Boys Don't Cry: On the Radical Unsaturation of Gender Dichotomy

Abstract

Using Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of “becoming” and the “rhizome,” as well as Bion's discussion of the interaction between the “establishment” and the “messianic idea,” the author analyzes Boys Don't Cry (1999), a film that presents the story of a young transgender man who was raped and murdered. The author focuses on how the radical unsaturation of gender dichotomy may turn into an unbearable threat as it turns the linear, hierarchical “tree-like” relations of body and mind into a process of deterritorialization.