For the fourth week of this class, we watched a film called Tomboy, which is a French film about a young child who just moved to a new neighborhood. The child goes looking for other children in the neighborhood to play with outside and introduces himself to them as Mikael. The film follows Mikael’s life during a short period of time when he is struggling with his gender identity since he was born as a girl but seems to feel more comfortable as a boy with his friends. He experiments with the way he presents himself to these other kids, and none of them question his social identity as a boy because there is nothing about him that would suggest he is anything but what he says he is. I found this film fascinating in the way it portrayed gender in childhood since it was never something I questioned as a child, and the way the cinematography used certain shots and silences to express Mikael’s thoughts and experiences felt incredibly well-done.

The article assigned this week about gender performativity expands on the idea that gender is only a set of learned behaviors that constitute being a “boy” or a “girl.” These behaviors consist of the ways people present themselves to society in terms of appearance, activities, mannerisms, and many more. Throughout the film, Mikael is seen observing the other boys’ behaviors, copying the most boyish things they do in order to seem more socially masculine. This is his attempt at learning the behaviors of the opposite side of the gender spectrum that he was taught. The goal of these enforced gender identities, in the words of feminist theorist Judith Butler, is “to reproduce normative heterosexuality.” This normative heterosexuality is what the children in Tomboy feel compelled to protect when they discover that Mikael might not be a boy like they were led to believe. Since Mikael had kissed their friend Lisa, Mikael not being a boy would mean that two girls kissed, which felt unacceptable to the kids because it was homosexual. The crime to them was less the breaking of gender boundaries, but the breaking of heterosexuality. This part of the plot upholds the claim that the enforced gender binary on people is actually intending to enforce heterosexuality above all else.

Something I really enjoyed about the way this film came across was the use of silence and close-up shots of Mikael to connect the viewer to Mikael’s point of view. While I was watching this film, I truly felt like I was in Mikael’s shoes, experiencing the world from his point of view. The way the scenes played out felt like childhood memories, switching between scenes with lots of important dialogue and moments of growth and realization to scenes of playing and laughter and silence, which seem less important but actually bring back the idea that Mikael is only a young child, living a simple and mostly carefree life. The juxtaposition of these two types of scenes in the film is what gives it such a unique take on gender identity since it combines the struggle of experiencing gender dysphoria with being such a young person.