vogler10

Comparing Mala Mala to Paris is Burning does a disservice to Mala Mala. This film presents an exploration of the many forms of gender expression: from those who wear it only on the surface to those who truly believe that they were assigned a different gender at birth. One of the subjects says it best when she says that some of the "trans-gender" girls actually want to be "beauty queens" and not real women because once youth fades and they can no longer be beauty queens, they are no longer interested in being women.

Mala Mala presents a complete gradient of the understanding of gender expression with subjects from different backgrounds, social classes, and different ways of verbalizing just what it means to be trans-gender in Puerto Rico in the 2010s. The film conflates drag and trans-gender cultures because in Puerto Rico they are not separate in the same way the are in the United States and other western countries. The filmmakers are very much aware that some subjects are only playing women whereas others are being women.

Ultimately the true heart of Mala Mala lies in the back-stories of the women in the film. At the end of the film, Ivana says that the way they can effect real change in society by pushing for a non-discrimination law in PR is not through legalese and statistics but through their own stories and their own struggles. This film delves into those stories precisely. This isn't a social philosophy think-piece that was concocted by people who've taken many critical gender studies classes at a university. Rather, it looks at subjects whose lives and backgrounds more than compensate for the limited vocabulary they have to make sense of who they are and what they do. This is a compelling film more interested in the "how" than in the "what".