Where the Boys Are: Cinemas of Masculinity and Youth

2. Boys Won’t Be Boys: Cross-Gender Masquerade and Queer Agency in Ma Vie en rose

As a mass medium, the silver screen is likely one of the most productive cultural sites on which identities are performed and incorporated through representation and reception into an elaborate, albeit fictional, system of sociopolitical, economic, and kinship relations. It is part of a dense network of discursive practices in which patriarchal power over the definitions of gender, sex, and sexuality has been and still is, by and large, manifested. Comingof -age scenarios tend to show how boys learn to confront life’s challenges with an ideologically “appropriate” set of actions and reactions. In this sense, boy protagonists undergo rites of passage into adult male subjectivity by tackling very particular challenges that are always already defined as “masculine” by the hegemonic culture into which these maturing subjects are assimilated and socialized. Such scenarios bolster what Monique Wittig has referred to as “compulsory heterosexuality.” For Wittig, as queer theorist Judith Butler points out, the terms “‘male’ and ‘female’ exist only within the heterosexual matrix; indeed, they are the naturalized terms that keep that matrix concealed and, hence, protected from a radical critique” (Butler 1990, 111). Wittig, according to Butler, also demonstrates to what degree heterosexist imperatives become manifest “in the discourses of the human sciences . . . [which] ‘take for granted that what founded society, any society, is heterosexuality ’” (115–16). 41 The cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals 2 boyswon’t be boys Cross-Gender Masquerade and Queer Agency in Ma Vie en rose Cordula Quint cordula quint 42 At the foundation of the coming-of-age narratives—the characters , their adolescent concerns, and their problems and conflicts with adulthood—is a nexus of ideas Butler refers to as “heterosexual coherence.” Causal links are erroneously assumed between three distinct dimensions of selfhood: the anatomical sex, the performances of gender in social life, and sexuality. In other words, a male anatomy is assumed to be coextensive with performance of masculine gender and with heterosexual desire for women. Easily overlooked, then, are the widespread discontinuities between the discrete dimensions of selfhood among heterosexuals, bisexuals, gays, lesbians, and transgendered and transsexual peoples. Culturally marginal forms of sexuality falling outside the heterosexualist continuum are effectively rendered unintelligible by mainstream narratives, including (and especially) those focused on boyhood and emergent masculinity. In the 1990s, coming out as queer was often a high-profile, “hip,” and even satirized media event. As the closet door was forcefully opened, the previously “unnatural” and “aberrant” even ran up against the danger of co-optation and assimilation. It was the decade during which the narrative conventions of the celluloid closet began to be scrutinized for the heterosexist imperatives they fulfill and during which emancipatory progress was made regarding the representation of queer subjectivities. In this sense, films focused on gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and transsexual characters remedy a symbolic absence eloquently described by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as “that long Babylonian exile known as queer childhood,” marked as it is by “the terrifying powerlessness of gender -dissonan[ce]” and other stigmas (Sedgwick 1993, 4). 1 As Butler observes in her reading of his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality , Freud suggests that it is the exception, the strange, that gives us a clue to how the mundane and taken-for-granted world of sexual meanings is constituted. The presuppositions that we make about sexed bodies, about them being one or the other, about the meanings that are said to inhere in them or to follow from being sexed in such a way are suddenly and significantly upset by those examples that fail to comply with the categories that naturalize and stabilize the field of bodies for us within the terms of cultural conventions. Hence, the strange, the incoherent, that which falls “outside,” gives us a way of understanding the takenfor -granted world of sexual categorization as a constructed one, indeed, as one that might well be constructed differently. (1990, 110) Cross-Gender Masquerade and Queer Agency in Ma Vie en rose 43 In this essay I hope to address the strange, the incoherent, and that which falls “outside,” in order to throw light on that which is embraced as the norm and to bring into relief the cultural agency that the “abnormal, aberrant, and incoherent” fulfills for the contingent redefinition of such norms. MA VIE...