Trans New Wave Cinema

Akkadia Ford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000379136
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

This book presents a critical cultural study of the Trans New Wave as a cinematic genre and explores its emergence in the twenty-first century.

Drawing on a diverse range of texts, the cultural, social, aesthetic and ethical implications of the genre are placed within the context of rapidly changing understandings of gender diversity. From the cinematic borderlands of independent film festivals to wider public recognition via digital technologies, the genre encompasses a diverse range of texts from short films, documentaries, experimental films, to feature films and narratives that range across life histories, narratives and themes. The book presents transliteracy as an original theoretical approach to reading film representations of the Trans New Wave, and combines it with a new theoretical concept of cinematic ethnogenesis to investigate how the genre emerged from specific communities and the reciprocal interaction of audiences and texts.

This interdisciplinary volume engages with contemporary issues of gender diversity, transgender studies, screen and media studies and film festival studies, and as such will be of great interest to scholars working in these fields and in media and cultural studies more generally.

1 Introduction

Introduction

The Trans New Wave is a new genre of independent gender-diverse cinema that emerged in the twenty-first century. This is an era of a profoundly new cinema centralising the lived experiences of transgender embodiment and sexualities. As a cinematic era, the films that are the focus of this book have been written, directed, produced and exhibited since 2008. These screen texts are centred upon the concerns, themes, narratives and—most importantly—the lives of transgender filmmakers, film participants and gender-diverse communities and allies. Initially through the work of independent transgender filmmakers and activists in the Bay Area of San Francisco and in Los Angeles, the cinematic impulses of this Wave simultaneously arose synergistically throughout the world. Integral to this process is the international circuit of independent filmmakers and film festivals, focussed upon gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer film festivals and the dedicated sites of trans cinema exhibition. This book presents a critical cultural study of the Trans New Wave as a new genre in cinema. Encompassing a wide range of cinematic texts, from short films, documentaries, experimental films and animations to feature films, across life histories, narratives and themes, these are films that centralise trans agency.

This book is situated within the broader disciplines of screen, media and cultural studies and the critical field of contemporary trans cinema scholarship that includes key figures such as Jack Halberstam, Joelle Ruby Ryan, Eliza Steinbock, Anthony Clair Wagner, Jonathan Williams, Wibke Straube and Cáel Keegan who have all written significant contributions to developing a trans-informed, transactivist scholarship on cinematic representation in film and television series.¹ This book aims to build upon the significant work of these scholars, including the work of leading scholar Susan Stryker (1998, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2008). The theoretical positions of Joelle Ruby Ryan (2009), Eliza Steinbock (2011, 2013) and Cáel Keegan (2013, 2014, 2015, 2018) are examined in context to specific aspects of trans cinema.

Joelle Ruby Ryan’s doctoral thesis (2009) examined trans representation in film, television and media from the 1950s through to the present² through four stereotypes.³ Cáel Keegan (2018) has focused upon reading the cinematic style of directors Lana and Lilly Wachowski in terms of trans aesthetics. This is of specific relevance to the Chapter 3 discussion of filmmaker use of genres and the crossover between theatrical and online screening exhibition strategies used by trans filmmakers, exemplified in the Wachowskis’ work.⁴ Eliza Steinbock (2011) has written on early work by Buck Angel,⁵ one of a small number of filmmakers within the Trans New Wave that have a specific focus upon transmasculine sexuality. Steinbock (2013) has also utilised the perspective of affect theory in discussion of the text Trans Entities: The Nasty Love of Papí and Wil (Morty Diamond, USA, 2007). In this article, Steinbock’s focus is upon the text as an exemplar of the affective dimensions of cinematic trans sex (Steinbock 2013), with affect remaining a key area of critical engagement in trans cinema studies scholarship. This text is significant, as one of the three films featured in Tristan Taormino’s original 2008 article to illustrate the emergence of “The New Wave of Trans Cinema”.

The aim of this book differs from these prior scholarly investigations within trans cinema studies through focusing upon the Trans New Wave as a new genre that encompasses an ever-widening range of cinematic styles, themes and narratives. A further aim is to build upon and contribute to the ever-growing literature on transgender cinema. The intention is not to be an exhaustive encyclopaedia of all trans films written, directed and produced (this would be presumptive and most likely impossible) but to provide an overview of key styles, representational strategies and cinematic texts that have been exhibited since 2008, particularly on the international independent film festival circuit.⁶ This acknowledges that trans cinema is developing at a rapid pace and that new films emerge daily.

To understand the nexus between screen industry and screen theory, the discussion will incorporate the role of film festivals and classifications (ratings) systems upon trans screen content production, distribution and exhibition. The tensions inherent in presenting non-hegemonic screen content is not sequestered to dealings with official classifications (ratings) bodies but has also been evident in the programming of film festivals, with trans screen content frequently excluded, or marginalised within programmes, or presented at a lower ratio of the overall films exhibited. This has led to dedicated sites of trans cinematic content being established, including the San Francisco Transgender Film Festival (the oldest trans film festival in the world) and TranScreen: Amsterdam (The Netherlands).

This provides theoretical space for this book on the Trans New Wave to contribute new research and empirical evidence to the field. This research recognises that trans filmmaking has overflowed from the early subcultural origins, into all styles of trans and gender-diverse films and that the Trans New Wave has truly arrived, with specific films and filmmakers now recognised within the screen industry. This became apparent in 2012 at the Sundance Film Festival with the premiere of trans-narrative short film The Thing (Rhys Ernst, USA, 2011), twenty years after New Queer Cinema (Rich 1992a, 1992b, 2013) had come to wider public attention at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. In 2020, Sundance continued as a site of significance in trans cinematic history with the World Premiere of feature documentary Disclosure: Trans Lives on Screen (Sam Feder & Amy Scholder, Executive Producer Laverne Cox, USA, 2020).

This discussion starts from several points: that New Waves do not have to be continuous, they break with traditions; that filmmakers in New Waves have a sense of urgency and in asserting their creative agency and freedom, they also assert their own morality, usurping and repositioning authority to themselves—that is the point of a New Wave. As observed of New Queer Cinema ‘pastiche’ and ‘irony’ are used as tools (Çakırlar 2011). Significantly, individual filmmakers self-identify as ‘New Wave filmmakers’ in advance of clusters of filmmakers being identified. This final point is of immense significance. It has been observed in the work of Derek Jarman, one of the original New Queer Cinema filmmakers (Rich 1993), who self-identified as a ‘New Wave’ filmmaker as early as 1977, as evidenced through hand-written press materials that have subsequently come to light for his film Jubilee (Derek Jarman, UK, 1978, DVD extras). This self-identification is also evident in the work of Ewan Duarte, who uses the term ‘Trans New Wave’ in the MFA exegesis for his film Change Over Time (Ewan Duarte, USA, 2013).⁷

As the emergence of new waves is episodic, they are significantly connected to changes in culture and film representations (Sellier 2008). Chapters 3, 4 and 5 examine how the films written, directed and produced are related to times of consequence in the life of the filmmaker, particularly the director, and independence in telling these stories is vital. Each film represents a particular insight into “the specificity of transsexual experience” (Prosser 2006, p. 279) and as such, no metanarratives can be derived from a comparison of the texts selected as case studies. This acknowledges that though temporal moving images, films also become static representations ‘frozen in time,’ recording a particular sequence of moments in the fictional screen text, or the factual individual life narrative. This movement of time, both in the onscreen world of the text and in the life of the screen characters and documentary participants, continues to the experience of viewing and writing about the texts.

Background to the Trans New Wave emerging

The films identified as the Trans New Wave throughout this book are defined as independently produced (non-studio)⁸ films—written, directed, produced and exhibited since 2008. The rationale for this year as the starting point of this cinema is contexualised and positioned against the background of films with transgender and transsexual characters, themes and narratives that had preceded this time and the cinematic pioneers of the genre.

Twenty-first-century transgender films pre-2008 and the corpus of films with transgender and transsexual characters, themes and narratives in twentieth-century Hollywood form significant cinematic milestones that have opened the way and, in some cases, formed points of resistance for this independent cinema to emerge.

That the new millennium brought with it an upsurge in creative responses by transgender filmmakers has previously been recognised within trans cinema scholarship. Joelle Ruby Ryan’s PhD thesis Reel Gender: Examining The Politics of Trans Images in Film & Media (2009) focussed upon historical representations of trans from the 1950s through to 2006 using four cinematic stereotypes⁹ with one chapter of Ryan’s thesis drawing upon four feature-length trans documentaries in the new millennium as exemplars of trans agency and “Transgender Revolutionaries” (Ryan 2009, pp. 240–294).¹⁰ Ryan utilises the term “New Wave” (p. 254) in this discussion in relation to these four documentaries, as exemplars of millennial films where trans people are represented “as engaged political agents dedicated to radical social change and cultural transformation” (p. 254). Ryan’s thesis demonstrates that trans cinema was on the cusp of increased screen production, leading to wider scholarly and public recognition. This was later also recognised by B. Ruby Rich (2013), who uses a term “The New Trans Cinema” (pp. 271–277), also referring to transgender cinema pre-2007.

Ryan’s 2009 thesis differs in several significant features from this book, including use of the millennial marker year of 2001 (pp. 254–255) as a temporal star...