ABSTRACT
Examination of Trans New Wave films offers the opportunity to innovatively engage a transliterate theoretical approach, building upon established uses of transliteracy, to translating narratives and imagery in transgender films to a wider audience. Embedding understandings of trans issues, gender and sexualities from within the communities producing the films is to be trans literate. Transliteracy acknowledges that “literacy is best understood as a set of social practises; these are observable in events which are mediated by written texts.” Trans New Wave films are texts that ‘mediate’ between ‘social practises’ and ‘events’ in trans lives. The foundation of transliteracy is ethnographic methodology and autoethnography, arising from empirical perspectives of curating independent trans films and interacting with filmmakers. There is a critical nexus between sociocultural circumstances and how minoritised communities creatively respond. The ability to think across boundaries is part of a transliterate approach. This may usefully be applied to textual exegesis of a range of emergent and genre cinemas to enable understanding of what films mean to the communities represented onscreen. Subheadings: ‘Key texts of the Trans New Wave’; ‘Epistemological Cinema’; ‘Ontological Cinema.’
