Trans On Screen

The Transgender Studies Reader Remix, 2022

In 2014, a TIME magazine cover featured a full-length photograph of trans actor and activist Laverne Cox, with an accompanying caption that read "The Transgender Tipping Point." Their cover story, TIME implied, marked the moment when transgender crossed the threshold of cultural acceptability. 1 The cover story's subtitle, "America's next civil rights frontier," suggested that the last "next frontiers"-presumably gay rights or even the Black Civil Rights Movement-had been eclipsed by the need to expand the possibilities of gender. Transgender cultural acceptance was thus positioned in a progress narrative in which concerns about sexuality and race had moved on to concerns about gender-diversity. Transgender, was not, as that story might suggest, a term only then breaking through to mainstream awareness. In their introduction to The Transgender Studies Reader 2, published a year before TIME's "transgender tipping point," Susan Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura included a graph generated by the Google Books Ngram Viewer that charted the prevalence of transgender between 1900 and 2008 in Google's massive corpus of digitized and text-searchable books. The graph showed a hockey-stick-shaped line that inflected sharply in the early 1990s and shot steeply upward through 2008. A new graph (Figure 1) shows how transgender's prevalence rose even more rapidly between 2008 and 2019. Far from being a breakout phenomenon in 2014, transgender was already ubiquitous. As Aizura and Stryker note in that same introduction to The Transgender Studies Reader 2, according to a 2011 Public Religion Research Institute poll, "91 percent of people living in the U.S.A. report that they have heard the term transgender," with a strong majority (89%) agreeing that trans people should have the same rights as everybody else. 2 A 2021 Pew Research survey suggests that awareness of transgender has only grown in the intervening decade. 3 Nearly half of all respondents (42%) to that survey claimed to know a trans person personally (a 5% increase since 2017), while roughly a quarter knew someone who identified as non-binary or used gender-neutral pronouns. Most people overall still consider gender to be determined by assigned sex at birth (56%), while among those under 30, only 44% held that view. All the while, opinions about trans people have become increasingly polarized, to the point that we are now primary battlegrounds in the contemporary culture wars. Heightened trans visibility and representation, in other words, did not only result in a tipping point toward greater understanding and acceptance. It has in fact gone hand in hand

Transgender Theory: Complicating Feminist and Queer Theory As a trans theorist and trans person myself, I recognize the importance of trans theory, especially as a student who has to constantly seek out ways to study transgenderism and transsexuality in the academy; trans theory should not be something one has to search for, but should be readily available as a viable resource for any student wishing to study gender and sexuality. Gender variance affects everyone, not just trans individuals. Some of the questions this paper will be answering are: What is trans theory? Why is trans theory important? Where does trans theory belong in academia? Does transgender theory belong in feminist theory, where many trans-identified individuals have felt historically marginalized? Or does transgender theory belong in queer theory, where queer has been associated most prominently with sexual identity and not gender identity? I am giving voice to the tension that exists within feminist theory and queer theory and transgender theory's place within it. Transgender theory does not currently have a home within academia. Transgender theory belongs in the institution and the best place for it may just be a place of its own. This paper could help establish trans theory as a relevant, significant, and important place within the academy. Using standpoint theory, I am arguing that trans theory cannot be fully incorporated by feminist and queer theory and needs institutional grounding to stand alone within academia.

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2019

Albeit a relatively old phenomenon, transgenderism currently remains difficult to define and understand due to the fact that it is so polymorphous and changing. Indeed, while it may be considered that in continuity with the mediatization of the transsexual phenomenon and of the first cases of Sex Reassignment Therapy (SRT), the transgender phenomenon appeared in the 1970s with certain cases of secondary transsexualism described by Stoller, and with the "first" transgender person, Virginia Prince (Castel, 2003, p. 486 and 491), it is only recently that the American Psychiatric Association (2013, pp. 451-459) and the WPATH 4 (2011, p. 97) have given it a certain recognition in their respective studies. According to the definitions given by these associations of health professionals, transgenderism corresponds first and foremost to a group encompassing all the different forms of gender incongruence (whether or not this incongruence entails distress experienced by the individual, and whether or not there is gender dysphoria). It is "simply" the opposite of cisgenderism 5 , that is, the opposite of the congruence between sex and gender. Thus, according to this broader conception, very diverse issues of identity or of non-conformity of gender may be considered as transgender, such as: • transsexualism with total hormonal and surgical transformation, but also partial (without an operation of sexual reassignment), • intersex conditions with ambiguities of genital organs, • identity-related transvestism, and even in a certain manner: • effeminate men who consider themselves as men, • or virile women who consider themselves as women.

Only in recent decades have transgender people - i.e. those who experience an incongruity between their biological sex and their gender identity - found realistic, honest and respectful representation on the screen. For much of the history of cinema, the more superficial image of the "transvestite" prevailed, especially in comedies and, to some extent, in horror films. Only recently has space been given to the psychological, social and cultural problems that the condition of "transgender" often implies, with all-round portraits of personalities, in films that often give voice to the experiences that accompany the often painful and demanding journey of those who intend to change their sexual identity and, together, their place in the world. Part 2 is also available at Academia.edu and at www.cinemafocus.eu

GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2004

TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2014

What will now surely be known as the Transgender Studies Reader 1, edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle and published in 2006, gave a name to the field. With its door-stopping heft and 768 pages, it literally weighed in on the field's existence. The equally substantial and perhaps even more sweepingly ambitious Transgender Studies Reader 2 (hereafter TSR2), coedited by Stryker and Aren Z. Aizura, follows and complements the first volume, collecting together new and recently published articles and book excerpts and charting the multiple directions of the flood of work published over the past several years. While TSR1 traced the conceptualization of gender variance historically, from nineteenthcentury sexology through foundational theoretical, autoethnographic, and political texts of a century later, TSR2 charts the field's emerging trends and lines of analysis. While TSR2, organized into ten thematic sections of five essays each, strives for broad coverage, other recent collections take more topical approaches. The past year also saw the publication of Transfeminist Perspectives in and beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (hereafter TP), edited by A. Finn Enke, which was honored with a Lambda Literary Award in 2013. TP assembles twelve essays that reflect on what Enke characterizes as ''the productive and sometimes fraught potential'' of the relationship between feminist studies and transgender studies (1). Two exciting journal special issues devoted to transgender studies have also appeared in the past couple of years. A thematic issue of Feminist Studies titled ''Race and Transgender'' (hereafter ''RT''), edited by Matt Richardson and Leisa Meyer, includes seven essays, poetry, an art essay, and an interview that together bring transgender studies and critical race theory into dialogue. And a special issue of L'Espirit Createur, the international journal on French and francophone studies, titled ''Transgender France'' (hereafter ''TF''), edited by Todd W. Reeser, makes note of the French theorists who have inspired transgender theorists (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari) and includes twelve essays, in English and French, that bring transgender analysis to French and francophone texts and contexts. A review of these collections gives me the opportunity to take account of this exciting interdisciplinary field at this moment of its explosive growth and to consider the inspiring work taking place under its rubric. I cannot hope to do justice to these collections in their entirety and certainly cannot capture the richness and range of the eighty-two articles published in them. What follows is a selective tour through these new volumes, a series of transects through the field that maps its animating themes and questions.

A ddressing a gathering of archival professionals in 1970, Howard Zinn asserted that "[archives are] biased towards the important and powerful people of the society, tending to ignore the impotent and obscure: we learn most about the rich, not the poor; the successful, not the failures; the old, not the young; the politically active, not the politically alienated; men, not women; white, not black; free people rather than prisoners; civilians rather than soldiers; officers rather than enlisted men" (Zinn 1977: 21). While these observations may have been received as an indictment when he delivered this speech, our growing awareness of archival biases has catalyzed a great deal of archival activism. Indeed, those of us who champion archives of oppressed communities can rightfully claim that things have certainly improved in the decades since Zinn's address. Yet his overarching point remains no less profound: leveraging the power of archives is not "the politicization of a neutral craft, but the humanizing of an inevitably political craft" (20).

Only in recent decades have transgender people - i.e. those who experience an incongruity between their biological sex and their gender identity - found realistic, honest and respectful representation on the screen. For much of the history of cinema, the more superficial image of the "transvestite" prevailed, especially in comedies and, to some extent, in horror films. Only recently has space been given to the psychological, social and cultural problems that the condition of "transgender" often implies, with all-round portraits of personalities, in films that often give voice to the experiences that accompany the often painful and demanding journey of those who intend to change their sexual identity and, together, their place in the world. Part 2 is also available at Academia.edu and at www.cinemafocus.eu

Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2021

This article seeks to start a discussion that may help us understand why the category "transgender," created to include all trans* experiences, has excluded some. If "transgender" cannot fully include all trans* people, can it still be a useful category to adequately capture and analyze the lived experience of historical actors? It is in tracing back the genealogy of transgender, in the search for a name that could encompass the multiple and sometimes contradictory relationships between one's body and its social recognition, that we may attempt to discover why transgender has eclipsed terms such as transsexual and transvestite. The article first examines the parallels between recent debates in the historiographies of gender and transgender as terms that can express the complex social representation of bodies negotiated by language. Second, it studies how much a genealogy of transgender in the past reveals in fact a multiplicity of terms to express a realignment between body and a self that can be read by society. Ultimately, the author proposes the study of first-person narratives as the best way to comprehend the multiple terms used to express the diverse and sometimes contradictory identities an individual can embody.

JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 2022