Kimberly Peirce's 1999 film Boy's Don't Cry is a touchstone takes new concepts of gender and sex out of the academy and places it into a mythological context, the filmed depiction of transgendered Brandon Teena is the creation of a new secular saint, and to fully understand the radical implications of this, it might help to compare him to others who transgress gender, especially in a context that is easily both cinematic and theological. Is Brandon Teena a new kind of warrior, and if he is, then where would his genealogy come from? Symbolically, the most obvious precedent is Joan of Arc, and if we treat the films that they were both treated as texts seperate from their biographical legends then the connections between these two boy warriors tells us much about how gender is treated, even in a theological context.
To begin is to define terms, especially important in a field which is so new, seminal texts are still being written and ur-texts are about ten years old1) What is meant by Transgender is simply those who transgress gender. There is an assumption in this culture that gender is sex, and that only two sexes occur, namely man and women. Those who are not readily identifable as either man or women, those who feel isolated by those categories, those who wish to move into the other side of that binary or those who reject either outright could be considered as transgendered. There are cultures2) who allow more then one category, and it could be argued that those who follow a proper exception would not be consdiered trasngendered.
Transexuals are a difficult case in this kind of theorotical reading, as they capitulate to the binary, trying to fix their transgressions clinically or socially. This is accepted as a standard and approite response to ambigous gender, and often sex. There are two problems with this. The first is a process of clinicazation, Transgendered and pedophiles are the are the only sexual other left where a surgerical correction is not only considered an option, but one of the more effective ones. The second problem with passing is a contiuntion of traditional gender norms, and by that method the prison of gender normality is maintained for generations of gender outlaws.
There are problems with this line of thinking, among them certain biological conjectures and a deconstruction of male power that problematizes assuming masculine power. The concept of the modern transsexual was brought into full awareness by an endcironlogist by the name of Henry Benjamin, who still has a makor foundation named after him, this approval has meant that research done around gender transgressors has centered on hormones and their role in sex devolepment. For example in Mary Duvalls mammoth study on Female To Male Transexuals1), she discusses for five pages (60-65) the nature of hormones on transexuals, making claims like "A possible basis for transexualism has been thought in studies of of the histo- compabilty-Y(H-Y) antigen status of transexuals. The HY antigen can be found in the bodies of males but not females..."2) or there has been evidence, however, to suggest that female-to-male transexuals have a higher inicidene of menestural difficulties and polycystic ovarian disease, both of which suggest hormanal abnormaolities" 3)
Like studies on the biological nature of homosexuality, inconclusive evidence, small sample sizes and a medical agenda forces a prescriptive attitude towards these phemonae, that may be away from their experinces. The other arguement is put forward by femminsts like Germiane Greer and Janice Raymond. In The Whole Woman, Greer talks about male to female transexuals, arguing that the nature of being female is one of a birth culture, it cannot truly be learnt, because it is imposed on you. She considers men who become transexuals impossible and ludcrious imposters of real women, their manners and desires patonrizing.1) In The Transexual Empire2), Janice Raymond argues that assuming male personae, and later personhood, is to abondanon women and to cross into male privelge. It is an affront against sisterhood or a common liberation struggles among women. For both Greer and Robinson, even if gender was constructed, then it was constructed against women and not by them.
Viewing this in a theological lens is to enter through a rabbit hole. The basic theory has barely been done, most churches have not produced any statements, and if they did they tend towards the prohibitive, using the essential complimetary theology extroploted from Genisis, a good example of which is found in the Latter Day Saint Proclamation of the Family, whose only line on the transgender does not seem to understand the word and states "Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose" or the Jewish law found in Deut. 22:53), something that prohibits ritual tranvestism but not other forces of Gender amibguity. The discussion of liberation of transgendered indviudals runs towards the same historio-critical view of the scripture that liberated many homosexuals, namely thought thst does not rise above "we are not ancient isrealites."
To allow the idea that we are blank from birth is a radical notion that may upend notions of the body in judeo-christian theology. Even such a radical notion as embodiment theology, which celebrates God's creation as good and holy would feel awkard at a body that was born with out a core idenity. If we moved that type of theological thinking forward and thought that exploring the logical extensions of what it means to be human in God's world might be useful. Think of the body not worth correcting, but embracing how it is corrected.
If we take this view with Brandon Teena we have a different set of consquences concerning what occured. The story is fairly simple, a male to female transexual with little money and fewer prospects moved from home to Lincon Falls Nebraska, where he fell in with a crowd of similar misfits, including Lana Tisdel, who he fell in love with and John Lotter and Tom Nissen who raped and killed him. This story was turned into a conventional love story by grad student and first time director Kimberly Peirce. In the press surrounding Brandon himsel,. he is constantly refered to in press as transgressive, with terms like female bodied1) ,a sexual misfit2) , male impresontor3) and that she had actually been a woman.4) Even in his eulogy, Fthr Wittig, the priest residing claimed that she was "a very confused young lady"5).
But Brandon had taken a mans name and forged a new idenity6), he had wooed women the way heterosexual men were supposed to, and drank with the boys. He never slipped, and photos of him show a person who had adopted masculine signals , the hand over the crotch, the wide open legs, the standing askance, the cowboy shirts and posing with a mobsters tommy gun for halloween. There is even a photo of him, smiling shirtless, post shower. Kimberly Peirce qoutes a conversation second hand, through Lana, where Brandon Teena says "i am not a lesbian, i'm not going to New York or LA. I am going to be a straight man here in Lincon. "1) He was not allowed to approach an embodied theology, because his body was such a dangerous object that it needed to be corrected by rape and murder, the irony of this was the rape occured at Christmas, an act of evil on a day whose intentions were to note the birth of a man who was also a god.
There are two films, one a basic documentary produced in 1994, produced with movie-of-the-week whiplash speed. The other one was a poetic medatation on the nature of desire, metioned earlier as Boys Don't Cry. This film was a political document intended to make Brandon Teena a marytr, just before the film went into preproduction a radical group of transsexuals, founded on the Debard inspired specatcles of groups like Act-Up and Queer Nation marched on Lincon. 40 of them from the United States and Canada went through town sqaure, yelling with rage at the violence that Teena endured. Pierce was part of that group. 2)
There are scenes that act as geographical sigifer, noting the beauty in plain Nebraska, the joys of gas stations, factories, high ways, tract homes, trailer parks, dive bars playing MTV and karoke machines gathering dust in the corner. The sheer pyshicality of Hilary Swanks preformance shows a joy in creation, she lopes through these banalities with a coltish grace and when she falls in love with Lana, the novelty is heartbreaking.
Because there was no suspense in the movie, the story well disessmatied by popular media, the film ascended like a religous melodrama. There is a segment where Brandon's vagina is found out, she talks to the sheriff, as the forced undressing is shown in broad cuts, the way that he is broken resembles a medieval descent from the cross, and the authorities invading this process has obvious Chrisitan metaphors.
In a scene soon after they take her to the factory where he met Lana, they remove her clothes, and take turns . She is presenting and claiming a phallus, they are claiming a penis. They force penetration on her, trying to teach her the meaning of being a woman, putting her in place, reminding her that she posseses's a subservient vagina. The signifer meets signified, and on a dark road where no one can see, theory is shattered into reality. Afterwords though, presentation returns. They take her into the car, get her dressed, call her good buddy, and drive to an apartment where they offer her a beer and a bath. She is once again he, one of the boys. There is a conflation of the outsider, the boy who steals the girl, the boy who has ideas above his station, homophobia, transphobia and all nature of ambigous idenity is presented here. Brandon Teena is as much of a victim of attempting to posesses the wrong kind of woman, as he is a marytry for queer causes. This was Christ, who died for hersey, politics, conveience, and for theological reasons.
Her murder then becomes an anti climax, where her gender does not seem to matter. In making the film a heteronormative narrative, the end shoot out resembles any number of american endings. It is Bonnie and Clyde in the Caddaliac, or John Dillinger at the movies. Brandon stole Tom's girl. Brandon is restored as a boy.
If Brandon Teena is about how to make a boy, then the filmed depictions of Joan of Arc are about how to lose a boy. Joan of Arc was not transgendered until she died. Born and raised as a conventional women, who learnt sewing, weaving and other handicrafts1), when she recived the first visions at a young age they came from two women(Catherine and Margriete) and one man (Michael), by the presence of these two women, she placed herself in a tradition of female mysticism that marked mediveal christianity, when she decided that she was called by God to defend France from England she got tacit premission from the Dauphin and later Charles VI, anyone who gets premission from the king who gave Joan her first set of armour. Transgender requires Transgression, there was none here. Even her death sentence, for witch craft and heresy, was done in a way befitting a woman.
Their are hundreds of films of Joan of Arc, and she was one of the first stories to be filmed with the 1895 Alfred Clarke production being the orignator. and the history of Joan of Arc could be considered a history of how women could be depicted in film, especially erotically. They range from the deeply religous to the deeply secular but if four could be considered represntive, they could be Carl Dreyer's 1926 Passion of Joan of Arc, Victor Flemings 1948 production with Ingrid Bergman, Otto Premingers discovery of Jean Seberg in St Joan and Luc Bresson's action disaster The Messanger. Each one says something about how females are constructed in film, and none of them features the 14 year old in armour, her hair cut in a savere pageboy.
Carl Dreyer uses trial transcripts, but aside from that it is not documentary as much as a radical and expressionist1) treatise on manic faith. The mayrtrydom has cleared parrells to the crucifixon, with the jailing, mocking gaurds, crown of thorns, Joan collpasing under the weight of torture, and calling it a passion itself. The mortifaction of the flesh, and pain itself is viewed as a way to elimanate self and come c loser to God. Compare this to Pierces film, who makes a marytr without any sense of the Divine. Humanity as left Joan, God has left Lincon, Nebraska. The most ambigous scene in Dreyers film is the scene where she is cut for bloodletting, which could be considered a restoriaon of Joan's vagina if she did not look so much like a mater delorsea already. It could also be a draining of the masculine essence and a qoute of the wounds of Christ as reflected in the stigmata. It is thought that the blood depicted on Joan of Arc was really Maria Falconetti's. That small, tight scene talks so much about the destructive tendecies in the nature of saint's, to the atheist Dryer, martyrdom is sucide with a divine agenda.
If Dreyer's is a knotty and confusing european art peice, then Victor Flemming directing Ingrid Bergman is the exact opposite. She is a sex symbol in the midst of an alduterus sex scandal, the armour in the battle scenes is cut to accuentate her breasts and hips, the burning is done in a white dress. This is not a Joan we recognize, she is not boyish, she is not a girl. But this is a director who tried to turn Judy Garland into a naive farm girl1) and supervised the greatest renovation of racial myths in american history2). He did not care about accuracy as much as spectacle.
The source texts of these movies where bascially the same, mostly medival legend, with some transcripts thrown in but Otto Preminger remade Shaw's St Joan, although he substutited Shaw's inventioned death. The films starred Jean Seberg, who was discovered in her home town in Iowa after a national cattle call. Much like Falconetti was made to bleed and Swank walked arround Beverly Hills pretending to be a boy, Seberg suffered serious burns after a malfunction on the set. It was not the most damage that she did though, the film was a disaster and it was mostly blamed on a combonation of Serbeg's sexualized gamine qaulities and a script that lacerated Catholicisms history of complacency. She soon moved to France, founded the new wave by starring in Breathless and became heavily involved in Maoist politics. She was found dead in a vineyard away from Paris facing Orleans. Her struggles internally and externally matched Joan's on fervour and in devotion, her tendecy away from the church seemed generational.
Luc Bresson's The Messengar is the last of the Arc movies, made in the same year as Boys Don't Cry, and continues a '90s trend of crazy women and female action stars. Here Joan is stripped of the holy, made hysteric and deluded, her rituals considered obsessive-compulsive. In Dreyer's film the mortifaction is holy, the mayrtrydom is considered Christ like, in Flemming's the spectacle overwhelms any sense of Divine, in Preminger it is a political and social text and in Flemming it's an action movie led by a star. There are no real hero's in Bresson films, they finish their work with a calcuated effiency. It is the exact opposite of a film like Boy's Don't Cry, even the moody atmospheric touches are meant to excuse womens violecene That both of these films appeared at the same time, perhaps shows a new understanding of the concept of sex, allowing for men to be raped and oppressed as much as women can be grand martial leaders. This may not be progressed, but it does tie the nature of power and idenity, the sheer core of naming into violence. When one yeilds a sword, no matter how crazy, one can name price, privelege, station or idenity, especially if called by God.
What does it mean then, to be Brandon or Joan ? Joan did not transgress gender, even in her filmic dections, the women who played her and how they played her fit into the general milleu of the time. She is eroticized without being exoticised, and much of the work that surrounds her deals with issues aside from religion. Ironically, it is difficult to find a Joan movie that is about Joan, that is historcally accurate, that depicts her as real and does not have any political baggage. She has become a very really sexual type, a holy amazon. Brandon Teena is in the beginnings of mythology. His name has been codifed, his life has been made clear. In Boys Dont Cry, his petty vandalism, his car theft, his peccadillos and his confusions become secondary to his rape and murder which become the beginnings of a new kind of liberation, where nothing needs correcting and biology can be transcended. More importantly, Lana's continued life is not depicted, how she feels about Brandon's gender, and how she feels about the families interference. Brandon is made into a heterosexual cowboy who falls in love like a sensitive new age man.
Gender constructed becomes Gender Confused. To embody it is to recognize with in ourselves is a bit of the formless void that YHWH was supposed to have eliminated in the very first chapters of Gensis. I am not a man. I am not a woman. I see myself like Brandon, even though I have broad shoulders, a wide carriage, a penis and a beard, because I remember being on the razor edge of reading signals. I grew up with factories and chemical plants, teenage boys up to no good on a friday night. I remember coming home and seeing them from the corner of my eye and thinking how much I would like to be them. In high school my desire to make love to men was a desire to aborb their manner and way of being. Brandon did not know how to be a man, even though at this core he was one. I do not know how to be a man, and at my core I am not sure I am one. If Brandon is my secualr saint, remembered in the same mental spaces as the bashings and death threats i got in Sherwood Park, then Joan is my religous one.
The catholic church accepts weirdness at its corners, perhaps it comes from vacuuming pagan rituals where ever they encountered them, but Joan embodies many of those for me. She was loved by the church, she was given refuge and succour. They trusted her to provide statehood and she delivered. She was as much a man as a woman could be there, she was loved and respected for those reasons. But when she failed, when she was killed as a woman. 19 years later she was restored and hundreds of years after that she was cannonized. 1926, the same year as the Dreyer film. How many saints have we burned or silenced, and when will the church regret it ? These two people are about voice and the wilderness, not the wilderness of Moses and Aaron, but the interior wilderness of self.