Boys Don T Cry Reading Response

Anna Garcia
2/12/2015
Reading Response Paper “Boys Don’t Cry”
SOCL 3600 Gender and Power
Dr. Agnes Riedmann

The film, Boys Don't Cry, is based on a true story and raises numerous real-world issues in its story of a murder case in Middle America in which the victim was a girl who successfully passed herself off as a boy. Brandon Teena depicts the life and death of a young woman who believed that she should have been born a man. Teena concealed her female gender and successfully convinced almost everyone she knew that she was really a male, while living in a small town in Nebraska. At first, as I was watching the movie, I was confused as to why Teena wanted to dress up at as a man and be called Brandon. I thought that maybe she was just lesbian and that she didn’t like dressing like a girl and wanted more of the masculine look. But then I realized that she was just having issues with not feeling right being a woman. She felt that she was stuck inside the wrong body. That’s why she wanted to dress up as a man, and later on actually be able to get the operation that would make her a man physically. But then Teena’s real identity is discovered, as she was raped, beaten and ultimately killed by some good old boys who were threatened by Tenna’s ambiguous gender. In order for me to better understand this film I need to understand what gender meant to me. For me Gender simply means a class between masculine and feminine while sexuality means the capacity for sexual feelings. Teena Brandon had gone through great lengths to hide her sexual orientation because of what society today does and does not accept in human behavior. I feel like Teena Brandon and a lot of people who share her feelings do hide or try to become someone else for fear of being accused of flaunting, being verbally abused, or physically attacked as was Teena Brandon when her secret identity had been exposed. It is quite hard for a person that is homosexual to live a life of acceptance in society like everyone else today. It is hard for a person who has feelings for someone of the same sex to be accepted and sometimes live a so called normal life. Although I believe Teena Brandon and her sexual identity crisis had made it hard for her to live normally without having a deep, dark secret inside of her, and pretending to be someone she was not. Inside Teena most likely had felt fear, been lonesome, and misunderstood.
One problem I had was keeping Brandon as a sympathetic character. It is clear that Brandon did many things that led to getting raped and murdered, but there can't be any suggestion that Brandon brought it on himself. It certainly seems that some of Brandon's choices weren't so smart; getting involved in petty crime, ending up in prison, and, not doing well at hiding his female identity. On the other hand, the violence and intolerance that he experienced was not his fault at all. For me this movie was successful in keeping the audience on Brandon's side, and not becoming discouraged with him for taking too many risks or being self-defeating.