The film, Boys Don’t Cry is about a
20 year old, female-to-male transgender. Brandon Teena leaves home after being
threatened by an ex-girlfriend’s brother who finds out that Brandon is
biologically female. So Brandon moves to
a small town where no one knows him and he can start his life over. He involves
himself with some ex-convicts and becomes romantically involved with a woman
named Lana. Brandon has charges from before he moved and is placed in the women’s
prison. Lana goes to get him out and asks him why he was put there. He says it
is because he is a hermaphrodite. Lana
says that she loves him no matter what. There is a news article that has
Brandon’s birth name, Teena Brandon, which gets the attention of Tom and John.
Tom and John, the ex-convicts, get suspicious and forcefully remove Brandon’s
pants showing his lack of a penis. Afterwards, they take Brandon out to the
middle of nowhere and brutally beat and rape him. Then they all go back to Tom’s
house and Brandon is able to escape out the bathroom window. Even though he was
threatened to not report what happened, he does. Tom and John decide to kill
Brandon. Lana tries to stop them but they find Brandon at Candace’s house. One
of them shoots Brandon and the other shoots Candace and then attempts to shoot
Lana but is stopped and then Tom and John flee. Lana just ends up falling asleep next to
Brandon’s body. Her mother comes and takes her away from the scene. The movie
ends with Lana leaving home with a voice
over of Brandon reading a letter he was going to give her.
First of all I just want to say
that this was the saddest movie I have ever seen. Okay, now onto sex, gender, and sexuality. I thought
it was interesting that Lana said she loved Brandon, no matter what he was. The
first time that they became intimate out in the field, it shows that Lana
noticed Brandon’s cleavage but she doesn’t question it. Then there’s the part
with the woman’s prison and Brandon says he is a hermaphrodite and is going to
get a sex change. And the last time she
is confronted with Brandon’s biological gender, is when Tom and John pull
Brandon’s pants down. However, even though they try to force Lana to look, she
refuses to. In the beginning of the movie you assume she is straight because
she seemed to have some sort of relationship with John and then starts to fall
for Brandon who she thinks is male. So, she seems to have been straight but
does loving Brandon, who is biologically female, make her a lesbian? She acts
on her desires that are for Brandon. So
it seems that sexuality not as cut and dry as people may think. But if at the
very beginning, he told her that he possessed the body of a female, would she
still fall in love with him?
In response to your questions I think the movie is attempting to show the fluid nature of sexuality. At the beginning Lana only knows that she can be attracted to men but because gender is a social construct when she finds out she has been attracted to a person biologically of the female sex that stigma is removed. At that point all that factors in are her desires and whether or not she'll act on them. If at the beginning she had found out he was female she may not have been attracted to him in the same way because the stigma caused by the social construct would still be in place.
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