ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Pedro Almodóvar's 2011 film The Skin I Live In and Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs, to argue that these films lay bare the underlying cultural logics—and gothic effects—of the metonymical relationship between skin (as visible sex) and gender. It discusses how skin is legible as a trope of gender dysphoria even in these films that try to distance the plotlines of their narratives of gender and skin from transgender narratives. The skin tropes appearing in transgender rhetorics articulate what exactly is so imprisoning about the skin and how it both expresses and produces gender dysphoria. Viewed as representations of transgender characters, films like Silence and Skin appear to be transphobic and bizarrely unrealistic portrayals that associate gender dysphoria with the murderous stealing of women's skin in Silence and that depict genital surgery as punishment and castration in Skin.
