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...