The Matrixial Gaze: Transgender in Boys Don’t Cry
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
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.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.014 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it