This roundtable considers trans theory’s status as a site of thinking racialization, empire, political economy, and materiality in the current historical, institutional, and political moment. We ask, what does it mean to think trans in a time of crisis?, and what is the place of critique in a crisis?, acknowledging that global crises are not…
Most writing on transgender cinema focuses on representations of trans people, rather than works made by trans people. This article surveys the history of trans and gender variant people creating audiovisual media from the beginning of cinema through today. From the professional gender impersonators of the stage who crossed into film during the medium’s first…
Feminist and trans theory challenges “the” binary sex/gender system, but can create a new binary opposition of subversive transgender versus conservative transsexual. This paper aims to shift debate concerning bodies as authentic/real versus constructed/mutable, arguing that such debate establishes a false dichotomy that may be overcome by reappraising scientific understandings of sex/gender. Much recent biology…
It is reductive yet accurate to assert that Chase Joynt and Jules Rosskam first met because they are both trans people who make documentary films. While the alignment of these affinities does not necessarily prefigure a friendship—in fact, many would argue and experience the opposite—they have found kinship in their shared approach to positions as…
Language matters, both in terms of what we say and how we say it. Our words can do real violence to those about whom we speak. This violence reflects the broader socio-cultural oppressions which marginalized communities face as a daily reality. Simultaneously, hateful language supports such oppressions, as a vehicle by which bigoted ideologies re-circulate…
In this article, Mizrahi (Jews of Arab descent) and trans legal claims will serve to expose the law as a tactic of stability. These experiences, positioned at the in-between of stable legal categories, embody the “other” of law, the affective ideologies that the law refuses. If transgender as an identity category emerged from the violent…
The term trans is a word-forming element. The original meaning, in Latin, is ‘‘across, beyond, through, on the other side of, to go beyond,’’ with the prefixal meaning of crossing (trans-Atlantic), changing (transformation), or between (transracial). What are the stakes of invoking a term that both invites and confounds oppositional thinking (male–female, masculine–feminine) in the…
This issue of TSQ explores trans both in relation to and as a form of creative practice—a project that repeatedly brought the editorial team face-to-face with some fundamental questions. What does trans look like? Must it be apparent or easily legible? Through which strategies might we articulate the significance of the many ways culture makers…
On a sunny August afternoon in Amsterdam, Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist of the Film Festival Research Network met cultural analyst, festival programmer, and filmmaker Eliza Steinbock (currently working as a lecturer and researcher at Maastricht University). The discussion ranged from Amsterdam-based transgender film festivals to issues of precarity in activist film festivals and…
TSQ New Media editor Tobias Raun interviews Kortney Ryan Ziegler, the organizer of the Trans*H4CK hackathon, which took place in Oakland, California, in September 2013. The hackathon brought forty transgender, gender nonconforming, cisgender, and queer people together to create digital tools and content for trans communities. Raun and Ziegler discuss the usefulness of social entrepreneurship…