Excerpt: Kimberly Peirce reflects on how UChicago shaped her filmmaking career
by Jack Wang, News Officer for the Social Sciences and Arts & Humanities
Kimberly Peirce, AB’90, said she would not have become a filmmaker without the guidance of UChicago Prof. Lauren Berlant, now a renowned literary scholar and cultural theorist. Photo by John Zich
When Kimberly Peirce made Boys Don’t Cry two decades ago, she created the movie as a labor of love. The University of Chicago alum wanted to tell the story of Brandon Teena, to honor the courage and imagination of a trans person who lost his life in pursuit of his true self.
But the small, independent film became a surprise hit and cultural touchstone, one that established Peirce as a director and helped shape a national conversation about gender and sexual identity.
None of that would have been possible without UChicago, Peirce insisted during a recent visit to campus. This is where she got lost in the study of Shakespeare and history and physics—and where she met a young professor whose honest advice transformed her career path.
“We really have to celebrate Lauren Berlant,” said Peirce, AB’90. “She took me under her wing. She gave me permission to dream, and to follow my great passion to tell stories.”
A renowned literary scholar and cultural theorist, Berlant had arrived at UChicago only a year before Peirce—and had done so with a willingness to expand the educational canon, highlighting writers such as Julia Kristeva and Monique Wittig in a class on lesbian feminist theory.
That class felt to Peirce like “a beacon,” calling her toward the value of voices that weren’t male, straight and white. When she returned to Hyde Park following a two-year hiatus in Asia, where she worked as a photographer to save money for her studies, Peirce told Berlant that she wanted to become an academic.
“She rightly told me, ‘I just don’t think you’re cut out for it,’” Peirce said to an audience waiting to watch a screening of Boys Don’t Cry. “So sometimes, teachers tell you what you’re not supposed to do.”
Sitting a few rows back at the Logan Center for the Arts, Berlant raised her hand: “I just want to say that there was another part of that sentence, which is, ‘You’re really great at reading film.’”
It was a talent that Peirce herself had not yet identified. Her conversation with Berlant prompted her to enroll at Columbia University, where she wrote a graduate thesis that became the script for Boys Don’t Cry. The feature film eventually won Hilary Swank an Oscar for her portrayal of Brandon Teena.
“To make a movie like Boys, I had to be classically trained in film, but I also had to be schooled in terms of gender and sexual identity,” said Peirce, who at the time was discovering her own queerness. “I had to access both the classical side and then the radical, personal side.”