Performativity and ‘Boys Don’t Cry’

In addressing the concept of ‘performativity’ in relation to Kimberly Peirce’s 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry, I think it essential to first discuss Judith Butler’s ideas about gender performativity and particularly how they relate to discourses surrounding ‘Queer’ theory. The idea of gender being essentially performative emerges from Michel Foucault’s assertion that the ‘self’ is not pre-existing but rather is constructed only through our relations with others and through structures of power and knowledge.  In other words we embody and are constituted by the discourses that make up our culture.  Leading on from Foucault’s idea that there is no essential ‘truth’, Butler proposes that gender is not a ‘natural’ element of ourselves or inherently linked to our biological sex, but is entirely performative.

In an essay entitled Performative Acts and Gender Constitution she writes, ‘Gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather it is an identity tenuously constituted in time- an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’.  She draws on linguistic philosopher J. L. Austen’s idea that there is no real abiding self but rather selfhood is established through the acts that we carry out, acts learned from the behaviour of those around us.  The behaviour of those around us is effectively what describes as ‘restored behaviour’, repeated again and again over time with the result of giving the appearance of being ‘natural’ or ‘real’ while really possessing no true substance. ‘One is not a body, but in some very key sense, one does one’s body’.  In her book Gender Trouble, Butler confronts the humanist idea of a pre-existing self, arguing that ‘there is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results’. ‘Then the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief’.  Her suggestion that we come to believe that our performance is real makes the argument that the stylization of our bodies does not reflect some kind of personal choice but rather we are simply enacting familiar and established forms of behaviour, as formed by the ‘policing norms and personal relations of a sexist, heterosexual culture’.

Foucault’s assertion then that there is no pre-existing self is essential to the ideas of Queer theorists who question the assumption of lesbian and gay discourses that there is some kind of unambiguous homosexual identity.  The concept of ‘Queerness’ is extremely difficult to define or pin down although it could be suggested that this is essentially the aim of queer theory, to resist and redefine the concept of definition or binary categorization. Robert J. Corber explains how Queer theory emerges from the ‘dislike of the minoritarian model that has determined lesbian and gay movement’s strategies. For Queer theorists, the assertion of a collective identity, rather than a prerequisite for political and social intervention, marginalizes and excludes those who are unwilling or unable to conform to it, and requires lesbians and gays to gloss over…the differences among them’.  Like Butler, queer theorists draw on the ideas of Post structuralism, rejecting the idea of a monolithic singular homosexual identity. Rather, as Tamsin Wilton suggests in her book Sexual (Dis)Orientation,  queer theory asserts the idea that it is possible to ‘perturb the entire field of heteroerotic normativity by establishing a theoretical location, eccentric to the heteronorm, that is amenable to occupation by anyone who wishes to position themselves as queer’.  Queer theory effectively deconstructs and rejects the labels of sexual identity as being products of a culture that is heteronormative, refusing to be limited to expression only within the confines of categories as established by this culture. In his essay Gender Fucking or Fucking gender?, Steven Whittle argues against the concept of there being only two distinct genders.  He suggests the existence of gender ambiguity and fluidity, making the argument that if there is no unified subject, as is suggested by Butler and Foucault, then gender is effectively fluid and unlimited. He identifies this idea as ‘gender-fuck’, ‘a full-frontal theoretical and practical attack on the dimorphism of gender and sex roles’.  This notion has the effect of destabilizing and deconstructing the idea of gender as symptomatic of a unified subject position, proposing ‘a play with gender partitioning to ultimately make the partitions meaningless.’  Drawing on the ideas proposed in Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw, Whittle suggests, not the creation of ‘a third sex’, but rather ‘a third space; a space outside of gender’.  I would suggest that this ‘third space’ is the space inhabited by queer theory, a place outside of the confines of gender as defined by a heteronormative society, a place of gender fluidity or ‘gender-fuck’.

Boys Don’t Cry is essentially a film about the transgendered experience and reveals the performativity of gender through Teena Brandon (Hilary Swank), and her assumption of the appearance and identity of a heterosexual male. The plot is centred around Brandon’s relationship with Lana Tisdel (Chloe Sevigny) and explores issues surrounding Brandon’s search for his ‘true’ identity and the question of Lana’s knowledge and acceptance of his transgendered body. My argument stems from the idea that in feeling it necessary to adopt and ‘perform’ the gender of a heterosexual man, the character of Brandon inhabits and thus reaffirms binary categories of gender definition, conforming to heteronormative codes of ‘identity’ and essentially rejecting the notion of ‘queerness’. Lana however, embodies the concept of queer through both her acceptance of Brandon, despite his lack or gender or sexual identity and the instability of her own concept of self-hood and sexual orientation. While Teena Brandon’s portrayal of a male draws attention to gender as being inherently ‘performative’, Lana’s character exhibits a messy, disrupted sexual ‘identity’ that lacks such a strong performative element and is arguably much more ‘natural’ and certainly more ‘queer’.

We are introduced to the performative element of Brandon’s gender portrayal from the outset as a result of the ‘makeover’ scene. Our attention is immediately drawn to the components that make up his gender performance as he embarks on what Richard Ekins and Dave King describe in their essay entitled Telling Body Transgendering Stories, as a mission of ‘substitution’ and ‘concealment’.  The fact that we actually witness Brandon replacing body parts associated with one gender with those associated with another and concealing body parts which might be seen to conflict with the intended gender display, is effective in demonstrating that the boy garb is essentially a costume. In being permitted to view the binding of the breasts and see the strap-on we are effectively allowed back-stage, and are therefore party to the deception. In accordance with the ideas of Butler and Foucault, it can be argued that in putting on ‘drag’ and acting like how he supposes man to act, Brandon ‘does’ male gender as it is defined by heteronormative society and presumes that the ‘self’ he feels himself to  be accords with this physical depiction of man as society purports man to be, essentially supposing an inherent link between being genetically male and male gender performance. Butler writes, ‘If gender is drag, and if it is an imitation that regularly produces the ideal it attempts to approximate, then gender is a performance that produces the illusion of an inner sex or essence or psychic gender core; it produces on the skin, through the gesture, the move, the gait, (that array of corporeal theatrics understood as gender presentation), the illusion of an inner depth’.  If gender is an illusion, as is suggested by Butler, then Brandon’s confusion lies in his acceptance of that illusion and of the heteronormative assumption of a ‘true’ and ‘natural’ identity. In opposition to Butler’s proposal of gender being ‘an imitation that produces the very notion of the original as an effect and consequence of the imitation itself’ , Brandon arguably subscribes to the idea that his mimicry is the imitation of something that has an original, that there is an origin of unambiguous ‘truth’ in his male gendering. Admittedly it is problematic to accept the idea that there is no performer prior to the performed. We are programmed by society to accept that gender is illustrative of some pre-existing self-hood that is inherently linked to our biological sex. Butler asserts however, that this ‘denial of the priority of the subject…is not the denial of the subject; in fact the refusal to conflate the subject with the psyche marks the psychic as that which exceeds the domain of the conscious subject…It is this excess which erupts within the intervals of those repeated gestures and acts that construct the apparent uniformity of heterosexual positionalities, indeed which compels the repetition itself and which guarantees its perpetual failure’ . Thus, in her proposal that imitation only serves to reinforce an illusion of an original, Butler exposes the instability of the heterosexual identity, suggesting that the original only maintains its validity through repetition. If an ‘identity’ is only valid through its being constantly instituted again and again then that identity is extremely precarious as it ‘runs the risk of becoming de-instituted at every interval’.  This is illustrated in Boys Don’t Cry by the constant reminders of Brandon’s biologically female sex, as discussed by Michele Aaron in her essay Pass/Fail.  Reminders are a common element of films involving drag. In film like Mrs Doubtfire and Some like it hot we are constantly reminded that the actions of the protagonists are in fact gender performances and that these components of performance do not correspond to their biological sex and are therefore ‘unnatural’. This is indicated by the scene in Mrs Doubtfire where Robin Williams’s character is caught going to the bathroom by his son who consequently freaks out or when his stockings fall down to reveal hairy legs. In Boys, we are reminded that Brandon is biologically female both when he gets his period and when Lana spies his cleavage in one of the love scenes. Aaron questions the spectator’s need to be constantly reminded of the characters biological sex, saying that such reminders only ‘reinforce the essentialism of gender even if the protagonist’s (relatively) easy disguise confirmed its performativity.’  On the other hand she argues, the reminders ‘make safe the gender play, and especially the homoerotic implications arising from it. It exploits transgression only to heighten the return to order, or, as Annette Kuhn writes, it ‘problematises gender identity and sexual difference…only to confirm the absoluteness of both’.  Essentially then, these reminders serve to undermine the notion of performativity in their assertion that the persons biological sex constitutes their identity. We suspend our disbelief in imagining that Brandon is biologically male, as that’s what he wants to be and could be, if he had the money. These reminders spoil the illusion and set up the gender performance as somehow being false.

Towards the end of the film, when Brandon is being victimised, John Lotter (Peter Sarsgaard) demands to know Brandon’s ‘true’ sex, saying ‘Are you a girl or are you not?’. It is from this demand that Brandon fit in to a category that Brandon’s ‘sexual identity crisis’ initially emerges. The idea of Brandon’s search for a solid ‘identity’ is key to my argument that he rejects his queerness, for in subscribing to the idea of ‘true’ self, Brandon effectively wishes to sign up to a normative category, he wants to ‘fit in’. As Mark Norris Lance and Alessandra Tanesini suggest in their essay entitled Identity Judgements, Queer Politics, ‘Identity judgements we hold are normative. They are political endorsements of particular sorts of psychological and sociological placings, whose appropriateness can be evaluated only within specific political contexts’.  They suggest that in claiming to have a certain ‘identity’, one ‘ought to take that identity to be part of one’s script for one’s life’ . Brandon’s incapacity to achieve self-realisation then is rooted in what Butler describes as ‘other in the self’. In normative terms one must be one or the other and ‘that other installed in the self thus establishes the permanent incapacity of that self to achieve self and identity’.  In other words it is Brandon’s rejection of his queerness and faithfulness to normative forms of identification that makes him feel so alien and prevents him from being content with the self that he is.

Central to my argument is Michele Aaron’s observation that ‘Brandon is not the only character straying from the idealization of gender’.  When we are introduced to the character of Lana she is sitting at the bar, drinking and smoking a cigarette. In contrast to the character of Candice (Alicia Goranson), who wears skirts, she wears trousers, jackets and boots and the close-up on her face while she is singing karaoke reveals a slightly androgynous face. Aaron details, ‘her downy fleshiness is in sharp contrast to the lithe hairlessness of Brandon’ and references Xan Brooks who suggests that ‘her heavy jawed beauty contrast nicely with Swank’s more refined, aquiline looks and further blurs the tale’s gender roles’.  Preceding Lana and Brandon’s first encounter at the gas station is a long shot of Lana outside the store, pacing and whistling. While it is not possible to suggest that Lana plays a male gender role, it is notable that she is not overtly ‘feminine’ in her actions as this further confuses the implications of her relationship with Brandon. Central to the discussion of Lana’s ‘queerness’ is the debate as to when she ‘knows’ about Brandon’s ‘true’ sex. There is undoubtedly a valid argument for the suggestion that she knows from the start. Michele Aaron supports this argument with the suggestion that the shot of Brandon with the pack of tampons in the filling station is ‘held just too long for the approaching Lana not to see what he’s doing’  and is reinforced by Lana’s later question, ‘Wait a minute, what’s your name again?’. In her reference to these key moments, Aaron asserts her view that ‘Lana definitely knows. And she knows how to keep it quiet’.  I would argue however, that these interruptions in Lana’s fantasy do not serve to undermine the terms of her fantasy. Whether she suspects and chooses to gloss over these instances or not, she still chooses to believe that Brandon is biologically male. Rather these moments serve to confuse the spectator, to ‘queer’ our manner of viewing the narrative in making us question ‘what we think she knows, and whether we think the knowing worth thinking about’.  My suggestion surrounds the fact that the knowing is definitely worth our consideration for if she does in fact know, then what sexual category does she ‘fit in’ to according to heteronormative discourses? Is she straight or is she lesbian? I propose however that at the point in the film when she asks, ‘what’s your name again?’, she does not know but she suspects. She has chosen to suspend her disbelief and accept Brandon’s assertion that he is male, illustrated by her exclamation that she feels like she is ‘in a trance’. The moment where this changes, in my opinion, is the moment where she spies his cleavage. Patricia White describes in her essay, Girls still Cry, how ‘Brandon penetrates and pleasures her, and a shot from Lana’s optical point of view reveals the hint of cleavage in Brandon’s chest. Lana doesn’t verbalize this moment when the film cuts back to the close-up of her face on the pillow [when she is chatting to her girlfriends], but next a series of shots in flashback show her touching Brandon’s jeans at the crotch, then tracing his jawline, and looking into his eyes’.  In response to the demands of her friends to know whether she did ‘it’, she responds ‘what do you think?’. White questions why we as the spectator find this presumably frustrating answer so satisfactory. She suggests that the answer lies not simply in the fact that we have witnessed the events that her friends so desperately want to be made party to, but in the idea that we credit her with know knowing and so take pleasure in the ignorance of the ‘duped’ characters of the girlfriends who think they know what ‘it’ is.

Lana’s ‘queer’ identity then, I would argue, emerges from the fact that she does not feel betrayed on discovering that Brandon is in fact biologically female, ‘I don’t care if you’re half monkey or half ape’. Lana’s feelings for Brandon do not change and are not confined by categories such as gay and straight, male and female. In her acceptance of the ambiguity and fluidity of gender, she chooses to sustain her fantasy in accordance with Brandon’s gender performance, thus destabilizing the binary categorization of sexuality. Judith Halberstam observes, ‘Not only does Boys create a transgender subject position which is fortified by the traditional operations of the gaze and conventional modes of gendering, it also makes the transgender subject dependant upon the recognition of a woman…In other words, Brandon can be Brandon because Lana is willing to see him as he sees himself and to avert her gaze when his manhood is in question’.  This is demonstrated in the sequences surrounding John and Tom’s discovery of Brandon’s true biological sex. When Brandon is fully clothed, he is essentially saved by Lana’s refusal to penetrate the illusion, to look at him with ‘the scrutinizing gaze of science and ‘truth’’. Seeking a refuge in Lana’s room, Brandon offers to prove his sex to Lana and opens the zip of his trousers. The female gaze is thus established through Lana as a ‘willingness to see what is not there’ , as she says ‘Think about it, I know you’re a guy…I’m going to tell them what we know is true’. Halberstam describes how ‘Time slows down while the couple linger in the sanctuary of Lana’s private world, her bedroom; the bedroom itself becomes an otherworldly space framed by the big night sky and containing the perverse vision of a girl and her queerboy lover’.  Halberstam’s suggestion then, that Lana’s room becomes an ‘otherworldly’ space is reinforced by the repeated imagery of sci-fi that permeates the film. Near the beginning of the film, Lana’s mother is discovered passed out in front of a sci-fi television show and towards the end Lana voices her desire that she and Brandon could just ‘beam’ themselves out into the universe. Further allusions to an ‘alien’ world, as described by Aaron, include ‘the cinematographic distortion of light’, ‘time-periods of day and night shown passing at warp speed’ and ‘images of factories with the smoke and metallic splendour of space-stations’.  I think it significant that it is specifically spaces inhibited by Lana, her room and work place, that are seen as somehow ‘alien’ or ‘otherworldly’. As Aaron suggests, these allusions to the iconography of popular sci-fi, ‘are not just the stoned aesthetics of a ‘surreal dreamscape’ , rather they are suggestive of Lana’s difference, her difference being rooted in the fact that she inhabits a different space, a ‘third space’  as is suggested by Kate Bornstein, a ‘queer’ space outside of confines of gender categorization.

‘The brutality of the male gaze, however’, as suggested by Halberstam, ‘is more than just a castrating force: John and Tom not only want to see the site of Brandon’s castration, more importantly they need Lana to see it’.  They need Lana to be repulsed by the site of Brandon’s female genitalia in order to confirm their branding of him as a ‘gender outlaw’  and ‘freak’. ‘Lana kneels in front of Brandon, confirming the scene’s resemblance to a crucifixion tableau, and refuses to raise her eyes, declining once more to look at Brandon’s unveiling’.  The brutality of the male gaze and the determination of John and Tom to remain faithful to notions of biological determinism are further emphasized by the consequent rape. As Butler asserts, ‘those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished’.  Julianne Pidduck suggests, in her essay Risk and Spectatorship, that Brandon is ‘doubly violated- both as self-identified male forced into sexual submission as a woman, and through the brutal police investigation’.  In the tearing away of Brandon’s ‘costume’, John and Tom reveal a recognizably female body, thus exposing a ‘performer’ behind the gender performance which is indicative of the humanist notion of a pre-existing self. If Teena Brandon as female precedes Brandon Teena as male, then the gender performance is revealed, in terms of heteronormativity, as being somehow ‘unnatural’ or ‘freakish’ in it’s denial of the ‘true’ pre-existing self. Lisa Henderson describes how Brandon finally becomes ‘a transitional body made violently accountable to a gender binarism which permits no alternative embodiment or subjectivity, demanding instead that both one’s body and claims about one’s self conform to (born) male masculinity or (born) female femininity, and to heterosexuality as their normative counterpart’.  Brandon is essentially subjected to what Bornstein describes as ‘gender terrorism’ as enforced by ‘gender defenders’ , those who defend and reinstitute the idea of gender as being a ‘real’ and ‘natural’ result of biological sex and of ‘drag’ as being a copy of something that has a ‘true’ and definite original. I think that Lana effectively escapes retribution for the messiness of her sexual identity as a result of her ‘queerness’. While Brandon performatively assumes the role of heterosexual male, both Lana’s gender and sexuality are much more fluid and uncertain. It is difficult to punish someone for their sexual identity or lack thereof, if they don’t claim to have one. As Steven Whittle asserts, ‘a fluid identity, is one way to solve problems with boundaries. It’s hard to cross a boundary that keeps moving’.

While Lana’s ‘queerness’ is reinforced by the final love scene, it is difficult to accept that Brandon’s transgender gaze is suddenly converted to a female, lesbian gaze. Lana, in contrast to her previous loyalty to the idea of his being male, seems to easily accept the fact that Brandon now relates to her as if he were female, reinforcing the fact that she allows him to be what he wants to be, outside the confines of the gender binary. Critics such as Halberstam and Henderson contend Kimberly Peirce’s decision to abandon the transgender gaze in this final encounter, Henderson alerting to the fact that ‘it is disturbing to watch Brandon be humanistically recovered by the script into a love that not-so-humanistically refuses the masculine gender he has struggled to become’.  I would argue however that the rape does not so much strip Brandon of his ‘true’ identity, rather it effectively ‘queers’ him in its stripping of the performative elements of his gender. With Lana, Brandon no longer needs to be one or the other, they can both inhabit the ‘third space’ and relate to each other simply as humans, as ‘queers’, outside the borders and rules of gender as produced by a heteronormative culture.

I propose then, that the final scene, contrary to the assertions of Halberstam and Henderson, is the most honest of all. While they suggest that Peirce sacrifices Brandon’s identity in favour of some humanist notion of Teena reverting back to her ‘natural’ pre-existing state, I would argue that Brandon essentially succeeds in self-realisation in this last encounter in his acceptance of his ‘queerness’. With Lana, it is acceptable to be queer, not to fit in to binary categories of gender definition. In relating to each other simply as humans, they reveal gender to be entirely performative, Brandon effectively having stopped ‘doing’ himself and just being himself. He joins Lana in the ‘third space’, breaking through the borders of gender as dictated by the repetitive actions of those around him, and thus revealing ‘the underlying model of human sexuality’, as defined by Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman, to be ‘polymorphously perverse’.