Transgender Cinema

In this article, we conduct a case study of collaborative authorship that takes place in the writing of the Amazon Prime series, Transparent. To do this, we rely on extensive interviews with three of the show's writers, and one editor to investigate what can be learned by tracing the collaborative efforts that begin in the writers' room and extend through every aspect of the show's production. This inquiry intends to open possibilities for the ways in which collaborative authorship practices of Hollywood writers' rooms and television production can inform writing pedagogy, and professional writing practices, particularly for collaborative, creative writing. Ultimately, the authors suggest practices currently being enacted by these professional writers that school communities, teachers of writing, and professional writing groups can adopt.

In this article, the author considers the erasure of racialized and indigenous histories from white trans archives, time lines, and cartographies of resistance. The author examines interventions by black queer and trans historiographers, critics, and activists who have attempted to reinscribe blackness into the history of LGBTTI2QQ space in Toronto. Lastly, the author considers how power and privilege influence what is allowed to be remembered, and what is considered archivable. The classic archive structure-primarily white trans and queer archives-is the allegedly neutral disembodied collection of objects that create and inscribe a narrative of struggle and resistance that always begins with whiteness and that is used too often in the service of homonationalism, gay imperialism, and the vilification of the less progressive other. The author suggests that we start with a black trans and queer history as a way to orient us toward different pasts and futures, and a radically different account of the present and what needs to change. Keywords black, trans, archives, Toronto, time I n this article, I will consider the erasure of racialized and indigenous histories from white trans archives, time lines, and cartographies of resistance. I will examine interventions by black queer and trans historiographers, critics, and activists who have attempted to reinscribe blackness into the history of LGBTTI2QQ space in Toronto. 1 Lastly, I will consider how power and privilege influence what is allowed to be remembered, and what is considered archivable. This article was created through several collaborative feedback sessions with the Marvellous Grounds collective and draws on the emerging Marvellous Grounds archive project. 2 In particular, I draw on the writing of contributors Monica Forrester, a black trans activist from Toronto who has done sex worker outreach for the past two decades; Richard Fung, artist and activist and one of the founders of Gay Asians of Toronto; and Douglas Stewart, a black activist and organizer who started Blockorama and other key black queer and trans organizations in the city.

In this article, the author considers the erasure of racialized and indigenous histories from white trans archives, time lines, and cartographies of resistance. The author examines interventions by black queer and trans historiographers, critics, and activists who have attempted to reinscribe blackness into the history of LGBTTI2QQ space in Toronto. Lastly, the author considers how power and privilege influence what is allowed to be remembered, and what is considered archivable. The classic archive structure—primarily white trans and queer archives—is the allegedly neutral disembodied collection of objects that create and inscribe a narrative of struggle and resistance that always begins with whiteness and that is used too often in the service of homonationalism, gay imperialism, and the vilification of the less progressive other. The author suggests that we start with a black trans and queer history as a way to orient us toward different pasts and futures, and a radically different...

When Bros creator, Billy Eichner made an impassioned plea for people to see his queer-centred romantic comedy, he shared concerns on Twitter that straight people “just didn’t show up.”

The subsequent “flop” discourse surrounding Bros appears to ignore the positive reviews from audiences who have seen the film – focusing more on the failure of a queer romcom to have mainstream appeal, and a corresponding bottom line at the box office.

Cross-gender roles and performances permeate many of Shakespeare’s plays. This special issue on contemporary transgender performance of Shakespeare was published by the open-access journal dedicated to Shakespeare and appropriation, Borrowers and Lenders, and edited by Alexa Alice Joubin. She shows that these cross-gender acts have been misunderstood as “cross-dressing,” which implies crossing from one fixed binary position to the other. Viola presents as pageboy Cesario for most of the dramatic action in Twelfth Night. Falstaff escapes Ford’s house as the Witch of Brainford in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Rosalind ventures into the woods as Ganymede in As You Like It. In that same comedy, Celia (as Aliena), Phoebe, and Audrey were also played by boy actors in Shakespeare’s time. In Cymbeline, British princess Imogen dresses as a male servant, Fidele, on their quest to find their husband among the Roman soldiers. These works are in fact transgender plays. Centuries of cisgender-centric biases told us we have to suspend our disbelief to understand cross-gender roles. Joubin and her contributors ask: What if the body of the female character and the actor’s somatic presence exist on a continuum rather than in contrary fixations? The enactment of gender practices is not predicated upon “substitutions” (as in substituting the boy actor for Desdemona) or entail diagnostic recognition (as in being reminded of the “real” body beneath the illusion of Desdemona). The special issue contains research articles and interviews of actors.    :::      https://borrowers-ojs-azsu.tdl.org/borrowers

TSQ New Media editor Tobias Raun interviews Kortney Ryan Ziegler, the organizer of the Trans*H4CK hackathon, which took place in Oakland, California, in September 2013. The hackathon brought forty transgender, gender nonconforming, cisgender, and queer people together to create digital tools and content for trans communities. Raun and Ziegler discuss the usefulness of social entrepreneurship models to trans community formation, the importance of fostering digital activism by and for underrepresented communities, and the possibilities of circumventing traditional grantmaking institutions by raising seed money for trans activism through crowd funding.

In this short essay, I reflect on representations and themes in trans cinema in the Philippines. I examine the emerging and intersecting themes of precarity and motherhood in two recent films –Rod Singh’s Mamu and a Mother too (2018), and Isabel Sandoval’s Lingua Franca (2020). I look at how economic and social precarity tends to pervade the lives of trans women, and how transness itself becomes a form of precarity under the legal system’s lack of accommodation to trans rights. I also examine trans motherhood and make the argument that while it destabilizes biology as the root of motherhood, it also reifies traditional tropes of Filipina motherhood that center it on self-sacrifice. Finally, I look at how precarity and motherhood intersect in Philippine Trans Cinema.

"Documentary Disclosures" is about the emergence of queer-identified filmmaking in In dia against the dramatic backdrop of a rapidly transforming mediascape in the last decade of the twentieth century. The restructuring of India's urban mediascape in the 1990s-through processes of economic globalization, an open-sky policy, and the rise of the Hindu right-witnessed wide-ranging cultural transformations, including an unprece dented efflorescence of cinematic and televisual speech on issues of sex and sexuality. Against this backdrop, the works of three independent filmmakers-Pratibha Parmar, Riyad Wadia, and Nishit Saran-rendered queer subjects and communities visible while raising formalist concerns about documentary's ability to "disclose." This chapter discuss es the work of these filmmakers as both intercultural texts and confessionals that shaped a new generation of queer interlocutors.

Using the theoretical frameworks of embodied learning and gender performativity, we examine the narratives of nine other-­‐‐than-­‐‐heterosexual adult male actors for their experiences of gender identity development through theatre performance. Actors communicate with each other and with their audiences through their bodies. An actor’s body becomes what Gilbert (1994, p. 477) has called a “sign-­‐‐vehicle”-­‐‐-­‐‐ the primary channel through which a performer communicates her or his unspoken feelings, intentions, and messages. Just as an actor portrays herself or himself differently to express polar emotions of joy and grief, she or he may embody gender differently to convey traits of a character. The purpose of this analysis is to explore the embodied learning about gender identity in male actors who identify as gay or bisexual. We sought to understand the ways participants intentionally explored gender through acting, and how they made meaning of that process. The data analyzed he...

This thesis explores performing gender fluidity as a deviant act. The conceptual impetus is to tease out ways in which comedy and beauty can be used to subvert stigma against the gender fluid community in a cultural climate where it is still dangerous to be queer. Through aestheticized, heroic and subversive imagery, I utilize drag vernacular to contextualize my own feminine performance as a gesture of power. In collaboration with gender fluid models, we create imaginary spaces as a backdrop for the outlaw act of playing with the gender binary. Within recognizable systems of gender marketing, the cult of the feminine is subverted. Often, the final product is presented as a conflation of painting, photography and performance. Shady Ladies, can be interpreted as a Midwest gender protest. By including geographic information in the titles, I mirror the widespread violence against the gender-queer community due to limitations within the binary gender system.

Analyzing trans narratives about the early moderns through the lenses of affective labor and social reparation, this chapter reclaims as trans the Shakespeare films that have been misinterpreted as homosexual. In doing so, this chapter builds a longer, more intersectional history of gendered embodiment. Reparative trans performances—works in which characters see their conditions improve—carry substantial affective rewards by offering optimism and emotional gratification, as exemplified by two recent films about early modern theatre making. The South Korean blockbuster The King and the Clown (dir. Lee Joon-ik, 2005) delineates the love triangle between a fifteenth-century king, a masculine jester, and a trans feminine character. Stage Beauty (dir. Richard Eyre, Lions Gate, 2004) chronicles the private life and stage career of the historical boy actor Edward Kynaston (1640–1712) who plays exclusively female roles before taking on male roles on stage. By reading these two films in the context of trans cinema, this chapter makes an intervention in both transgender and Shakespeare studies by demonstrating new ways to interpret gender variance beyond just a dramatic device. :::: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501759505/trans-historical/#bookTabs=1 ::::: ISBN: 978-1501759505

En las últimas décadas han ido emergiendo estudios específicamente cinematográficos sobre representaciones de transiciones y redefiniciones de género a través del vestido, la reconstitución corporal y posturas discordantes frente a las normas imperantes. Este artículo se propone recorrer sus principales aportaciones –y las de sus referentes en las artes escénicas- con un doble objetivo. Por un lado, trazar un marco teórico con las relecturas fílmicas de terminologías, mecanismos narrativos y modelos discursivos de la tradición cultural, testimonial y activista. Por otro, señalar la polisemia de estas representaciones según distintas agendas políticas de género y sexualidad.

Cómo citar: Asenjo Conde, D. (2017). Límites visuales entre normatividad y diversidad. Revista Prisma Social, 57-82. Recuperado a partir de https://revistaprismasocial.es/article/view/1554.

Abstract:
Cinema provides ‘privileged access’ (Zubrycki 2011) into trans lives, recording
and revealing private life experiences and moments that might never be seen, nor
heard and after the time had passed, only present in memory and body for the
individuals involved. Film, a temporal medium, creates theoretical issues, both in
the presentation and representation of the trans body and for audiences in viewing
the images. Specific narrative, stylistic and editing techniques including temporal
disjunctions, may also give audiences a distorted view of trans bodily narratives that
encompass a lifetime. Twenty first century cinema is simultaneously creating and
erasing the somatechnical potentialities of trans. This article will explore temporal
techniques in relation to recent trans cinema, comparing how three different
filmmakers handle trans narratives. Drawing upon recent films including the
Trans New Wave (Ford 2014, 2016a, 2016b), such as the experimental animated
autoethnographic short film Change Over Time (Ewan Duarte, United States, 2013),
in tandem with the feature film 52 Tuesdays (Sophia Hyde, Australia, 2013), I will
analyse the films as texts which show how filmmakers utilise temporality as a
narrative and stylistic technique in cinematic trans narratives. These are texts
where cinematic technologies converge with trans embodiment in ways that are
constitutive of participants and audiences’ understanding of trans lives. This analysis
will be contrasted with the use of temporal displacement as a cinematic trope
of negative affect, disembodiment and societal disjunction in the feature film
Predestination (The Spierig Brothers, Australia, 2014), providing a further basis for
scholarly critique of cinematic somatechnics in relation to the trans body.
Keywords: Trans; Cinema; Temporality; Trans New Wave; Change Over Time;
52 Tuesdays; Predestination.

Somatechnics 9.1 (2019): 58–83
DOI: 10.3366/soma.2019.0265
© Akkadia Ford
www.euppublishing.com/soma

Author
Akkadia Ford holds a PhD in Cultural Studies (School of Arts & Social Sciences, at Southern Cross University, Australia) and works in interdisciplinary capacities in film: as a Classification Officer for the Special Broadcasting Service Corporation (SBS television, Australia), as a lecturer, tutor and film consultant on issues of gender, sexualities and queer culture, scholar, filmmaker and Festival Director (Queer Fruits Film Festival 2009–2012). Current areas of interest are focused upon transgender
representation in films, transliteracy, queer film, film classification (ratings systems) in Australia, UK and USA, gender disruption, film festivals, audiences and issues of spectatorship. Recent publications have focussed upon transliteracy as a theoretical approach to reading gender–diverse cinema of the Trans New Wave. Akkadia is published in international journals including The Journal of Communication and Media Studies, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Screen Bodies, Cybergeo European Journal of Geography, as Guest Editor including Somatechnics Journal 9.1 (2019) and edited collections.

How people dress has always been associated with certain socio – cultural contexts and help in creating one’s identity(s). Fashion trends have always been associated to gender. The binary genders namely male and female have certain clothes, shoes, make-up and hairstyles which are associated to them. However, when it comes to transgender community, there is a question mark still. The researcher will be majorly looking at two movies, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Kinky Boots, to try and see what fashion clothing, accessories’  these characters use and attempt to see how they use it to create a transgender identity.

E s war für alle eine Überraschung, als dieser traurige Mann auf einmal vor der Himmelspforte stand, damals, im Mai 1980. Niemand konnte sich erklären, wie er überhaupt hier hinauf gekommen war, mit all dem Gewicht auf seinen Schultern, und als wir ihn fragten, ob er ganz sicher sei, dass er hier hingehöre, es sei doch meistens sehr hell und fröhlich hier oben, da antwortete Ian Curtis, das sei naturgemäß auch sein erster Gedanke gewesen, und also habe er zuerst einmal an die Türen der Hölle geklopft, und zwar an die der dunkelsten Kammern, wo es ihm anfangs auch ganz gut gefiel. Bis er merkte, dass man dort, wo kein Licht hineinfiel, auch keine Vorhänge habe, die man zuziehen könne. Wunderbar düster und aussichtslos sei es dort gewesen, er aber habe sich plötzlich gar nicht mehr einsam und verlassen gefühlt in der Gemeinschaft all der verlorenen Seelen. Aus diesem Grund habe er schließlich auch schon zu Lebzeiten, damals, in Macclesfield, sein Zimmer himmelblau gestrichen, dunkel sei es in ihm selbst ja schon genug. Und so bat er mit sehr leiser Stimme, ob wir hier oben nicht doch einen Platz hätten, wo er sitzen und rauchen und verzweifeln könne, hinter einer schwarzen Gewitterwolke vielleicht, er sei im Übrigen ein sehr ordentlicher Raucher.

Hay algo irresistible en ser hombre y mujer a la vez, en tener acceso a ambos mundos. En contra de algunos dogmas psiquiátricos la mitad y la mitad no sufren una confusión de identidad sexual o una confusión de género. Lo que sufrimos es una dualidad despótica que nos dice que sólo somos capaces de ser lo uno o lo otro" Gloria Anzaldúa (La frontera) "Las lesbianas no son mujeres" Monique Wittig (El pensamiento heterosexual) "La homosexualidad es un problema sociopolítico en el cine español social del postfranquismo" Eduardo Haro Ibars "Todos hemos nacido desnudos, el resto es drag"

"[T]he carefully constructed essays in [this volume] contribute to elevating this reference book so much more than its component parts could have achieved - much like German cinema itself. It is a volume that contributes significantly to reference works on German cinema, European cinema, and cinematic history. Any academic library that has students that might get the merest whiff of cinema as part of their curriculum should ensure this work is available to them."
-- Matt Borg, Sheffield Hallam University, REFERENCE REVIEWS

“A Companion to German Cinema represents the cutting edge of German cinema studies that will force scholars to rethink their approach to the subject. Conceptually innovative and theoretically rigorous, the collection convincingly claims that the renewal of the field must occur from its margins.” -- Roy Grundmann, Boston University

“This book is meant to re-envision what has been little seen, unsettle your thinking about German cinema and visual culture, and examine German cinema’s socially transformative potential.” -- Dora Apel, Wayne State University

“Combining a path-breaking exploration of German cinema beyond the canon with a serious contribution to theories of nation and transnationalism, this collection is a much-needed addition to European film scholarship.” -- Rosalind Galt, University of Sussex


A COMPANION TO GERMAN CINEMA offers a wide-ranging collection of essays demonstrating state-of-play scholarship on German cinema at a time during which cinema studies as well as German cinema have once again begun to flourish.

* Offers a careful combination of theoretical rigor, conceptual accessibility, and intellectual inclusiveness

* Includes essays by well-known writers as well as up-and-coming scholars who take innovative critical approaches to both time-honored and emergent areas in the field, especially regarding race, gender, sexuality, and (trans)nationalism

* Distinctive for its contemporary relevance, reorienting the field to the global twenty-first century

* Fills critical gaps in the extant scholarship, opening the field onto new terrains of critical engagement