ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses some of the historical conditions of possibility for reading the mythical representation of sexual difference in contemporary Western commercial film. It provides the primary tutor text Neil Jordan's The Crying Game because the film's promotion and reception in the United States crystallized some of the salient ways sexuality is being reconfigured and how its narration functions in an increasingly transnational geopolitical order. As one of the most pervasive forms of cultural narrative in industrialized societies, commercial film serves as an extremely powerful vehicle of myth. The concept of the tale is premised on an understanding of the real as historically constructed. The heterosexual imaginary and the postcolonial imaginary are two "scattered hegemonies" through which colonial subjects are articulated in terms of transnational, ambivalent postmodern identities. From Courtly Love to The Crying Game, Zizek promotes a gender-flexible, performative, and stylized subject that is nonetheless wedded to the myths of contractual individualism and patriarchal heteronormativity.
