Veneno (2020) and the Trans Bio-epic

Queering remembrance between trauma and joy

Abstract

Veneno (Atresmedia, 2020) chronicles the life of Cristina Ortiz, a transgender woman who suddenly became a public phenomenon in 1990s Spain. The series explores queer memory, narrativizing both her story and the young journalist and writer Valeria Vegas’ process of writing her biography. Veneno weaves together multiple temporalities of trans history, blending remembrance and imagination to evoke both past traumas and hopeful futures and emphasising challenges and strengths of (gender)queer experience within cis-heteronormative reality. This paper employs an embodied, affective theoretical lens to examine Veneno’s emotionally charged portrayal of traumatic experiences. It explores Veneno’s epic form as a means of queering the biopic genre, asking how its aesthetic excess and affective mythology reconfigure the remembrance of trans life on screen. The show’s sensorial qualities are evaluated within a consideration of the history of onscreen representations of trans lives that focus on violence. The analysis considers how the series’ sensorial and mythic registers transform memory into collective, embodied experience. In an era of expanding trans visibility, it becomes crucial to understand how screen narratives of gender non-conformity might reimagine past and present, challenging normative chronologies while sustaining new modes of affective recognition.