The class character of Boys Don't Cry

Screen

Volumn 42, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 299-303

  Henderson, Lisa ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 63849340874     PISSN: 00369543     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/screen/42.3.299     Document Type: Article

References (5)

1. The question of where Brandon's sexed body begins and ends is difficult. My description comes largely from Jay Prosser. Second Skins: the Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia, 1998), p. 175, though to call Brandon 'female-bodied' sets aside the ways in which his masculinity is indeed felt in and written on his body
2. Judith Halberstam, 'The Brandon Teena archives', public lecture at the John Sims Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 10 February 2001
3. The phrase 'condescending glamorizing' comes from Sally Munt. 'Introduction', in Sally Munt (ed.), Cultural Studies and the Working Class: Subject to Change (London and New York: Cassell, 2000), p. 12. In North America it is significant that with a few religious exceptions, poverty is most noble in the eyes of those who are not (or are no longer) poor. With the pain and corrosion of poverty set aside, a poor background can make for noble material indeed if a person moves into (or becomes eligible for) a position of considerable status and authority, for example in cabinet and Supreme Court confirmation hearings. In truth, I think there is human nobility in surviving poverty, and millions of people routinely do so in the USA alone, without ever becoming cabinet ministers or Supreme Court justices. But when popular discourses are not condemning poverty as a personal rather than social failure, they tend to redeem it with attributions of noble modesty. Such an equation says little about poverty or inequality, I would argue, though much about the representational authority of privilege
4. Munt, Cultural Studies and the Working Class
5. Cora Kaplan, 'Millennial class'. Introduction to a special issue, 'Re-reading class', PMLA Journal, vol. 115, no. 1 (2000), p. 13