ABSTRACT
Trans New Wave filmmakers engage a range of narrative strategies to depict shared thematic concerns of transgender lives, across cinematic styles, developing significant visual languages to represent gender-diverse bodies onscreen. In this chapter, films including fictional, factual (documentary), experimental, performance art and music on screen will be compared for representational and temporal strategies and tropes. Comparison of trans male narratives include fictional short The Thing (Rhys Ernst, USA, 2011), factual short Trans Boys (Ali Russell and Monique Schafter, Aus., 2012) and films that addresses intersectional issues of race, gender and sexualities. Use of genres and subgenres by Trans New Wave filmmakers, including road trip, science fiction and horror, are highlighted as being of particular relevance to theoretical discussions of trans cinema. Three key narrative devices to represent dysphoria, namely, road trip, mirror and ‘exposure’ scene, are examined. Issues of the ‘real’ and ‘reality’ within film and a critical engagement with the ‘erasure’ of the trans body arise, through narratives focused upon “passing figures”, or the ‘passing couple.’ Do Trans New Wave filmmakers have a responsibility to represent the trans body as non-passing? Subheadings: ‘Cinematic Forms’; ‘Recurrent Themes and Tropes.’
