When in Neil Jordan's The Crying Game (1993) the male protagonist's female lover disrobes to reveal a penis, the movie's much-celebrated "secret" effectively shocks unsuspecting spectators into a recognition that genders and sexualities are performative. Those viewers who had assumed a natural relation between Dil's femininity, her biological sex, and her heterosexuality now are exposed to the constructedness of her gender and sexuality and, as a result, to the recognition that identities are mutable. This instruction in the performativity of identity has led some critics to see the movie as adhering in practice to theoretical descriptions of agency. (1) Dil's dramatic revelation of the gap between biology and performative gender, the strongest version of this approach goes, plays out the movie's valorization generally of the capacity to resist received identities; The Crying Game asserts "the possibility of locating real alternatives for [its] characters" (Boozer 175).
Certainly the movie foregrounds and celebrates its characters' negotiation of identities that are clearly discursive and performative. Beginning with a sexual tryst between a black English soldier, Jody, and a white Irish woman, Jude, the movie emphasizes Jody's transgressive enactment of a discursive masculinity by setting the scene to Percy Sledge's "When a Man Loves a Woman." When Jude's efforts to seduce Jody turn out to be an IRA plot to kidnap a British soldier, attention shifts to Fergus, Jody's guard. Almost immediately, Fergus, who is Jude's lover, forms an eroticized identification with the prisoner that instigates Fergus's pursuit of a gentler, homoerotic, and anti-IRA masculinity. After Jody is killed accidentally by British troops that storm the IRA compound, Fergus flees to England, where he pursues his changes in a romantic relationship with Jody's black girlfriend, Dil. The movie's big surprise, that Dil is actually a transvestite, functions both to provide a model for and to compel Fergus's own transformations in masculinity. At the same time, Fergus is tracked down by his former comrades (including the now maniacal, femme fatale Jude), who threaten both him and Dil. To protect Dil, Fergus disguises her as a male, and when Jude discovers their hiding place, it is the male Dil who kills her. The movie ends with Dil, restored to a devoted femininity, visiting Fergus, who is doing time in a British prison for Dil's act. Played to Lyle Lovett's rendition of "Stand by Your Man" the final scene deliberately underscores the fact that gender is performative.
However, if the movie has been read as substantiating influential theories of performative agency, it has also provided the occasion for calling these same theories into question. Numerous critics have noted that even as Dil so memorably demonstrates the body's freedom from naturalized identity, she avails herself of this capacity largely to enact identities that reify rather than challenge oppressive stereotypes of race and gender. (2) As Dil provides Fergus, the white, heterosexual protagonist, with a homoerotic object of desire that is also the "woman" of his dreams, the movie at one time restores in the transvestite the vulnerable, accommodating...