The characters played by Hoffman, Williams and Barkin are the cinematic descendants of the Lemmon-Curtis-Monroe triad established in Some Like it Hot, in which the participants are forced, through ludicrous or improbable circumstances, to adopt a transvestic position within a highly structured gender continuum (in Ellen Barkin's case, a masculine personality is transferred into a biologically female body).
In films of this type, conventional gender differences are highlighted through comedy or satire, on the assumption that such gender differences are essential or natural. Issues such as sexual harassment and misogyny are either trivialised or patronised in a didactic manner, according to the whims of the (usually heterosexist) director. The latest addition to this genre would be All Men Are Liars, in which a young man disguises himself as a woman in order to join an all-female band.
On the other hand, the images portrayed in The Crying Game or Paris deal specifically with the figure of the transgenderist. Marjorie Garber has suggested in Vested Interests (1992) that the role played by the transvestic or transgendered figure in relation to the gender/sexual dichotomies of Western culture have not been adequately explored; observers have a tendency to look through rather than at the TG.1
The transgenderist is a paradox from many perspectives. As Marcus O'Donnell has argued, the ambiguity of identity, gender and sexuality invested in the transgendered figure excludes virtually all taxonomising viewpoints. The transgendered body is a text upon which cultural transgression is (often traumatically) inscribed.
In this paper, I will discuss three films dealing with the image of the transgenderist. It is my intention is to question the legitimacy of the images of transgenderism promoted in films such as Priscilla, Queen of the Desert or Paris Is Burning. A politically conscious transgendered community has been developing in the United States since 1969 - the year of the Stonewall riots - today, many international TG organisations are claiming a specific subcultural identity. Many of these groups are now seeking self-representation independent of patriarchal mythologies, just as the feminist, gay and lesbian communities have queried the images imposed upon them by masculinist culture.
"Transgendered" is the generic term use to describe drag queens, transvestites, transvestophiles, and transsexuals. Except where otherwise indicated, these terms will refer to the Male to Female variant. I will argue that the transgenderist is one of the most misrepresented and misrecognised identities within the poly-cultural continuum. Being both unstable and amorphously constructed, the transgenderist exists in a state of constant misinterpretation. She is used variously to symbolise the oppression of sexual and racial minorities; as a metaphor depicting cultural and political disruption, and to mock the issues of otherness and identity. The only thing which the transgenderist has failed to represent is herself.
In much the same way that the image of the Woman has long been employed to represent the unrepresentable, so too has the transgenderist come to depict the unrecognisable. For this reason, the TG has been fetishised and commodified. As an object of consumption, the transgenderist has been employed as the negativity against which white heterosexual patriarchal culture defines itself. In this sense, the TG has no existence except as the symbolic field silhouetting the masculinist profile of the "Real Man".
Passing is not confined to the gender continuum; there are categories for "executive realness" or "teenager realness". The majority, however, are transgendered and, in several instances, the crossing of racial divisions seem to play an important function in the mimesis. Livingston's narrative, significantly, poses as an ethnographic documentary, presenting the film as a transcriptive record of a black gay subculture.
To a great extent, the film represents drag as a pathetic attempt to live out an "impossible" sexual fantasy of social mobility. For example, Venus Xtravaganza's wish to be a "spoiled, rich white girl" is contrasted against her prostitution and death - evidently at the hands of one of her clients. The implication is that drag queens yearn for the things denied to them by the colour of their skin and sexual preference: if I were white, and straight, and wealthy, I could be a real person.
Paris is Burning also casts the black drag queen in the role of extreme Other: alienation is total and unequivocal. Above all, the sub-text of Livingstone's film is not the transgressing of phallocentrically imposed gender boundaries. Drag is, rather, presented as being intrinsically about race and sexual orientation; specifically, Paris is Burning explores the problems of being poor, black and gay in white America.
Subsequently, Jenny Livingston interprets drag as a phenomena connected with homosexuality and racial otherness: gender-crossing is explained away as an extreme reaction to the hostility of white, middle-class, heterosexist society against both the black community and homosexuality in general.
This composite being, which seems to disturb all western patriarchal codings, becomes, for Livingston, the sign for ultimate otherness. In short, Paris Is Burning totally ignores the possibility of a transgendered identity existing independently of race and economic status. As such, it is presents the transgenderist as something dangerously close to the white, heterosexist perception of the Other as a black sexual pervert, despite Livingston's evidently sincere attempt at sympathetic treatment.
Like Paris Is Burning, Crying Game deals with the transgressing of gender, social and racial boundaries. As with Venus Xtravaganza in Paris, Dil becomes an image of racial, sexual and gender ambiguity; the issues of visibility and invisibility are emphasised through the numerous transformations she undergoes throughout the narrative.
The paradox of gender and desire is played out in the polarised figures of the film's two women. Dil is represented as racially ambiguous and "desirably feminine", frequently contrasted with Jude's "dangerous"aryan masculinity. The complex tapestry of master-slave dialogues underlying The Crying Game positions Dil in an unavoidably antagonistic role with Jude; consequently, the construction of transgenderism in this film is deliberately misogynistic. This is, perhaps, the major down fall in an otherwise exceptional piece of cinema.
Jude's IRA connections are employed to explain her (apparent) gender transgression. This is merely a plot device; Jude is threatening not so much for her political allegiances, but for her assuming of a conventionally masculine role. While biologically female, Jude is made undesirable through her violent - read masculine - behaviour. Dil, while genitally male, is depicted as exceptionally feminine, and therefore eminently desirable.
Dil undergoes several identity shifts throughout the film. In her first appearance, she is stereotypically feminine; she wears a mini and high heels, she works as a hairdresser, and gives an impression of vulnerability hidden beneath a facade of working class hardness. Several scenes later she has become an oppressed woman, striving to free herself of a damaging relationship. Vulnerability and hardness are commonly dichotomised as feminine and masculine traits within heterosexual society: Dil is made desirable through her acquisition of and oscillation between each.
Dil's gender mutability is thrown into high relief during the disrobing scene, turning the spectator's preconceived notions of gender, sexuality and identity inside out. This is, of course, the most challenging inversion-image employed in the film. The Oedipal mystery is reversed through the substitution of a phallic woman for the castrated mother. Instead of a veiling of the phallus, there is the unveiling of the penis.6 This sudden metamorphosis of desirable woman into genetic male is a reversal of the construction of Woman within the Masculine Gaze. In her role as The Woman, Dil is little more than a mirror held up to the narcissistic gaze of masculine desire.7 The transformation of the genetic female into The Woman is a similar process.
The gender-shunting which takes place during the film forms a kind of negative ring structure. Dil must disrobe in order to be revealed as a male; later she must dress up in Jody's clothes in order to hide her femininity i.e. to adopt an aggressively masculine role. However, her identity, like her gender, remains constantly in a state of flux.
Significantly, in the scene where Dil confronts Jude over Jody's death, Dil has assumed a masculine role: she is dressed in Jody's cricketting whites. The uniform and the sport are both signifiers of masculine competition and achievement, but the final image is both cross-cultural and post-colonial. Dil must become a white, anglicised male in order to "legitimately" face Jude's phallic woman.
In her final appearance, Dil has resumed her more familiar feminine identity, and in line with Fergus' demand that she not refer to herself as "his girl", she is re-established within the narrative as a transgendered woman; one conventionally attractive and monogamously loyal to "her man", as the soundtrack suggests.
Even so, the spectator is still left with the transgendered paradox: Dil has been reconstituted as the Woman-who-is-not-female. She is therefore doubly marginalised. Not only is Dil the Woman, she is also the Other-Woman. The polarised structure of phallocentric culture places Fergus and Dil in a state of irresolvable division. The Crying Game ends with Dil and Fergus separated by a transparent screen, delineating the "ambiguities of desire and lack" which characterise the film.8 The invisibility of the partition is overtly symbolic. Dil's ambiguity makes her unacceptable. Being neither man nor woman, neither gay nor heterosexual, she has no place within the gender/sexual continuum.
The striptease scene in which the "Filipino Wife From Hell" gate crashes the Drags' impromptu performance has been singled out as the most offensive sequence in a movie heavily laden with sexist and racist imagery. Gross sexual and racial stereotyping appears to have been one of the primary features of the film: no one is exempt. Even the three central characters portrayed in Priscilla are, in themselves, stereotypes of the transgendered community. Just as the "Wife from Hell" is an excessively masculinist vision of The Woman, Bernadette is an excessive stereotype of the male to female transsexual; Adam and Tick are both extreme images of the gay male drag.
The film raises the question of whether we can have a stereotype of something considered by many theorists to be an appropriative construct a priori. If so, is there is a transgendered or drag identity separate from the image employed within patriarchal culture? In short, is there a culturally articulated transgenderist beyond the "raging drag queen" stereotypes represented in films such as Priscilla?
This is arguably a more problematic issue than whether there exists a "real" woman against which a transgenderist may be constrasted. If transgenderism is little more than the imitation of the Woman, what then defines "real" women against the construct of Woman? This paradox of mimesis is emphasised in performance of the drag queen (and more specifically, in the body of the transsexual): while all gender and all identity is constructed, the drag (and the TS) must presume the existence of a "real" woman in order to have something to imitate. If the "real" woman is found to be a mimetic construct, precisely what is she imitating? Does the transgenderist imitate the same thing?
The debate is exacerbated by the fact that "realness" in any gender-specific sense is nothing more than an arbitrary patriarchal construct. As stated at the beginning of this essay, the transgenderist, like the Woman, is a representation of Otherness, and is, again like the Woman, something unknowable and marginalised past all recognition. Heterosexist culture deals with the paradox by fetishising the transgenderist; by transforming the unknowable or the unrecognisable into the known and the visible. Whatever can be recognised may be seen, whatever can be seen may be possessed, and whatever can be possessed may be controlled.
The result is a movie which spends most of its time evading the paradoxical presence of the transgenderist. Priscilla makes endless token concessions to the dynamics of gender and identity without actually analysing the issues to any depth. As Vallence and Zetlin commented:
In the cinema of the nineties, the transgenderist has been rendered visible through its highly conspicuous absence. Paris Is Burning cross-dresses the transgenderist in racial and sexual identities; the transgressing of gender is linked ontologically with the black urban gay. The artificiality of style, fashion and lifestyle are invoked in the image of the transgenderist, but like the Woman, the TG is present only as object, never as subject.
The transgendered identity in The Crying Game is rather blatantly merged with an urban Irish nationalism; a crisis of gender and sexuality is diffused into a series of master-slave narratives reflecting the repression and alienation of the Irish people.12 Worse still is the combative deployment of gender against transgender: Dil's sexual ambiguity is forced to assume a misogynistic position within The Crying Game's primary narrative. Subsequently, the transgenderist is arbitrarily constructed as the enemy of the "real woman". However, such manipulation is only to be expected. As Barbara Brook has pointed out, The Crying Game's subjectivity is, ultimately, the perspective of a white male director exploring issues of gender, race, national identity and sexuality.13
What cannot be represented as subject within heterosexist culture is automatically mocked, hidden, or denied; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert homogenises the transgenderist, along with the gay and the Woman, into a series of lavatory humour cartoons, the expression of which ranges from the puerile to the tasteless. The final set of images are utterly devoid of significance; the Woman, the gay and the transgenderist have been replaced with the two dimensional representations of a stripper, a "fag", and a "drag". Kerryn Goldsworthy's description of the film seems the most appropriate: "funny, brash, loud, and not very good".14
I have suggested in this paper that there is an autonomous transgendered identity independent of the patriarchal stereotypes disseminated in the popular media. While the constantly shifting ambiguity of this identity defies all conventional definition, we must nonetheless consider the need for a discourse of the transgenderist which takes into account the contradistinctive and paradoxical character of transgenderism. It is my conclusion that the TG cannot articulate her identity through any existing theoretical framework; rather, the Transgenderist can only speak from outside.
Sandy Stone has previously declared the need for a theoretical counter-discourse from within the transgendered community; self-representation transcending the universalising vision of heterosexist models. From Stone's vantage point, the only way to confront the paradox posed by transgenderism is to locate the enigma beyond all constructed notions of gender, sexuality, identity and difference.
Footnotes
1 Garber, M., Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Routledge, Chapman, and Hall, 1992, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 1993, p.9.
2 Garber, Vested Interests, p. 17.
3 O'Donnell, Marcus, "Fragments of Juan Davila", Outrage, n. 146, July 1995, p. 61. O'Donnell is here discussing Davila's poly-cultural transgendered figure, The Flower Vendor (1995).
4 Hentzi, Garry, "Paris Is Burning", Film Quarterly, vol. 45, n.2, Winter 1991-92, pp. 35-36, p. 35.
5 Rockett, Kevin, "Phases of the Moon: A Short History of Cinema in Ireland", Film Comment, May-June, 1994, vol. 30, n. 3, pp. 25-30.
6 Brook, Barbara, "The Lady Vanishes: cherchez la femme in The Crying Game, Arena Magazine, n. 6, Aug/Sept. 1993, pp. 51-52, p. 52.
7 Brook, Arena Magazine, n.6, 1993, p. 52. 8 Ibid, p. 51.
9 Phelan, Unmarked, p. 107.
10 Vallence, Davis, and Monica Zetlin, "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert" Cinema Papers, n. 10, pp. 62-63, p. 62.
11 Lacan, Feminine Sexuality, pp. 4-5.
12 Kennedy, Harlan, "Shamrocks and Shillelaghs" Film Comment, May-June 1994, vol. 30, n. 3, pp. 35-40. Kennedy's analysis links gender-trauma to national identity:
. . . The Crying Game . . . proposes a cinema about Ireland that rhymes a nation's troubles with the troubles of us all; that diffuses state politics into emotional politics; that explodes identity and frontier not just in the map of nations but in the human psyche; that plants metaphors like land mines; and discovers that Everything is Not What it Seems.
13 Brook, Arena Magazine, n.6, 1993, p. 51.
14 Goldsworthy, Kerryn, "Funny, Brash, Loud, Not Very good: Goldsworthy on Priscilla", Arena Magazine, n.14. Dec 1994-Jan 1995, pp. 49-51.
15 Stone, Sandy, "The Empire Strikes Back: a post transsexual manifesto," in Straub, Kristina, and Julia Epstein (eds) Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, Routledge, New York, 1991.
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