Pink dreams, blue world: Power, fantasy and desire in Alain Berliner’s Ma Vie en Rose

Abstract

Abstract Alain Berliner’s film Ma Vie en Rose (1997) tells the story of Ludovic Fabre, a young transgender girl living in a suburban community outside of Paris. The film uses Ludovic’s story as a lens through which to examine the social policing of queerness and transgender embodiment. This article joins other previously published work about the film in reading it through a Foucauldian lens in order to examine the extent to which social power structures lend shape to normative understandings of gender identity and expression, but this article’s intervention lies in its combination of this Foucauldian perspective with a Lacanian psychoanalytic approach that invokes Lacan’s territory of the real, symbolic and imaginary and the authorization of social ‘law’ within this psychic terrain. I argue that the film’s powerful deployment of desire and fantasy can be analysed within a psychoanalytic framework to delineate the operations of social power and illuminate the extent to which queer gender expression is rendered outlaw and abject within hegemonic normative society.