‘Sí valgo, yo valgo seguro’ Spain’s new peripheral female subjects in Yo soy la Juani

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Despite his mainstream success and prolific production, in all his films Bigas Luna demonstrates a preference for the peripheral and the marginal – in terms of the subjects he depicts as well as through his representational practices. In this article I investigate the new peripheral subjects in his 2006 film Yo soy la Juani/My Name is Juani: young women on the cusp of adulthood, at the margins of Spain (Tarragona) and the edges of mainstream culture. I argue that Bigas Luna’s resistance to hegemonic power structures and his marginal politics face a new challenge in the twenty-first century as the mediatized and pervasive culture of celebrity alters our reading of his female star, Verónica Echegui, and his relationship with her. Bigas attempts in this film to present a specific version of Spanish femininity as a point of resistance to a manufactured female subjectivity yet he also imitates it and shows that these young female characters are in thrall to the culture that he claims to resist. As the film negotiates a tricky path between these media discourses and the images of resistance in the film itself the end result is an ambiguous text that neither resists nor entirely complies with a culture that commodifies the bodies and aspirations of its peripheral female stars.</jats:p>