Queer films in context
Jul. 6th, 2018 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSomeone on Twitter linked to this article: How I broke, and botched, the Brandon Teena story by Donna Minkowitz. It's about the real life rape and murder of a trans man depicted in the film Boys don't cry.
Minkowitz explains that being
I really needed to read that article, because I have spent most of the last 20 years upset about Boys don't cry. It came out in 1999, when I was an undergraduate student in a relationship with a woman, and just starting to discover Queer community. There were pretty much two scenes at university: the gay men's party and casual sex scene, and the intellectual feminist lesbians. As a bi woman with minimal political awareness (I wasn't identifying as a feminist at the time, and I knew basically nothing about lesbian politics), I fit slightly less badly with the intellectual feminist lesbians, and I got somewhat less politically ignorant by hanging around them. They weren't TERFs in that they didn't go out of their way to hurt trans people, but if a trans woman wanted to be part of their circle, she had better be prepared to provide a rigorous theoretical justification for why a trans woman should be accepted.
Anyway, there were very very few mainstream films about lesbians at the time, and the feminist lesbians generally disapproved of porn or anything male gaze centric. And they were really really excited about Boys don't cry. I saw it with my girlfriend, and it was literally the first ever time we saw on screen people having sex in a way that even slightly resembled how we had sex. I was massively upset about it; I closed my eyes through the explicit rape scene but that didn't change the fact that this supposedly ground-breaking "representation" was about someone nominally like me being raped and murdered. What I said I was upset about was that it was telling a fictionalized story about a case that was still going through the courts; the scrolling text at the end said that the people accused of murdering the protagonist were appealing against their conviction. Having now read Minkowitz' article, I am more able to articulate why the whole thing felt so wrong to me: it was being sold, both by the marketers and by the nearest thing I had to a Queer community as a lesbian film, which didn't really fit.
I'm reminded also of being hugely traumatized by Rocky Horror in the early 90s. Again, I saw it in hugely the wrong context: I have no idea why the counsellors though it would be a good idea to show it to a bunch of 12-year-olds at Jewish youth camp, but it was a very straight environment. There was some amount of messaging that "we" shouldn't bully or discriminate against those poor unfortunate gay people over there, but absolutely no possible idea that anybody in the audience might in any way relate to the gender stuff in RHPS. I'm not saying that the film is Problematic, and I now understand that it was really really important to a generation of gay, trans and genderqueer people. In the 70s when it was released it was a lot of people's first exposure to any possibility of anything outside the gender binary, and there was a whole community around it where people got to dress up and experiment with gender expression and kinky aesthetics and so on.
To naive little 12yo Liv, though, the whole thing seemed to be about people being forced against their will into gender presentations and sex that they didn't want, and it was just terrifying. As an adult, I understand that forced feminization is an actual kink, and it's like rape fantasies, there are any number of reasons why someone would enjoy imagining a situation where they give up control and agency. But as a child, the message seemed to be not one of liberation and permission to play around with gender and have non mainstream sex, it seemed to be message that if you transgressed any kind of strictly heterosexist vanilla existence in any way, you would be punished with rape, humiliation and cannibalistic murder.
I think some of this is that there was a shift in thinking about trans identity round about when I was first starting to be aware of this. I'm not sure I have this quite right because I'm talking about memories of an era when I was quite young and very much on the periphery of the scene. But I get the impression that up to about the 90s, gay men, transvestites, drag queens and actual trans women were more or less lumped together as an identity group, with the other side of the divide being lesbians including butches and trans men. Whereas now the dominant model is that the main groups are cis people regardless of gender or sexuality, and trans people who absolutely are the gender they say they are. I met back then, and I still know now, plenty of trans women for whom the old grouping was massively painful: they constantly had an uphill battle to prove that they were in fact women who happened to have the wrong letter recorded on their birth certificates, not fetishistic men.
There's something about this in the tension between feminists and the trans community, too. Some TERFs are just evil and hate trans women out of sheer bigoted cruelty. But I think there's also quite a few like Minkowitz, who are still thinking in the old paradigm, who want the freedom to be masculine while still identifying as women, and who are uncomfortable with the idea of a connection between feminine gender presentation and female identity. That assumption isn't even slightly trans people's fault, of course, it's a lot more about gatekeepers who assume that you have to be 'feminine' to be a woman, so if someone isn't accepted as a woman, she kind of has to live up to that stereotype to avoid being misgendered.
Certainly the old system of dividing the LGBTQ community into 'masculine' and 'feminine' had loads of problems. But possibly the new system of dividing us into 'cis' and 'trans' isn't perfect either. For example, it makes it hard to find space for drag and genderbending, which are an important part of historical Queer culture. There are occasional tensions between non-binary people and binary trans people, because some expressions of those identities can undermine people in the other group, if everybody has to be either cis or trans. And I think there probably are people who don't fit neatly into either the cis or the trans bucket.
Which certainly doesn't make it ok to disrespect other people's gender identities! I think it's much more reasonable to tell Brandon Teena's story as being about trans man than about a lesbian. If someone tells me he's a trans man, I'm going to believe him, I'm not going to lecture him about how it's ok for women to present masculine. I wonder if there's a healthy way for lesbians to be in solidarity with people like BT, without appropriating his identity as happened in the original article and the film. I'd like it to be a positive solidarity, too, not just a commonality of being oppressed by overlapping groups of homophobes.
More on this hopefully soon, I have loads and loads of thoughts bouncing off that article and other stuff I've seen or watched recently.
Minkowitz explains that being
extremely ignorant about trans people [l]ike many other cis queer people at the time, she saw Brandon Teena's as a continuation of
the rich, creative conversation going on in the early Nineties in the lesbian community [...] about feeling free to “be” male, to some extent, in the psychic fantasy arenas of our own minds, and out in the world.. Hence she, and in a lot of ways the creative and marketing teams for the film, saw Brandon Teena as a butch lesbian rather than a trans man. Minkowitz also talks about how she glossed over the other victims of Teena's murderers, one of whom was African American, because she identified with the white 'lesbian'. There's a photograph of the original heavily misgendering article included in the link.
I really needed to read that article, because I have spent most of the last 20 years upset about Boys don't cry. It came out in 1999, when I was an undergraduate student in a relationship with a woman, and just starting to discover Queer community. There were pretty much two scenes at university: the gay men's party and casual sex scene, and the intellectual feminist lesbians. As a bi woman with minimal political awareness (I wasn't identifying as a feminist at the time, and I knew basically nothing about lesbian politics), I fit slightly less badly with the intellectual feminist lesbians, and I got somewhat less politically ignorant by hanging around them. They weren't TERFs in that they didn't go out of their way to hurt trans people, but if a trans woman wanted to be part of their circle, she had better be prepared to provide a rigorous theoretical justification for why a trans woman should be accepted.
Anyway, there were very very few mainstream films about lesbians at the time, and the feminist lesbians generally disapproved of porn or anything male gaze centric. And they were really really excited about Boys don't cry. I saw it with my girlfriend, and it was literally the first ever time we saw on screen people having sex in a way that even slightly resembled how we had sex. I was massively upset about it; I closed my eyes through the explicit rape scene but that didn't change the fact that this supposedly ground-breaking "representation" was about someone nominally like me being raped and murdered. What I said I was upset about was that it was telling a fictionalized story about a case that was still going through the courts; the scrolling text at the end said that the people accused of murdering the protagonist were appealing against their conviction. Having now read Minkowitz' article, I am more able to articulate why the whole thing felt so wrong to me: it was being sold, both by the marketers and by the nearest thing I had to a Queer community as a lesbian film, which didn't really fit.
I'm reminded also of being hugely traumatized by Rocky Horror in the early 90s. Again, I saw it in hugely the wrong context: I have no idea why the counsellors though it would be a good idea to show it to a bunch of 12-year-olds at Jewish youth camp, but it was a very straight environment. There was some amount of messaging that "we" shouldn't bully or discriminate against those poor unfortunate gay people over there, but absolutely no possible idea that anybody in the audience might in any way relate to the gender stuff in RHPS. I'm not saying that the film is Problematic, and I now understand that it was really really important to a generation of gay, trans and genderqueer people. In the 70s when it was released it was a lot of people's first exposure to any possibility of anything outside the gender binary, and there was a whole community around it where people got to dress up and experiment with gender expression and kinky aesthetics and so on.
To naive little 12yo Liv, though, the whole thing seemed to be about people being forced against their will into gender presentations and sex that they didn't want, and it was just terrifying. As an adult, I understand that forced feminization is an actual kink, and it's like rape fantasies, there are any number of reasons why someone would enjoy imagining a situation where they give up control and agency. But as a child, the message seemed to be not one of liberation and permission to play around with gender and have non mainstream sex, it seemed to be message that if you transgressed any kind of strictly heterosexist vanilla existence in any way, you would be punished with rape, humiliation and cannibalistic murder.
I think some of this is that there was a shift in thinking about trans identity round about when I was first starting to be aware of this. I'm not sure I have this quite right because I'm talking about memories of an era when I was quite young and very much on the periphery of the scene. But I get the impression that up to about the 90s, gay men, transvestites, drag queens and actual trans women were more or less lumped together as an identity group, with the other side of the divide being lesbians including butches and trans men. Whereas now the dominant model is that the main groups are cis people regardless of gender or sexuality, and trans people who absolutely are the gender they say they are. I met back then, and I still know now, plenty of trans women for whom the old grouping was massively painful: they constantly had an uphill battle to prove that they were in fact women who happened to have the wrong letter recorded on their birth certificates, not fetishistic men.
There's something about this in the tension between feminists and the trans community, too. Some TERFs are just evil and hate trans women out of sheer bigoted cruelty. But I think there's also quite a few like Minkowitz, who are still thinking in the old paradigm, who want the freedom to be masculine while still identifying as women, and who are uncomfortable with the idea of a connection between feminine gender presentation and female identity. That assumption isn't even slightly trans people's fault, of course, it's a lot more about gatekeepers who assume that you have to be 'feminine' to be a woman, so if someone isn't accepted as a woman, she kind of has to live up to that stereotype to avoid being misgendered.
Certainly the old system of dividing the LGBTQ community into 'masculine' and 'feminine' had loads of problems. But possibly the new system of dividing us into 'cis' and 'trans' isn't perfect either. For example, it makes it hard to find space for drag and genderbending, which are an important part of historical Queer culture. There are occasional tensions between non-binary people and binary trans people, because some expressions of those identities can undermine people in the other group, if everybody has to be either cis or trans. And I think there probably are people who don't fit neatly into either the cis or the trans bucket.
Which certainly doesn't make it ok to disrespect other people's gender identities! I think it's much more reasonable to tell Brandon Teena's story as being about trans man than about a lesbian. If someone tells me he's a trans man, I'm going to believe him, I'm not going to lecture him about how it's ok for women to present masculine. I wonder if there's a healthy way for lesbians to be in solidarity with people like BT, without appropriating his identity as happened in the original article and the film. I'd like it to be a positive solidarity, too, not just a commonality of being oppressed by overlapping groups of homophobes.
More on this hopefully soon, I have loads and loads of thoughts bouncing off that article and other stuff I've seen or watched recently.
