"Bulldagger"
“Halberstam rightly observes that the female masculinity of Black lesbians is circumscribed by race, but at the same time aspects of Latifah’s portrayal of Cleo are played as a one-dimensional stereotype of the big, tough bulldagger.� (Springer, “Waiting to Set It Off,� pg.188)
“ ‘In other words, lesbians were constructed as aberrant women who wanted to be men, and so, they acted more like men than the ‘real’ men acted: the only thing missing was the penis.’� (Springer, “Waiting to Set It Off,� quoting Omosupe’s description of a “bulldagger,� pg. 189)
Immediately as we are introduced to Cleo in the film, I thought to these statements above, as well as the positioning of Cleo as tied implicitly to the material; in fact, it is a materiality that harkens immediately to the construction of black men from the projects in film and video: she is sitting in her car, and is “shown up� by two guys who sidle up to her with hydraulics on full display (am I right in thinking that F. Gary Gray makes a cameo as the driver?). Stony and Frankie tell her that she’ll be able to match that someday. When in fact they do steal the money, Cleo immediately tricks out her car, mimicking the display of the men who initially showed her up, and in yet another harkening, she buys her “girl� Ursula (who doesn’t speak once in the film) fancy lingerie and has her perform for her on top of her new status symbol, while simultaneously drinking from a bottle (it is only Cleo that drinks from the bottle in the first scene – Frankie and Ursula both drink from glasses), and smoking weed (Cleo is the provider, even when the others do smoke, it is Cleo that instigates it – already she is transgressive and “reckless�); it is also Cleo that is brash enough to pull a gun, even as it is met with the appropriately feminine “catfight� of a slap. In that scene alone there is a tension between Cleo’s display of masculinity (pulling the gun – a threat of violence towards a woman), which is masked as her “being high,� and in turn, when she is slapped by Stony, that display immediately renders Cleo as feminine, displacing her masculinity.
The relationship of guns with Cleo could be easily read as attaching the “bulldagger� to that which she desires, or that which she is attempting to perform – the phallus. It is after all Cleo that negotiates the acquisition of guns from Black Sam, in part reasoned by the fact that she used to steal cars for him, but also by virtue of the fact that she is “equal� with him, suggesting that Cleo is seen as potentially equally masculine (also evidenced ad infinitum by Luther’s continual addendum of “...& gentleman�). When Black Sam suggests that the exchange of guns link to exchange in women, it is complicated by Cleo as friend of Frankie, and also by the suggestion that Cleo may also be attracted to Frankie (the groping scene on the rooftop, which reaffirms Frankie’s heterosexuality despite the lack of romantic interest in the film). Thusly, it suggests the inherent power relations between black men and black lesbians, complicated yet again because the object in question is also the phallus.
When at last Cleo is killed, she goes out, as Springer states, in the typical “hero’s blaze of glory,� which in some way ties her to her masculinity, yet I also read it as its inverse: because of her female masculinity, because of her strength in openly being a black lesbian, specifically a bulldagger, she is the most punished for this transgression. Placed in a filmic situation in which her bravura is met with unnecessary gunfire, there is a discontent between both seeing her as “an outlaw,� and thus, somewhat gaining pleasure in the fact that she is both willing to challenge the police and die (tying her to Larenz in the beginning of the film), or that she is “bad� enough to need to be stopped, as well as recognizing that as the only character that challenges the norms, she is also the most grandly, and vividly dispatched.