Boys Dont Cry Analysis

Boys Don’t Cry, released in 1999 by director Kimberly Peirce, was adapted from the real life story of Brandon Teena, a transgender man who was passing in rural Nebraska. After passing for some time and successfully dating local girls, Brandon was brutally beaten, raped, and murdered at the hands of two cisgender men who felt threatened by his masculinity. Peirce, with her “long-standing interest in transvestism and transsexuality,” sought to reclaim sensationalized media accounts of the 1993 murder of the real Brandon Teena (Leigh, 18). This paper will consider border theory – as discussed by Gloria Anzaldúa, David E. Johnson, and Scott Michaelsen – and J. Halberstam’s meditations on flexibility and rigidity in postmodernity in regards to Peirce’s representation of Brandon’s transgender identity. …show more content…
Such gender policing denies Brandon an existence in the borderlands and …show more content…
Johnson and Michaelsen, without minimizing the violence surrounding the border, conclude that the borderlands are “a place of politically exciting hybridity, intellectual creativity, and moral possibility. The borderlands, in other words, are the privileged locus of hope for a better world” (Johnson and Michaelsen, 3). The characterization of the borderlands as a “locus of hope” aligns with the representation of Brandon’s body in Boys Don’t Cry. In their rural, working class setting, the characters in Falls City fit the stereotype ascribed to them by urban queers as a social group that is rigid and unfit for the postmodern desires for ambiguity. Brandon then comes to represent the “heroic fulfillment of postmodern promises of gender flexibility” (Halberstam, “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies”). The relationship