Analyzing The Short Film 'Queering The Borderlands'
899 Words4 Pages
In “Queering The Borderlands,” Emma Pérez defines the colonial mindset as “the rulers versus the ruled…the idea of believing in a normative language, race, culture, gender, class and identity…a way of thinking about national histories and identities that must be disputed if contradictions are ever to be understood, much less resolved (Pérez 123).” In class, we discussed Pérez’s definition and further defined it as an outdated, heteronormative way of thinking that must be rebelled against so that we as a society can reconstruct the ways in which we identify ourselves. Similar to the feminist movement, the process of the decolonial imaginary involves uncovering the voices from the past and using these voices to establish progressive ideas about identity. However, before we reconstruct historical notions, it is important to…show more content… In the short film “Tomboy” that we viewed in class, we meet a young girl named Alex who is bullied by her peers because of the way she looks and dresses. She has short hair and prefers to wear t-shirts and shorts over dresses and skirts. In a particular scene, one of the girls in Alex’s class calls her out for wearing “boy” colors such as red and blue, and ridicules her for playing soccer with the boys during recess. While Alex’s physical appearance and interests challenge the colonial mindset Pérez discusses in “Queering the Borderlands,” the views and opinions of her classmates only further enforce them. They are not open to the idea that a girl can dress as she chooses, enjoy sports, and have short hair. Instead, the children are only able to think in terms of the gender roles that they have conceptualized at a young age. It is difficult for the children to break away from these