SOURCE: "Crossing Games: Reading Black Transvestism at the Movies," in Critical Matrix, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1994, pp. 109-25.

[In the following essay, Russell traces the crossing over of race, gender, and sexual categories by the character of Dil in Jordan's The Crying Game, and the cultural implications of our reading of Dil.]

In Neil Jordan's 1992 film, The Crying Game, mainstream American moviegoers experience and participate in reviving latent cultural dreams of sexual and social taboo. A conspiracy not to disclose the film's "secret" spread like wildfire throughout the nation, adding fuel to the fire of transgressive appeal. Such appeal, however, goes beyond the observation that Dil, a black transvestite, surprises the viewer when "she" reveals "her" penis midway through the film. Critics, both the official and the armchair varieties, skip over Dil's gendered blackness as if race and gender were mere complications secondary to the spotlighted event of the penis revelation. Haunted by this critical absence, I set out in this essay to examine how Dil, described by one movie critic as a "seductive, tough-talking, light-skinned beauty," seduces the viewer by physically embodying complicated and intertwined acts of racial and gender crossing. What interests me is how these crossings acquire transgressive appeal in a culture ridden with stereotypes of black female sexuality. It seems, after all, that the film's most attractive feature is the illusion that Dil is an accessible, exotic, racialized "feminine" body. Through the manipulation of the cinematic apparatus, racial and gender categories cross in and through Dil's overdetermined transgressive body.

While The Crying Game can be deconstructed on many levels, I am most intrigued by the ways in which American audiences consume the cinematic image of Dil, first as a black woman and later, during the film's climax, as a black gay male transvestite. To uncover some of the feminist meanings raised by these images, I consider the ways in which black feminist theorists have begun to deconstruct intersections between race and gender in popular culture. One might reasonably argue that black feminist theories developed in the United States have limited critical value in assessing The Crying Game, an Irish film. Unlike the cultural specificity of "blackness" in the United States, dominant discourse in Britain uses the term "black" to describe people of both Afro-Caribbean and Asian origin. Nevertheless, since I am limiting my inquiry to how the constructed image of Dil operates to revive latent cultural dreams among American moviegoers, American black feminist theories do offer critical tools for investigating possible ideological effects of Dil's transgressions. By exposing and deconstructing historically entrenched stereotypes of black female sexuality, these theorists revise cultural readings of black female images. The cinematic apparatus breathes life into such readings. Hence, deconstructing the cinematic image/experience of Dil's transvestism calls for yet another crossing, that of three usually separate fields of academic inquiry: film theory, black feminist theory, and cultural criticism.

In the realm of film theory, the work of theorists Jean-Louis Baudry and Laura Mulvey establishes a cinematic framework in which Dil's black feminist implications might be discussed. Baudry investigates how the cinematic apparatus successfully creates illusion in the eyes of the viewing subject by specifying the position of that subject. For Baudry, the subject is both a vehicle and a place where ideologies intersect. The subject is a space within the larger space of the closed, dark movie theater. And it is in the voluntary submission to be manipulated by the cinematic apparatus, our decision to "go to the movies," that we find ourselves "chained, captured, or captivated."

How do we come to desire certain kinds of cinematic submission while avoiding others? In this essay, I focus on particular cultural desires that may help to explain the tremendous commercial success of The Crying Game among American audiences. I argue that American moviegoers' desire to experience The Crying Game can be reduced to the erotic appeal of Dil's sexual, racial, and gender transgressions, all of which are exposed in the "revelation scene" when Dil reveals "her" penis. Baudry's formulation of the viewing subject as a vehicle implies a capacity for movement; the viewing subject might desire to move through Dil's body, both in an act of sexual transgression (and maybe aggression) and in a transcendence of the viewer's body. In teasing apart the layers of these transgressive impulses, I further posit that, viewed within the cultural terrain of the United States, this Irish film becomes mapped onto anxieties and erotic impulses which constitute latent and manifest cultural dreams uniquely American. Our collective cultural baggage is, to be sure, our most reliable "date" when we go in search of a good movie.

The idea of cultural dreaming, central to my analysis of Dil as a desirable crossed body, implies some notion of a collective body. After all, some body has to do the dreaming. Lisa Kennedy provides a useful definition of such a body in her article, "The Body in Question." Kennedy describes the collective body as "that phantasm with which I share blood, history, and hips…. Ambling, lumbering, hobbling in a monstrous mass, more male than female, urban than rural, angry than forgiving, the CB monster is reminiscent of some creature from a '50s sci-fi flick, bigger than a house." Here Kennedy makes the point that all notions of collective bodies are ultimately the work of our imagination. This is not to say that collective bodies do not exist; rather, they exist as imagined strategies for making sense out of the world around us. Film becomes a powerful instrument for unravelling this world: "Film because it feels extraordinarily powerful—all that money, and narrative, and pleasure—and because historically it is how America looks at itself."

The collective body I referred to above, the one who dreams, is a version of Kennedy's monstrous house with categorical racial, sexual, and gender rooms. Transgressive acts in this context translate into erotic and often shameful trips into rooms not of one's own. Such transgressive migrations occur as Baudry's viewing subject sits in the dark movie theater chained to the cinematic apparatus interacting with Dil, as well as in the frustrating attempts of the viewing subject to get outside her or his body. There are also various transgressions within the film and within the body of Dil—what we might call the "play within the play within the play." The metaphorical electrical wiring of this house/body becomes increasingly crossed and charged with sexual energy.

Baudry's reading of the cinematic apparatus sets this complicated crossing in motion. He critically assesses the experience of being a cinematic subject bombarded with imposed ideology, an experience he calls a play of "reflection and projection." These mutually dependent processes support Kennedy's observation that film is the mirror of America's self. This play of reflection and projection creates the illusion of a closed, womb-like world that comforts in its denial of denial. Editing gives the illusion of continuity, denying the juxtaposition of temporally and spatially disconnected images. The film projector is hidden behind and above the viewer. The monocular vision of the camera specifies the ideological position of the subject, determining "the very spot it must necessarily occupy." Hence, no room for ideological squirming exists; we must sit still and play the role of ideological recipients or battlegrounds.

The artificial dream-like world constructed by cinematic experience makes cultural dreaming not only abundantly possible but also convenient. In about two hours, the viewer's cultural terrain is made readable. Baudry articulates this idea: "The world is no longer only an 'open and indeterminate horizon.' Limited only by the framing, lined up, put at the proper distance, the world offers up an object endowed with meaning, an intentional object, implied by and implying the action of the 'subject' which sights it." For the viewing subject who wants to make sense out of the vast American cultural terrain, there is something extremely comforting in the sort of readability offered by narrative cinema. Paradoxically, Baudry suggests that while subjects are "chained" and made to occupy specific subject positions, they also play an active role in constructing the ideological meanings of the images they see projected onto the screen. Baudry's rhetorical use of imposed ideology paints a picture of what being "chained" might look like. But inevitably, the subject actively creates and perpetuates a particular ideology.

With this passive/active model of the cinematic subject in mind, I read Dil as a body with intentional meaning, as a body that says something telling about American culture. Laura Mulvey points out in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" that the mechanism by which cinematic objects are converted into meaningful objects in mainstream film has been, and continues to be, the male gaze. Through the monocular vision of the camera, the camera looks at and marks certain bodies as desirable feminized objects. Unlike the male protagonist, who looks back at the camera, feminized objects in the cinematic narrative look away from the camera. The viewer sees the "feminine" through the fixed, archimedean point of a male protagonist. Through this male gaze, the viewing subject is sutured, metaphorically stitched, to the culturally reflexive "perch" of phallocentrism.

In The Crying Game, the male gaze, specifically the white male gaze, is established through the white male protagonist, Fergus. Through Fergus, our suture point man, we engage with the constructed ideological meaning of Dil. The camera's monocular vision focuses on Dil as feminized spectacle. As a feminized object, Dil inhabits the cinematic space Mulvey describes as "to-be-looked-at-ness". Many aspects of Dil's image support this assertion. For instance, when Fergus finds Dil in London, "she" is working as a hair-dresser. The camera establishes Dil's "to-be-looked-at-ness" in this initial meeting. Not only does "she" avoid looking into the camera, "she" avoids looking directly at Fergus (who at this point has changed his name to Jimmy). The first time we see Dil seeing Fergus in a sustained glance is in the reflection of the salon mirror as Dil begins cutting Fergus's hair. Even when Dil occupies this optimum vantage point (she stands behind him while he sits nervously), it is Fergus who uses the mirror to scrutinize Dil, not the other way around. Sutured to Fergus's gaze, we find Dil as someone who wants to be looked at.

This initial meeting of the male protagonist and his "woman" introduces Dil as a woman "still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning." As a transvestite successfully passing as a woman, Dil carries meaning but cannot in any way be thought of as the maker of the ideological meaning that the viewer both projects and reflects onto "her" image. Passing as a woman, Dil occupies the cinematic space traditionally allotted feminized objects of desire in narrative cinema: "She is isolated, glamorous, on display, sexualised. But as the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her generalised sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her, too."

When I, along with Fergus, first met Dil in Millies Hair Salon, I was struck by the ways in which "her" appearance not only adhered to Mulvey's narrative script but exaggerated it in a way that I have yet to witness in a mainstream popular film. Dil, depicted as a glamour queen, epitomizes the ultimate object of socially constructed heterosexual male desire: the "Cosmo girl," the supermodel of commodified advertiser-driven femininity. With her long hair, painted nails, tight red mini-dress, high-heeled shoes, and makeup, Dil is a socially perfected, glamorous object on display. And in keeping with Mulvey's narrative script of cinematic femininity, we find her isolated: working in a hair salon, abandoned. Photographs of her true love Jody, a black man, are found scattered about her apartment, exaggerating her isolation by communicating to the viewing subject that she has been abandoned, has lost the one dearest to her.

Mulvey's script, however, fails to account for the ways in which the cinematic apparatus transforms Dil's feminized blackness into deviant glamour. How do glamour and gendered blackness cross within a white, racist, capitalist patriarchy? bell hooks asserts that while black men in drag, gay or straight, subvert heterosexist representations of black manhood, they do so at the expense of perpetuating the prescription of glamour as fictional white womanhood. In her insightful critique of Paris is Burning, a quasi-documentary film depicting black gay drag culture in New York City, hooks notes, "What viewers witness is not black men longing to impersonate or even to become like 'real' black women but their obsession with an idealized fetishized vision of femininity that is white." Dil, too, exemplifies this problematic subversion that transgresses social categories but fails to challenge the larger social system.

While hooks's critique highlights an obvious but hidden ideological thread that links all forms of serious black male drag, Dil's transvestism differs from the cinematic construction of black transvestism in Paris is Burning. Whereas in Paris is Burning viewers see black and Hispanic men transform themselves into glamorous drag queens who could and did pass, The Crying Game introduces Dil as already transformed. The viewing subject is successfully manipulated into seeing Dil through Fergus's eyes as a "beautiful girl." Even if you notice that "her" makeup is a little heavy or that "her" hands seem to lack some requisite petiteness, it is impossible to sever yourself from cinematic suture; it is difficult not to see Dil as a glamorous feminine object.

But Dil's blackness complicates "her" feminized glamour. American cultural stereotypes of black women's exotic sexuality transform Dil's glamour into deviant glamour. Hortense Spillers's essay, "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words," provides useful tools for deconstructing the cinematic experience of Dil as an exotic and sexually deviant black woman. In her critical inquiry into culturally constructed mythology and latent dreams of black female sexuality, Spillers notes that, historically, black women's lack of access to public discourse has forced them into a "paradox of non-being." For Spillers, "sexuality is the locus of great drama—perhaps the fundamental one." And in this great drama, black women have been simultaneously "exposed" and "hidden." According to Spillers, "black women are the beached whales of the sexual universe, unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their verb. Their sexual experiences are depicted, but not often by them, and if and when by the subject herself, often in the guise of vocal music, often in the self-contained accent and sheer romance of the blues."

Spillers's claim that subjective articulation of black women's sexuality has often been expressed through singing the blues is applicable to Dil, who can often be found lipsynching "blue" songs at the Metro, a local pub. In one of her most glamorous scenes, Dil is viewed through Fergus's voyeuristic gaze, lipsynching the title song. The image of the black female singer, particularly the black female blues singer, is a familiar icon in American cultural dreaming. Whatever is mournful about her sexuality is, nonetheless, as Spillers reminds us, often romanticized by the art form of blues itself. While Dil's lipsynching is not an exact reproduction of the black female blues singer, the image of Dil as a singer of blue songs calls to mind this powerful American icon.

Our cinematic encounter with Dil as a mournful singer, a singer of blue songs, reinforces her role in the cinematic narrative as an object with the quality of "to-be-looked-at-ness." Dil's accessible exotification heightens this basic cinematic quality. Dil's light skin and long, loose hair reveal that "she" is not only black but probably also white. As a body with readable biracial features, Dil is black enough to be othered but white enough to be considered a realizable fantasy. In this sense, Dil not only facilitates visual access to a sexual taboo, she in fact embodies the taboo of miscegenation through her existence as a transvestite passing as biracial woman.

According to Spillers, the "sexual drama" of American popular culture casts black women as gateways to subcultures of sexual deviancy: "She [the black woman] became … the principal point of passage between the human and non-human world. Her issue became the focus of a cunning difference—visually, psychologically, ontologically—as the route by which the dominant male decided the distinction between humanity and 'other.'" One of the questions that Spillers's formulation raises is whether or not there is some temporal quality associated with black women becoming points of passage between the human and nonhuman worlds. Although I find Spillers's discussion of black women's constructed sexual reality to be an especially critical point, it seems that a more powerful and accurate assertion would simply state that black women exist as culturally constructed gateways into otherness.

The idea of black women as gateways to otherness is also discussed by Sander Gilman. In his analysis of nineteenth-century artistic and medical representations of black female sexuality, Gilman uncovers European cultural attempts to prove racial difference between blacks and whites by representing black women's bodies, and specifically their genitalia, as inherently different from those of white women. Black women, whose iconographic representative was the female Hottentot, were depicted as having larger labia minoria and a vaginal opening located differently from that of white women. Although this racist strategy aimed to distance white Europeans from black Africans, Gilman shows how this "othering" often represented white men's desire for racial transgression through sexual intercourse with black women. The black female icon was not just a metaphorical gateway to otherness, but the actual physical gateway: "The roots of this image of the sexualized female are to be found in the male observers, the progenitors of the vocabulary of images through which they believed themselves able to capture the essence of Other."

Spillers's and Gilman's formulations of the social constructions of black female sexuality support the claim I introduced at the beginning of the paper: that as a constructed image of black womanhood, Dil serves as a gateway to a world of otherness, a world which mainstream American culture deems sexually deviant. The camera's monocular vision guides the viewer, gently and gradually, into a world of "sexual deviancy." Securely sutured to the male protagonist, we follow Fergus, who follows Dil, into the Metro. Gradually, it becomes clear to the specified subject that this pub is "different." Later we discover that the Metro is a world of gay men, lesbians, and transvestites who may or may not be gay or bisexual. In this sense, Dil exemplifies Spillers's formulation and takes it a step further. Not only does she, as a black woman, represent a point of passage into a world of otherness, she literally shows us the way.

In addition to Spillers and Gilman, Patricia Williams offers a critical tool for deconstructing Dil as a transvestite who successfully passes as a light-skinned black woman. In her essay, "On Being the Object of Property," Williams incorporates postmodern strategies to make sense of what she sees as black women's lack of subjectivity throughout American history. Williams's articulation of blackness as a quality that forces one to exist in the illusory present emerges as a powerful deconstructive angle. Since black women have not had access to public discourse, they have been cut off from history, and thus from the history of their constructed images. Williams describes herself as "spontaneously ahistorical," and "without documentation." The concept of spontaneous ahistoricity applies to Dil insofar as "she" is clearly constructed as someone without a history. We first see Dil as a photograph in a wallet. At this stage in the film, we have no clues about Dil's transvestism. "She" appears, smiling, in a photograph with Jody, her black male lover. "She" is strictly a representation, an image. Never do we learn about Dil's history. The camera discovers, or uncovers, Dil in the illusory present. The cinematic apparatus either deliberately erases Dil's history (i.e. his childhood, his parents, how old he is, where he comes from, when he started to dress as a woman), or passes over such details as if they were unimportant and unnecessary for our consumption of Dil's image through Fergus. In this respect, Dil exemplifies Williams's depiction of black women as extremely ahistoricized bodies. While history plays a critical part in constructing the stereotype we experience in Dil, the stereotype itself, by definition, has no historical narrative of "her" own.

After the viewer consumes Dil's black female sexuality through Fergus's gaze, the film's climax arrives with the revelation scene. This scene complicates my analysis of Dil's visual appeal. Mulvey's discussion of Freud's isolation of scopophilia, pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object, as an instinctual drive independent of the erotogenetic zones, is particularly useful for "reading" Dil's revelation. According to Mulvey's reading of Freud, scopophilia is linked to the primal scene insofar as people carry into adulthood the curious desire to see if another person is lacking a penis. Scopophilia reinforces and makes concrete the perception of sexual difference; it is this aspect of scopophilia that controls "erotic ways of looking and spectacle." In The Crying Game the viewing subject is specified to identify with the assumption that Fergus has a penis, though we never actually see his genitalia. Through Fergus's gaze, Dil represents a lack of a penis: the castration wound. The interruption of this controlled sexual difference throws the viewing subject into a state of chaotic transgression.

Just as Fergus and Dil are about to "consummate" their mutual sexual attraction, the camera looks at Dil's feminized face and then pans down his naked body to reveal first the lack of developed breasts, a cultural sign of femininity. Continuing its pan, the camera then discovers that, instead of a castration wound, Dil has a penis. At this point in my own viewing of the film, I could hear around me the giggles and gasps of my fellow suture victims struggling in the dark theater. My friend asked, with an air of false hope, whether she had actually seen a penis when the camera panned down Dil's naked body. What could I say? It was chaos, just plain chaos! Freud's theory of scopophilia, which had seemingly stabilized sexual difference, falls apart in this scene. Fergus expresses shock and terror as he reads Dil's "femininity" turned "male." In a subtle play on Freud, Dil's naked body reveals another kind of wound which is not the result of castration: a tattoo on his right arm. As a self-inflicted wound and a work of art, Dil's tattoo masculinizes, makes aggressive, the body we had so far read as tragically "feminine" in its passivity. Whether or not the tattoo was an intentional marker of Dil's body, this symbol of artistic masochism adds a provocative dimension to the revelation scene. Identifying with Fergus, the viewing subject feels unsettled. Yet there seems to be something pleasurable in this violent disruption of the narrative. Physically manifesting the narrative rupture, Fergus hits Dil across the face, then rushes into the bathroom to vomit and cleanse his "dirtied" body with water. Still sitting in the bedroom, Dil lights a cigarette, a post-climactic sign, and pleads with Fergus, "I thought you knew." The likelihood that on some unconscious level, both Fergus and the viewing subject "knew" might explain the mixing of violence and pleasure during this scene. Here I'm suggesting what is by now surely a truism: that homophobia and homoeroticism are intimately linked.

In Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety, Marjorie Garber investigates how America's cultural obsession with racial boundaries affects pleasure in gender and sexual transgression. While it is clear to most people that the transvestite stands as a representation of gender instability, and thus sexual transgression, transvestism is also intertwined with the crossing of racial lines and boundaries. Garber analyzes the possible cultural meanings that black transvestism might hold for a society with deeply entrenched racial and gender categories. In American popular culture, Garber asserts, "What the 'black transvestite' does is to realize the latent dream thoughts—or nightmares—of American cultural mythology as the manifest content of American life." While this general statement can be interpreted on many levels, its significance for The Crying Game is that Dil's visual image states that not only gender boundaries but also racial lines are crossable. As Garber points out, American cultural stereotypes of black sexuality link the black transvestite inextricably to the dominant white culture's fears and fantasies of sexual taboo, namely the cultural nightmare of miscegenation.

Borrowing black poet and critic Sterling Brown's formulation of the six black literary stereotypes, Garber states that the contented slave, the wretched freeman, the brute Negro, the tragic mulatto, the local color Negro, and the exotic primitive are all figures for which transvestism can be read as a subtext. The readability of the black transvestite "below the surface" is consistent with the definition of transvestism. For instance, we read Dil as an effeminate and apparently castrated body incapable of sexual threat. Reading "below the surface," however, we discover evidence of possible sexual threat: a penis. Dil's transvestism also operates as transgression in the cinematic construction of Dil as a light-skinned black transvestite. As a biracial transvestite, Dil plays the stereotyped part of tragic mulatto in the play of American cultural dreaming. Garber observes that the transvestite as tragic mulatto was a common figure in nineteenth-century minstrel shows. Revealing many levels of crossing, white men "well-dressed and elegant [would portray] 'plantation yellow girls'—the tragic mulattoes of transvestism." To stretch Spillers's and Gilman's theories of black women's bodies as gateways to otherness, transvestism in minstrel shows might be read as an extreme form of crossing into the essentialized other. Instead of transgressing into otherness through sexual intercourse, these white men transformed their bodies into the very bodies of black women. Not only did they cross, they became crossed.

Dil's biracial appearance seems to enhance, if not establish, her erotic appeal. In a review of the film published in The New Yorker, Terrence Rafferty referred to Dil as "a seductive, tough-talking, light-skinned beauty." Rafferty's description of Dil provides critical insight into how her biracial appearance is inextricably linked to her erotic appeal. As a stereotype and, thus, a latent cultural dream, the tragic mulatto has existed as an erotic other/same in American popular culture. Just as the tragic mulatto has been constructed in opposition to the stereotype of the dark-skinned, over-weight Mammy deemed ironically "masculine" in her perceived asexuality, so Dil in her "feminine" biracialness is constructed in opposition to Jody, a dark-skinned, over-weight black man. This binary construction of stereotyped black female sexuality is made especially clear when Fergus looks at the juxtaposed photographs of Dil and Jody in Jody's wallet. Jody's dark skin emphasizes Dil's "lightness" and marks her as feminized spectacle. When Jody tells Fergus, "That's my girl," Fergus retorts, "She'd be anyone's girl!" Jody, a British soldier stationed in Northern Ireland, uses the photograph of Dil to establish with Fergus, an Irish Republican Army soldier holding him prisoner, an ostensibly heterosexual male bond based on "owning a girl." Ironically, director Neil Jordan also crosses gender and race to comment on British rule in Northern Ireland. By casting the imprisoned British soldier as a black man, feminized by his overweightness (his "softness"), Jordan debunks the hypermasculinized, white image of the typical British soldier portrayed in news accounts. But Jordan also takes critical jabs at Northern Ireland. As a prisoner, Jody's image can be read on two levels: first, he is a political prisoner of the IRA; and second, beyond this physical confinement, he is a prisoner of both British and Irish racism. Jody laments to Fergus that the British government has sent him to the only place in the world where they still call you "nigger" to your face.

Jordan's critique of racism takes on a particularized form within an American cultural framework. Contrasted with the image of Jody, who plays the part of a masculinized Mammy, Dil appears as a tragic mulatto, "feminine" in her perceived passivity and "tragic" fate of being caught between two racial worlds. And there are clear indications that Dil's erotic appeal is linked to her passivity. For example, when Fergus physically fights another man in order to establish Dil as his property, we catch a glimpse of Dil's prescribed helplessness: the tragedy of her hyperfemininity. What appears to be mutual sexual attraction between a black woman and a white man turns out to be one of the ways in which racial lines are crossed in our cinematic encounter with The Crying Game. At this point in the film, before Dil reveals "her" penis to Fergus and to us, we are under the illusion that the latent dream we are experiencing is that of interracial heterosexual sex. And as I have pointed out, Dil's biracial body, the result of miscegenation, complicates this dream by turning the dream into an act of crossing into that which is already crossed.

Read on this level, the cultural dream is practically indistinguishable from commonly described sexual fantasies of desiring erotic encounters with racial others. According to this interpretation, can we distinguish Fergus's sexual attraction for Dil from, for example, Vivaldo's erotic impulse to cross into Harlem in James Baldwin's Another Country, or from any number of other literary or cinematic examples of eroticism based on racial otherness? Just as Baldwin's white male character, Vivaldo, in his search for exotic, erotic pleasure makes a premeditated physical crossing from his predominantly white neighborhood into Harlem, so we find Fergus making a premeditated physical crossing of the English Channel to meet Dil in London. As he tells his white friend in Ireland, "I need to go across the Water."

Indeed it is at this level of black/white sexual taboo that the film operates for the majority of our two-hour cinematic experience. Prior to Dil's revelation of "her" penis to Fergus, "she" passes as a light-skinned black woman, or as Fergus's white ex-lover, Jude, puts it, as "that wee black girl." The ideological meaning that we, along with the cinematic apparatus, construct at this point in the film has virtually nothing to do with transvestism. It is safe to say that while hints of transvestism might be flickering in the subject's gaze, Dil is, in effect, a black transvestite "passing."

So does The Crying Game just boil down to an interesting form of socially acceptable rebellion? While it may be just as simple as that, it is also as complicated as the multiple crossings between and among theoretical discourses I've examined in this paper. Reading black transvestism in this film calls for serious inquiry into the appeal of transgression. I have tried to open up a discussion that goes beyond a categorical discursive approach to deconstructing cultural productions. There is certainly more work to be done. Cultural productions like Dil force us to confront the messy inextricability of crossed categories of race, sex, and gender. As a reflection and projection of our latent and manifest cultural dreams, Dil emerges as a complicated cinematic construction with multiple readings and readabilities. After the lights go on and the credits roll, try not to forget: "she" was more than just another "wee black girl." Or was he?