ABSTRACT
The homoerotic articulation of desire through the bolero genre is exemplified in Pedro Almodovar's films Entre tinieblas and La ley del deseo. The Cuban musicologist Natalio Galan, 'filin' demonstrates a camp sensibility, particularly in the highly dramatic, gestural performances of certain popular female singers. The bolero as camp performance and melodramatic expression of emotion features heavily in the soundtracks to the early films of Almodovar in which it both expresses subversive sexualities and enacts performative identities. Despite Almodovar's playing down of a queer sensibility in interviews about the film, it clearly celebrates the fluidity of gender and sexuality and rejects fixed positionings. The stylization of the scenes in which boleros occur, their multivalence of signification and the multiple simulations of gender through performance can be categorized, despite Almodovar's protestations to the contrary, as both camp and queer in their subversive disruption of fixed gendered identities and normative sexual roles.
