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On the Necessity of Bad Trans Objects
Open accessAbstract
Despite newly affirming images of transgender people proliferating across US visual media, there has been a concomitant rise in anti-transgender attitudes, transphobic legislation, and trans antagonistic violence. The assumption that more and better images of transgender people are key to achieving transgender equality strains under the weight of an emerging contradiction: “good” representation does not necessarily mean reduced social or political antagonism for transgender people. Rather, the emergence of “good” (i.e. marketable) trans media objects illustrates how the most politically challenging aspects of transgender identification are increasingly forced outside the horizon of representability. This essay turns away from “good” transgender representations and toward an archive of recently canceled “bad” transgender media objects, offering new assessments of their unexpected value. Claiming badness as a trans property that must be embraced to achieve sex and gender liberation, it defends bad trans objects as unrecognized sources of transformative potential.
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Research works printed but not linked: 8
- For a record of American cinema's early cross-dressing his- tories, see Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016).
- Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2016), 36-41.
- Janice Raymond, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979). Trans theorist Sandy Stone responded to Raymond's personal attacks on her in The Transsexual Empire in her essay "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto" (1987), now regarded as a found- ing document of trans studies. See https://sandystone.com/ empire-strikes-back.pdf.
- Chris Straayer, Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Ori- entations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 42.
- Danielle M. Seid, "Reveal," Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, nos. 1-2 (2014): 177.
- Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduc- tion (New York, Vintage Books, 1990), 39.
- In refusing the structure of sexual difference itself, It's Pat breaks with the contemporary antisocial turn in queer theory, which argues that retaining sexual difference is necessary in order to pursue a gay political agenda. This was foundation- ally articulated by Leo Bersani in Homos, in which he argues that sexual difference must be retained as a symbolic economy because otherwise there could be no gay political subject. It's Pat therefore anticipates trans, nonbinary, and intersex chal- lenges to the prior framework of gay rights. See Leo Bersani, Homos (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 55-76.
- For a broad discussion of the "mirror scene," see Cáel M. Kee- gan, "Mirror Scene: Transgender Aesthetics in The Matrix and Boys Don't Cry," in The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cin- ema, ed. Ronald Gregg and Amy Villarejo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 176-77.
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Wanzo, R., & Hilu, R. (2024) · Feminist Media Histories · doi:10.1525/fmh.2024.10.1.1
Metadata
- Authors
- Keegan, C. M.
- Corresponding author
- Keegan, Cáel M.
- Venue
- Film Quarterly
- Publisher
- University of California Press
- Published
- 2022
- Volume
- 75
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 26-37
- ISSN
- 0015-1386 (ISSN-L)
- 1533-8630
- OpenAlex
- W4212969062
- Cited by
- 33
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 3 · 2025: 17 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 5 · 2022: 3
- FWCI
- 10.37
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Film Quarterly (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender and Feminist Studies
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy
- Social Sciences › Gender Studies › Gender, Feminism, and Media
- Keywords
- transgender representation, transphobia, violence against transgender people, visual media
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