Huesera: The Bone Woman
In Michelle Garza Cervera’s feature debut, compulsory heterosexuality is the true terror
Pickle surprise! We’re mixing this up this week; instead of sending you a newsletter about a few of our favorite queer things from the week (aka, those posts titled ‘Whiskers on Kittens’), we are going to talk about a single film that we both LOVED: Huesera. We have spent much of our free time this week talking about Huesera1 and we figured that when a new film this special comes along, it deserves the entire spotlight.
~SPOILER ALERT~
If you don’t want to know all the nitty-gritty details about this horror film, go watch it before you read our thoughts below.
HEATHER: For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved horror films—so much so that I dedicated much of my life to studying the genre. While the number of terrible horror films I’ve seen probably tallies up to an entire year of my life, that suffering is worth it every time a new horror film is released that immediately catapults to being one of my favorite films ever. This is certainly the case with Huesera (2022), a film that is so good I am grabbing my metaphoric megaphone and proselytizing to the masses for everyone to see it. This stunning debut feature film by Michelle Garza Cervera (co-written with Abia Castillo) speaks directly, painfully, and beautifully to the cost of compulsory heterosexuality, while also commenting on pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and motherhood. In Huesera, compulsory heterosexuality not only fractures Valeria (perfectly performed by Natalia Solián), but also haunts the nuclear family. We know something is not quite right in Valeria’s heterosexual union from the very beginning of the film when we witness Valeria’s detached expression during perfunctory sex with her husband Raúl. When we meet Valeria, she is trapped in a web of heteronormativity because she betrayed her queerness and left her punk community in order to appease her Mexican family and follow the “proper,” prescribed path to marriage and motherhood. Garza Cervera repeatedly uses the motif of the spider and her web to show, as one of the brujas (witches) says, that the web is “a house and also a prison.” As Valeria dutifully tries to emulate the expected progression of heteronormativity, the more imprisoned she becomes and the more divided she feels, as shown in numerous broken and split images of her in mirrors and windows.
Amie, after I saw this film for the first time, I immediately wanted you to see it because I felt like you would relate to key aspects of the narrative.
AMIE: Uhhh, yeeahhh. I’m so glad you did because Huesera really is phenomenal, both in the craft and the story—and not just because I related incredibly deeply to the primary theme that you honed in on, compulsory heterosexuality, which is so glaring to me it still disappoints me that not everyone is understanding it fully (as most reviewers so far reduce it to being only about pregnancy and peri/postnatal depression). Holy shit, Valeria’s journey to herself cuts to the bone for me. I feel like I just saw one of the storylines in my own personal “ghost of xmas future,” like some kind of nightmarish telling of a possible future I could have had if I had not gotten off the Comp-Het ride at a different point than Valeria did. While the social forces of patriarchy and heterosexuality pressed on me as a young woman differently than we see in the family pressures Valeria faces, they felt as haunting and horrific as they do embodied by La Huesera, the bone woman, in this film. I am beyond impressed with how Garza Cervera and Castillo used the Mexican myth of ‘La Huesera’—the bone collector who seeks and finds wolf bones to assemble into a wolf she sings life into that becomes a free woman when it runs off through the desert towards the horizon—to show us the efforts it takes for a woman to collect the pieces of herself and assemble them into her own free self.
It really can be that difficult. I was married for a short stint in my mid-twenties to a man who said he was bi, going into it thinking it would be more queer than it actually was in reality (and also thinking at the time I was bi, ignoring the fact that I deeply and fully loved women, being with women and knowing women and everything women, gawd I love women…). So, when external pressures to have a kid started being put on me, despite me always being clear to myself and to him and to everyone else that I had zero interest in nor intention to have children, I knew I had been trapped in something that only spelled danger and death to me and my self. Needless to say, I was drinking a lot.
HEATHER: In a weird way, I’m grateful that we met when we were both in the struggle to pick up the pieces to make ourselves whole. While our paths to recognizing and embracing our queerness were very different, we still shared the need at one point to gather up the fragmented pieces of who we are in order to rebuild our lives so that we could live more freely as our authentic selves. It is a radical action for a queer person to liberate oneself from the shackles of individual, familial, and/or societal expectations. We’ve talked many times about how each of us ending our previous relationship, while emotional and complex, was the most powerful act of reclamation either of us has ever made because we did it solely for ourselves. And had we not rebuilt ourselves for ourselves, we would never have the lasting relationship that we have.
I think the film beautifully and delicately juxtaposes Valeria’s external “straight” environment with her inner queer self. We see Valeria experience physical discomfort and auditory disturbance in her heterosexual life, while she is at peace in the quiet and ease when with Octavia. With Raúl and her family, Octavia is tense and dispirited. With Octavia, Valeria relaxes and becomes the most herself, the most in her body, the most unwound in Octavia’s arms. When we watch Octavia unbraid Valeria’s hair, we witness Valeria allegorically unravel the main tension in her life in a moment when she (re)embraces her queerness. Garza Cervera portrays this dichotomy with precision in the sex scenes Valeria shares with Raúl and Octavia. With Raúl, Valeria is a procreation vessel and her sexual “job” is to become pregnant—her sexual pleasure is visibly absent from the act. In fact, after Valeria becomes pregnant (and after she experiences some reignited “queer” feelings), she initiates sex with Raúl but he rejects her advances in fear of “hurting” the fetus. Whereas with Octavia, Valeria is fully present and the two are mutually engaged in the heat of shared pleasure. Octavia even caresses Valeria’s pregnant belly as she goes down on her to bring Valeria to climax.
I’m getting emotional simply thinking about all the small but impactful moments of connection, solidarity, and joy between some of the women—the brujas, punks, and queers. Is it any wonder Valeria asked her precious tia, with whom she has an unspoken queer bond, to help her find her way through this by any means necessary?
AMIE: Yeah, no kidding. At some point, once you see you’re living a lie, you can’t stop ignoring it. It really does haunt you! I’ll forevermore associate that feeling with being haunted by La Huesera. I relate to how Garza Cervera shows Valeria feeling uncomfortable and wrong in her own life, the pain and discomfort that you feel when you are living your life for other people—that was so beautifully portrayed with the body tension and the cracking bones. I think it can be initially easy to get swept up in compulsory heterosexuality, to forget yourself, when you dive deep into the role that society, that family and friends, want you to play because it’s “easier” on the surface. But it’s harder under the surface; there is a lot of coping and a lot of hiding you have to do in your own body to make it okay. Valeria had been trying to ignore these feelings of being in the wrong life until she sees Octavia for the first time in a long time and the truth literally starts haunting her body, with the relentless cracking and pain she experiences—and La Huesera, like an infesting chronic illness, relentlessly terrorizes her, no longer letting Valeria not deal with it. Valeria had taken the cage that society wants women to live in and tried to make herself be at home in it. To that end, I appreciate all the visual representations of cages (including the one she builds—but later destroys—as a crib for her future daughter).
I also really love in this story how Valeria engages with queer, bruja, and punk community to collect her bones, to put herself together. She knows that this is about her and for her, and nobody else—but that she can’t do it entirely alone. While her tia and her lover Octavia and the brujas help her pick up some of the bones, Valeria knows it’s for her alone to breathe life into the wild being she really is. She says to Octavia: “I have to do this. It has nothing to do with Raúl. Nothing to do with you.” That moment, those lines, gave me chills because it is exactly what I realized and had to do as well. Like Valeria, once connected to every bone in my body in new ways, I knew I had to choose myself for myself. I, too, was finally able and willing to sacrifice everything, to risk losing everything, to do so. Heterosexual society might paint you as the monster, as Valeria’s family does to her (and maybe some viewers still do because she dared to choose herself over her baby), but we know the real monster is the expectation to be a wife/mother that you don’t want to be. In her bruja journey to herself, Valeria can set the woman she was expected to be on fire and let her walk away. I have breathed the same last breath we see Valeria takes when she closes the door, toolbox and suitcase in hand… she’s free, as her true self, and running off into the horizon towards her right life.
Huesera means “bone woman” in Spanish, so English-speaking countries add “the bone woman” to the title in an effort to translate Huesera for people who don’t know Spanish, effectively turning the title into Bone Woman: The Bone Woman.