The Matrixial Gaze: Transgender in Boys Don’t Cry

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.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ I use “trans-” to refer to transgender in the broadest possible sense. The hyphen (-) is meant to refer to and to include ways of being transgender that are multiple, varied, in formation, and not encapsulated by any one given identity.

² Anti-Black racism was obscured in the film. Falls City is known as a “sundown town” in which African Americans appearing in the city after dark are in danger of being murdered (Minkowitz, 2018). Restaurants in the city often deny service to African Americans (Minkowitz, 2018). Nissen was a member of the American Group for White America and was openly racist. Leslie, Lana’s sister, was raising a biracial child at the time of the murders, which also goes unacknowledged in the film. The convergence of racism, misogyny, and transphobia underscores the intesectional nature of the killings and the extent to which many vilified peoples in the real-life tragic event are not incorporated into the film. See Dando (2005), Esposito (2003), and Noble (2004) for a discussion of racialization in Boys Don’t Cry.

³ The Ettingerian Woman is not a gendered construct in sociological terms but rather a support for the OSD. The Woman is a configuration of more than one partial subject in the matrixial web. The Woman is the “co-emerging partial self and Other, or a different kind of relations to the Other” (2006b, p. 71). In the matrix, Woman is a “border-Other, a becoming in-ter-with the Other, never a radical alterity” (Ettinger, 2001, p. 129). As Ettinger explains, a father and son can be a Woman.

⁴ See also writing on trans-necropolitics (Aizura, 2014; Haritaworn et al., 2014).

⁵ Fragilization in the matrixial involves the impossibility of not-sharing and being with the Other.

⁶ We should read Ettinger’s reference to the “m/Other” as a place holder for other Others (not only mothers).

⁷ For Lacan, the screen is a stain. This stain is sometimes transparent and sometimes opaque. It is, as Ettinger notes, paradoxical.

⁸ Like the matrixial a-link (the non-object-cause of desire), the “matrixial gaze is a subjective objet a that emerges within a singular severality: plurality and partiality, within a singular borderspace with its borderlines and borderlinks, where co-emergence in difference is born of nonconscious eroticized aerials of the psyche charged in and from a matrixial stratum of subjectivization” (Ettinger, 2006b, p. 89). The matrixial gaze makes meaning that can be apprehended on the subsymbolic level. The subsymbolic exists alongside the Lacanian Symbolic (which Ettinger also refers to as the phallic stratum) but is irreducible to it.

⁹ Although Lacan urges us to consider what is beyond the eye’s capacity to see, psychoanalytic theory and visual cultures more generally place enormous weight on the evidence of the visual (at the expense of other sensory, matrixial, and phenomenological systems). This is a problem relating not only to transgender representation, but to logocentrism and to phallocentrism.

¹⁰ Ettinger defines metramorphosis as involving “specific routes of passability, transmissibility, transitivity, temporary conductivity, and transference between various psychic strata, between the subject and several other subjects, and between subjects and composite hybrid objects—routes through which ‘woman,’ which is not the preserve of women alone, is inscribed in a subsymbolic web, knitted just-in-to the edges of a symbolic universe that cannot appropriate her in its preestablished signifiers” (Ettinger, 2006b, p. 94).

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Sheila L. Cavanagh

Sheila L. Cavanagh, Ph.D., is a professor at York University and an analytic candidate in the Lacan School of Psychoanalysis in Berkeley. Her scholarship is in queer theory, transgender studies, feminist theory, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Cavanagh edited a special double issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly on psychoanalysis (2017), co-edited Skin, Culture and Psychoanalysis (2013), and is co-editing a special issue of Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society on the psychoanalysis of Bracha L. Ettinger. She is completing her third book monograph titled Bracha L. Ettinger & Jacques Lacan.