brother as ‘having it all’ with his wife and baby. At this moment we are forced to recount Daniel’s speech in the past about the future of inclusion: being employed or graduating from university, while also being unable to marry or participate in sexual activity with partner(s), means the promise of citizenship, inclusion and acceptance, regardless of identity, has yet to materialise.
During their moment of escape Pedro and Luisa end up at a hotel. Daniel and Laura find them at the hotel and instead of immediately informing Santi, they give the two lovers a quick sex education lesson and discussion of consent. After Luisa states her love for and commitment to Pedro, Laura begins to cry softly. The two disabled lovers are able to finally be together in a private space purchased with stolen funds from the bakery. Tellingly, we are not shown their encounter; rather the camera shows Daniel and Laura sitting on the steps outside their room during Pedro and Luisa’s tryst. Only after their sexual encounter is Luisa able to confront her mother and demand recognition as an adult. Minutes later in the film we see Pedro and Luisa in her mother’s bakery, and it appears the matriarch accepts their relationship as legitimate.
After the night of Luisa and Pedro’s escape, Laura travels to Madrid to attend to her ailing estranged father and two brothers. Following a Christmas day phone call to Daniel when she lets him know her father is dead and he confesses his love, the two meet in Madrid. Daniel accompanies Laura as she sells her share in her father’s home. Later, we see Daniel and Laura at a New Year’s Eve celebration eating twelve grapes before sharing a kiss at midnight. This scene transitions to one in a hotel room where Laura and Daniel negotiate the expectations of their impending sexual encounter. Daniel asks Laura if she is planning to have sex with him ‘out of pity’. It is at this moment where she confesses her love for Daniel. Daniel replies, ‘Yo no he hecho nunca al amor’ (‘I’ve never made love’). ‘Yo tampoco’ (‘Me neither’), Laura answers: ‘Me he acostado con muchos hombres en mi vida, pero nunca he hecho el amor’ (‘I’ve slept with lots of men in my life, but I’ve never made love’). Daniel tells Laura he doesn’t care about her past sexual experiences: ‘Te quiero como eres’ (‘I love you as you are’). There are no expectations of anything other than what these two are. Daniel’s and Laura’s labels, identities, assumptions and baggage are all present, and because of the openness and acceptance the two are free to express love. Despite the temporal nature of this encounter and the mutual recognition that this event does not signal they will become a couple or will ever have sex again, the two embrace as the camera fades to black.
In light of how Robert McRuer (2006) has linked heterosexuality and able-bodiedness, one might conclude that the film’s ‘chromosomal mismatch’ between its protagonists is rendered unsustainable because of how Laura views Daniel’s disability. While the film allows for Daniel and Laura to express their love – and participate in sexual activity together, despite their chromosomal mismatch – viewers are not given access to the sexual activity, unlike Laura’s previous encounters and the interrupted moment between Santi and Reyes. Although viewers see the two protagonists in a post-coital shot with heads on pillows smiling and laughing, their union proves too transgressive to document. Unlike those moments, the film allows Daniel and Laura to narrate their emotions and intent before engaging in sex. Both communicate their feelings of love and desire to each other. In addition, they also set the parameters of the interaction. This moment then is marked by both an emotional attachment as well as carefully communicated ground rules. Because the camera fades to black before showing the activity, viewers are not given clues about the passionate or pleasurable nature of their interaction. Similarly, Pedro and Luisa’s sexual relationship is not visually documented. Read together, the directorial intent in these two scenes illustrates how intellectually disabled sexual activity remains too controversial to document. As such, despite the efforts of universalism in Daniel’s opening address, the film suggests that labels of disability continue to disallow sexual rights, beyond a limited narrative of exceptionalism.
10
Fig. 2: Daniel and Laura smile at each other after their sexual encounter, which is undocumented in the film.
Yo, también challenges sexually ableist assumptions as Daniel’s disabled heterosexual masculine performance makes him a desirable subject. In addition, Pedro and Luisa seem to gain wider familial (and cultural) recognition of their relationship. Yet the narrative of inclusion is not sustaining in that these characters’ successes depend on individual acceptance as opposed to larger social forces that Daniel calls for in his opening address. As a text of cultural criticism, the film acknowledges that calls for inclusion might be easier to obtain for arenas of employment, as opposed to wider participation in sexual and reproductive rights. Rachel Adams remarks that the film ‘makes apparent that an absence of sexual access is tied to broader failures to fully recognize people with disabilities as persons’ (2015: n.p.). It would appear that despite interpersonal acceptance, the hope for a democratic society lies in the future in a space that has yet to be actualised. The broad promise of citizenship and greater recognition of those labeled with intellectual disabilities, as well as their greater participation in all aspects of society, remains a goal for which some societies strive under the rhetoric of the UNCRPD. Tellingly, there remains a mismatch between rhetoric and access regarding the appropriateness of intellectually disabled sexuality, one informed by sexually ableist assumptions that may appear both on and off-screen.
Naharro, Antonio and Álvaro Pastor (dirs) (2009) Yo, también [Me Too]. 103 minutes. Alicia Produce/Promico Imagen. Spain.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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