Criss-Cross: Identity and Transformation in Re-reading Billy Elliot

Abstract: Billy Elliot (2000) has been widely recognised as an important British film of the post-Thatcher period. It has been analysed using multiple disciplinary methodologies but almost always from the theoretical frameworks of class and gender/sexuality. The film has sometimes been used not so much as a focus of analysis itself but as a conduit for exploring issues such as class deprivation or neoliberal politics and economics. Such studies tend to use the film’s perceived shortcomings as a starting point to critique society’s wider failings to interrogate constructions of gender and sexuality. This article argues that an examination of the identity formation of some of the film’s subsidiary characters shows how fluidity and transformation are key to the film’s opening up of a jouissance which is enabled by but goes beyond its central character