Halberstam, Jack. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies and Subcultural Lives. New York: NYU Press, 2005. Print.
Three chapters of Halberstam’s book—Chapter 2 “The Brandon Archive,” Chapter 3 “Unlosing Brandon,” and Chapter 4 “The Transgender Look”—are primarily concerned with Brandon; however, other sections of the book, such as Chapter 1 “Queer Temporality and Postmodern Geographies,” also discuss Brandon and might be helpful to turn to. In “The Brandon Archive,” Halberstam uses the various cultural renditions of Brandon’s story to “frame . . . questions about identification, responsibility, regionality, and race,” and he insists that we continue to explore the Brandon archive in this manner (25). In “Unlosing Brandon,” Halberstam discusses how biographies about transgender lives, particularly Brandon Teena’s but also notably Billy Tipton’s, are written for nontransgender audiences. Halberstam identifies three motivating factors behind narrating transgender lives: the project of stabilization, the project of rationalization, and the project of trivialization. Finally, in “The Transgender Look”—which is adapted from “The Transgender Gaze in Boys Don’t Cry,” an essay published in the academic journal Screen’s dossier on the film—Halberstam looks at a number of films, including The Crying Game and By Hook or by Crook. However, in relation to Boys Don’t Cry, Halberstam invokes film studies’s discussions of the gaze to argue that the mainstream success of Boys Don’t Cry was dependent “on its ability to hijack the male and female gazes, and replace them surreptitiously with transgender modes of looking and queer forms of visual pleasure” (83).