Ma Vie En Rose

If there was anything dominant in this film it was that of normalizing/normalizing forces. Ludo's behavior is, at first, taken lightly by his parents as well as the neighbors. At the beginning of the film, during the housewarming party, Ludo's actions of wearing a dress, earrings and heels to introduce himself is laughed off when his dad claims he is the joker of the family. No one bats an eye to this and instead just treat it as a phase. It's only as the film progresses and Ludo becomes more persistent in doing what feels right to him that the adults, his father, mother, neighbors, begin policing him and his behavior in an attempt to guide Ludo to what they perceive as normal. This policing of the adults gets intense especially after Ludo begins engaging with one of the neighbor's son. This particular neighbor is seen as the "leader" of the neighborhood; the most powerful of all the families. So it would be obvious that he becomes one of the most powerful forces that makes it his duty to rid the neighborhood of Ludo's behavior. Ludo's father is heavily into changing his son and even almost resorts to violence when he raises his hand to strike his wife for getting in the way of what seemed to be him beating Ludo for not being a "normal" boy. His mother who is, throughout the movie, calmer and more accepting of Ludo quickly shifts her ideals and begins to treat Ludo very nasty. She blames him for all their misfortunes and for ruining their lives after the father loses his job and they are driven out of the neighborhood. The comfort zones that Ludo turns to through all of this would be his grandmother and his television show (Le Monde de Pam). His grandmother is the only one throughout the movie that realizes that Ludo is not just going through a phase and accepts him for whoever he chooses to be. Ludo eventually moves out of his parents house and stays with his grandmother. As his grandmother, Ludo uses Le Mode de Pam television show to get lost in his own world where he is a girl and away from all the negative forces around him. He is constantly escaping to this very pink and colorful world.


Ludo does not understand why he is not a girl or why everyone does not believe that he is going to turn into a girl in time. He constantly is telling his mother that he understands that two boys cannot get married but is going to marry the neighbor boy when he finally becomes a girl. Before his sister explains to him the biological factors that make up a boy and a girl Ludo found comfort in keeping his hair long and trying to do things like a girl like pee sitting down which he believed would eventually pave the way into his transformation. After the talk with his sister Ludo came up with a theory of his own where he stated that God planned to make him a girl but the other X-chromosome got knocked into the trash by accident. In Anne Fausto-Sterling's text How To Build A Man, she explains how scientists have "into the fabric their own deeply social understanding of what it means to be male or female."(pg.3) She is showing that even these biological chromosomes are a scheme that scientists use to define normality. Male and female become the only two destinations that are available after fertilization. She explains that females are also considered the default sex since they lack the almighty Master Sex-Determining Gene (Y). So basically this master gene has to activate to stop the embryo from becoming female. This in turn shows that "the male is in constant danger."(pg.4) This I found very comical since Sterling is effective in showing how many, including scientists, perceive females in comparison to males. It's like having a female is just because the SDY gene failed to show up to the party; so now there's nothing else to do but be female. It requires something special to get a male if that is not present then hey better luck next time.