ABSTRACT
This chapter takes up the designation of trans cinema as a provocation to think cinema’s multiple components, including film texts, screen media, and spectators, from a trans perspective. Trans is a prefixial term for a range of non-binary and non-conforming gender identities, but it can also be affixed to man and woman (i.e. trans man) to signify the experience, past or present, of a transitional state of sexed being. Gender variance in cinema dates to the first films, and continues in popularity across screen media from television, to the Internet, to film industries, be they independent, Hollywood, or Bollywood. Since the late 1990s, a growing number of trans-specialized film festivals from Amsterdam to Beirut, Bologna, London, Los Angeles, Munich, Seattle, Sydney, Toronto, and Quito showcase national trans cinemas from around the world. In fact, the history of trans cinema is so rich and varied it is remarkable how little sus-
tained attention trans-focused moving images have garnered from feminist film theorists or genre specialists. To date, only one monograph has been published dedicated toTransgender on Screen (Phillips 2006), and this from within a mainly psychoanalytic and postmodern framework. Reviewed in Screen with the conclusion that it “offers such negative representations, a lack of complexity of thinking and a poor understanding of trans subjectivities,” its singular presence makes the paucity of scholarly work that much more evident (Stewart 2008: 114). In this chapter I find it imperative to begin by charting the possibilities for recovering
films and cinematic concepts that speak of trans before it reached today’s horizon of intelligibility, largely under the banner of transgender. Namely, in the silent era of film, “transformation” and “cross-dressing” on-screen emerged when sexological accounts were first debating the terminology and diagnostic criteria for transvestism and transsexualism. Laura Horak (2016) challenges us to rethink cross-dressing in transitional cinema through earlier respectable cultural forms in which cross-dressing did not carry the stigma of deviance it has today. I offer that Laura Mulvey’s (1981) under-utilized concept of “trans-sex identification” for female spectatorship is an important (mis)recognition of transgender phenomena. Judith (Jack) Halberstam’s (2005) development of “the transgender look” for films that challenge the binary ordering of gender and sexuality in order to affirm a trans identity and trans as desirable follows as a more recent intervention.
