The Matrixial Gaze: Transgender in Boys Don’t Cry

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article brings the feminist psychoanalysis of Bracha L. Ettinger to a reading of Kimberley Pierce’s landmark film Boys Don’t Cry. While many transgender studies scholars have critiqued the film from an intersectional lens, few have engaged important questions relevant to a transgender gaze from a feminist psychoanalytic angle. Feminist psychoanalytic theory offers insight into the gaze, the mirror, gender, sexual difference, temporality, trauma, and memory of relevance not only to cisgender women but to transgender subjects irrespective of gender identity. Ettinger’s formulation of the Other Sexual Difference (OSD) provides a way to understand elements of trans- experience that are not visible, yet significant to subjectivity. I contend that there is a correspondence between what Ettinger calls the matrixial gaze and the transgender gaze operating in the film that helps us to understand the interhuman dimensions of looking irreducible to identity. Both feminist psychoanalytic theory and transgender studies are concerned not only with gender but with elements of being that are not ocular and are too often eclipsed in phallic and white cisgender representational practices.