ABSTRACT
Trans and film studies scholar Eliza Steinbock has written widely on trans aesthetics and art and has served on the editorial teams for TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly and Duke University Press’s books series ASTERISK: Gender, Trans-, and All That Comes After. This chapter submits that diverse conceptualizations for trans embodiments and identities emerge together with phantasmagorical visual practices that offer them a horizon of intelligibility by interlacing science with entertainment. The experience of transitioning is often conceptualized as a visual effect of a personal disclosure, a “coming out” of the hidden epistemological closet into the revealing light of truth. The model of cinema-as-surgical theatre bears out surprisingly literally in the practice of early filmmaking, flipping Susan Stryker’s insight into the “cinematic logic of transsexual embodiment” into a confirmation of the transsexual logic of cinema at work since its inception.
