Boys Don’t Cry: Ideas of Gender, Sexuality and Disability
Sex and sexuality are highly contested domains for those with disabilities. Services provided to those with disabilities, be it by governmental institutions, NGOs or even by family are rendered in such a way that it assigns them an ‘asexual’, ‘genderless’ identity. However, the life experiences of men with disability and women with disability vary considerably due to various social, cultural, biological and psychological factors that are associated with being a certain sex or gender. Women with disability are often described as being ‘doubly marginalised’ on account of both their disability and their gender. This ‘handicap’ is multiplied excessively when the person in question is a woman who is disabled precisely because of her gender …show more content…
Not only does he think of himself as a man but, dresses and ‘acts’ like one. He is shown to perform traditional masculine gender roles like, getting into fights with men over girls and certain rites of passage common to the male youngsters belonging to the trailer park community like riding the back of a flatbed truck holding on to a rope while the truck goes around in circles in an empty lot. Only a little into the film, when Brandon is shown undressing that you see that he has wound up his breasts and stuffed his underwear to conceal the fact that he was born a female. Moss and Zeavin (2001) say that Pierce through the use of a conventional narrative brings in the struggle between the cisnormative society and transsexual identities. Brandon is portrayed as being doomed from the beginning, but is charismatic and beguiling, ‘located in the lineage of cinematic bad boys like James Dean. Brandon's heroic stature derives from his unwillingness to compromise his identity. Pierce presents Brandon's struggles against biological determinism as the struggles of a dignified renegade’
Sex and sexuality are highly contested domains for those with disabilities. Services provided to those with disabilities, be it by governmental institutions, NGOs or even by family are rendered in such a way that it assigns them an ‘asexual’, ‘genderless’ identity. However, the life experiences of men with disability and women with disability vary considerably due to various social, cultural, biological and psychological factors that are associated with being a certain sex or gender. Women with disability are often described as being ‘doubly marginalised’ on account of both their disability and their gender. This ‘handicap’ is multiplied excessively when the person in question is a woman who is disabled precisely because of her gender …show more content…
Not only does he think of himself as a man but, dresses and ‘acts’ like one. He is shown to perform traditional masculine gender roles like, getting into fights with men over girls and certain rites of passage common to the male youngsters belonging to the trailer park community like riding the back of a flatbed truck holding on to a rope while the truck goes around in circles in an empty lot. Only a little into the film, when Brandon is shown undressing that you see that he has wound up his breasts and stuffed his underwear to conceal the fact that he was born a female. Moss and Zeavin (2001) say that Pierce through the use of a conventional narrative brings in the struggle between the cisnormative society and transsexual identities. Brandon is portrayed as being doomed from the beginning, but is charismatic and beguiling, ‘located in the lineage of cinematic bad boys like James Dean. Brandon's heroic stature derives from his unwillingness to compromise his identity. Pierce presents Brandon's struggles against biological determinism as the struggles of a dignified renegade’