Highway and Home: Mapping Feminist-Transgender Coalition in Boys Don't Cry

Abstract

Feminist Studies 40, no. 1. © 2014 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 39 Elizabeth Schewe Highway and Home: Mapping Feminist-Transgender Coalition in Boys Don’t Cry The tradition of the highway narrative in the United States tends to define the road as a masculine space of freedom and escape. It presumes a dichotomy between the highway and the home—which is defined in terms of feminized domesticity.1 In the 1999 film Boys Don’t Cry, director Kimberly Peirce adapts the road movie tradition to fictionalize the story of transman Brandon Teena, whose rape and murder in late 1993 made his story a rallying cry for transgender activists. In the film, the highway provides the transgender protagonist a space of freedom in which to develop his white male identity through a “male escapist fantasy linking masculinity to [the] technology” of the automobile.2 However, the highway also becomes a space of danger and (sexualized) violence, and it is in a car on the outskirts of town that Brandon is brutally attacked and raped. Home is likewise defined in contradictory ways, as Brandon’s arrival in the homes of newfound friends reveals that this supposedly safe haven is actually fraught with physical and psychological violence. Brandon’s murder in the home of a friend not only dis1 . See Kris Lackey, Road Frames (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), xi; and Steven Cohen and Ina Rae Hark, introduction to The Road Movie Book (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2–3. 2. Cohen and Hark, The Road Movie Book, 2–3. 40 Elizabeth Schewe rupts his own return journey home, but also challenges the very notion of home as a safe space. This ambivalence toward home resonates with both feminist and queer theories, in which “home” and “migration” are important contested terms. On the one hand, the film reflects feminist concerns that women often desire and seek home, while also finding the home to be a space of danger, violence, and unrewarded labor. In the words of Gloria Anzaldúa, “though ‘home’ permeates every sinew and cartilage in my body, I too am afraid of going home.”3 On the other hand, Peirce’s rendering of Brandon’s journey also resonates with what Kath Weston has called the “Great Gay Migration.”4 This idea—which has gained almost mythological status—is that in order to find safe communities, queer people must leave rural homes and migrate to urban centers. The Great Gay Migration narrative defines “home” in terms of a symbolic urban/ rural divide. Brandon’s journey interacts with this narrative in complicated , paradoxical ways as he travels away from the regional urban center of Lincoln, Nebraska, to the small town of Falls City. Similarly, his identity as a female-bodied transman interacts in complicated ways with categories such as gay, lesbian, transgender, female, and male. One of the most compelling accomplishments of the film is its denaturalization of whiteness and its critique of working-class, white manhood. By adapting the road movie genre, with its historical focus on a white male protagonist, Peirce not only makes Brandon legible as a man, but also deconstructs the very processes through which white manhood is created in the first place. However, this nuanced critique of white manhood coexists with the “radical erasure of blackness” in the form of the complete absence from the film of Philip DeVine, an African American man who was murdered alongside the real-life Brandon 3. Gloria Anzaldúa, Bordlerlands/La Frontera (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 3, quoted in Susan Friedman, “Bodies on the Move,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 23, no. 2 (2004): 191. Friedman’s article examines in depth women’s complicated relationships to “home.” 4. Kath Weston, “Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration,” GLQ 2, no. 3 (1995): 255. Although Weston refers to a particular historical phenomenon—the large-scale migration of lesbians and gay men to the city of San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s—she also refers more broadly to the “imaginative processes associated with gay migration from rural and suburban areas to cities,” imaginative processes that create a shared community mythology. (256) Elizabeth Schewe 41 Teena...