In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

4 The Transgender Look

4 The Transgender Look Certain social groups may be seen as having rigid or unresponsive selves and bodies, making them relatively unfit for the kind of society we now seem to desire. —Emily Martin, Flexible Bodies In the last two chapters, we have seen how an archive of print and visual materials have accumulated around the figure of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who defied the social mandate to be and to have a singular gender identity. Here, I continue to build on that archive with a consideration of the feature film Boys Don’t Cry, but I also try to expand the archive of visual representations of gender ambiguity, placing this expanded archive within what Nick Mirzoeff calls “the postmodern globalization of the visual as everyday life” (Mirzoeff 1999, 3). I begin with a study of the transgender gaze or look as it has developed in recent queer cinema (film and video), and then in the next chapter, turn to photography and painting to examine the clash between embodiment and the visual that queer art making has documented in vivid detail. Gender ambiguity, in some sense, results from and contests the dominance of the visual within postmodernism. The potentiality of the body to morph, shift, change, and become fluid is a powerful fantasy in transmodern cinema. Whether it is the image of surgically removable faces in John Woo’s Face ⁄ Off, the liquid-mercury type of slinkiness of the Terminator in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the virtual bodies of The Matrix, or the living-dead body in The Sixth Sense, the body in transition indelibly marks late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century visual fantasy. The fantasy of the shape-shifting and identity -morphing body has been nowhere more powerfully realized recently than in transgender film. In films like Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game (1992) and Boys Don’t Cry, the transgender character surprises audiences with his/her ability to remain attractive, appealing, and gendered while simultaneously presenting a gender at odds with sex, a sense of self not derived from the body, and an identity that operates within the heterosexual matrix without confirming the inevitability of that system of difference. But even as the transgender body becomes a sym76 bol par excellence for flexibility, transgenderism also represents a form of rigidity, an insistence on particular forms of recognition, that reminds us of the limits of what Martin has called “flexible bodies.” Those bodies, indeed, that fail to conform to the postmodern fantasy of flexibility that has been projected onto the transgender body may well be punished in popular representations even as they seem to be lauded. And so, Brandon in Boys Don’t Cry and Dil in The Crying Game are represented as both heroic and fatally flawed. Both The Crying Game and Boys Don’t Cry rely on the successful solicitation of affect—whether it be revulsion, sympathy, or empathy—in order to give mainstream viewers access to a transgender gaze. And in both films, a relatively unknown actor pulls off the feat of credibly performing a gender at odds with the sexed body even after the body has been brutally exposed. Gender metamorphosis in these films is also used as a metaphor for other kinds of mobility or immobility. In The Crying Game, Dil’s womanhood stands in opposition to a revolutionary subjectivity associated with the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and in Boys Don’t Cry, Brandon’s manhood represents a class-based desire to transcend small-town conflicts and a predictable life narrative of marriage, babies, domestic abuse, and alcoholism. While Brandon continues to romanticize small-town life, his girlfriend, Lana, sees him as a symbol of a much-desired elsewhere. In both films, the transgender character also seems to stand for a different form of temporality. Dil seems deliberately removed in The Crying Game from the time of the nation and other nationalisms, and her performance of womanhood opens up a ludic temporality. Brandon in Boys Don’t Cry represents an alternative future for Lana by trying to be a man with no past. The dilemma for the transgender character, as we have seen in earlier chapters, is to create an alternate future while rewriting history. In Boys Don’t Cry, director Peirce seems aware of the imperative of queer time and constructs (but fails to sustain) a transgender gaze capable of seeing through the present to a future elsewhere. In experimental moments in this otherwise brutally realistic...