Temporalidades queer, imagen-tiempo y visualidad háptica en 20.000 especies de abejas de Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren (2023): construyendo una mirada trans infantil en el nuevo cine español de mujeres

Lucía Gloria Vázquez-Rodríguez

doi:10.5294/pacla.2026.29.s3.6

Authors

Lucía Gloria Vázquez-Rodríguez Author University College London

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2026.29.s3.6

Keywords:

Cinema, queer theory, haptic visuality, trans childhood, time-image

Abstract

This article analyzes the film 20,000 Species of Bees (Estibaliz Urresola Solaguren, 2023) from a perspective that brings together queer theory, haptic visuality, and the analysis of cinematic temporality, based on the hypothesis that the director constructs a film aesthetic that enables a trans and child-centered point of perception. Through an analysis of cinematic form, the article examines the formal procedures through which the film departs from the cisheteronormative representational frameworks that have traditionally fetishized, pathologized, or spectacularized the trans body. Three main dimensions underpin this denormalization of cinematic language: a slow pace, grounded in the rhythms of childhood and queer temporalities and akin to Deleuzian time-image; a haptic visuality that creates sensory proximity while avoiding any panoptic or voyeuristic logic; and a queer ethics that destabilizes these same normative frameworks of representation, also evident in the affective flows established among the characters. The film thus forms part of a new aesthetic sensibility within the other new Spanish women’s cinema, while also contributing to a genealogy of non-fetishistic representations of trans childhood, such as Tomboy (Céline Sciamma, 2011). Through immersive strategies of tactilization, ocularization, and auricularization, the film constructs a spectatorial experience that privileges “feeling with” the protagonist’s trans body over “looking at” it, thereby articulating an ethic of care that shifts the focus away from identity-based or voyeuristic concerns toward the construction and flow of queer affects.

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