Underlying lesson on Intersectionality in Barry Jenkins' "Moonlight"

Coming-of-age film, “Moonlight” offers the world more representation than we are used to and an underlying lesson on intersectionality. “Moonlight” follows its main character, Chiron, through three important phases of his life: his boyhood, his teenage years, and his adulthood. The film focuses on Chiron being gay, black, poor, and father-less living only with a drug-addicted mother; putting the most attention on the confusion around Chrion’s struggle with his sexuality. While this film covers so much ground in relation to the Gender Studies field, I want to touch on its underlying emphasis on intersectionality.

The film opens with Chiron, at this point in time called “Little,” running from a group of boys who are calling him gay slurs. Hiding in an abandoned apartment building, a drug hole, he is found by Juan, who ends up becoming a mentor of sorts or father-figure in Chiron’s life. Juan’s character is one of my favorites, being a drug dealer, we usually see characters like this one dimensionalised as being a drug dealer and because of that they are bad and that’s the end of it. “Moonlight” is different, we see Juan becoming a father-figure to Chiron, and caring about him. We see Juan with his family, we see him sharing positive life lessons with Chiron, we see him being honest. The way in which we see all of these different sides of Juan, plays on the intersectional lens that is in the film. Throughout the film we see how Chiron’s different social identities come together to form the discrimination and bullying which he faces everyday in elementary and high school, and after Juan’s introduction, we see how his influence morphs Chiron into the adult he becomes.

Growing up, the only friend Chrion is pictured with is his best friend, Kevin, who we find shares many similar qualities and identities to that of Chiron. Kevin though, being more financially privileged, changes the way he is treated by their fellow peers. This slight difference in these two characters (when focusing on their emphasized identities in the film) greatly changes the way they perceive life and how life receives them, working as a great example of how intersectionality functions.

It’s interesting to think about how different this film would be if we simply changed the race of the main characters. When we think of a gay, poor white child, its easy to see how the discrimination that Chiron faced in this film is very different from how discrimination would manifest for a white child with two similar core identities. Even in considering the other main characters, I can’t think of a film in which everything about Juan’s character would still work if we just changed his race. The way that these two plot lines would differ is one of the things that makes this film so important. It gives viewers, especially more privileged viewers, an example of how intersectionality works, here particularly in the life of Chiron, but this lens can easily be applied to the real world.

While “Moonlight” covers a lot of ground, it does it very smoothly without compromising its realistic feel. Another reason this film is so great is because it offers us a lot of things we don’t see often in popular cinema: a nearly entirely black cast, black gay characters, a drug dealer who is a positive role model despite that, and so much more. In consideration of not spoiling the movie I will end with saying that “Moonlight” is such an important movie because the way it presents us with characters we don’t usually see in film, in a positive way despite the negative stereotypes pressed onto the communities similar to that in this film, and it does all of this important work while offering a strong example of how intersectionality functions in society.