This chapter provides an overview of the queer video artists who are working in the United States in the twenty-first-century and presenting their work primarily in gallery and museum contexts, either in traditional shows or performance/time-based interventions. Their work is divided into purposefully capacious and fluid categories: reimagining a queer/trans world, restaging the medium, and…
Preface and Introduction to Abstract Bodies: Sixties Sculpture in the Expanded Field of Gender, including section on ‘transgender capacity’
June Scudeler — The Revolution is for Everyone: Imagining an Emancipatory. Future through Queer Indigenous Critical Theories
The title of this chapter puts in roughly historical order related types of criticism that concentrate on varieties of what might be loosely termed sexual dissidence. All of these labels emerge from dynamic mid- and late twentieth-century struggles to emancipate anti-normative sexual desires and gender identities from legal, medical and moral oppression. The word gay,…
This chapter presents a reading of Ōshima Yumiko’s Tsurubara-tsurubara (TS). This manga examines the internal and external conflicts and tensions that a gender-variant child, Tsugio, undergoes through the self-affirmation that occurs in the process of transition. Instead of evolving as a pathological discourse of gender identity disorder—of hormones and orchiectomies—TS explores Tsugio’s intuitive insistence on…
In 2012 at the ONE National Gay & Lesbian archives in Los Angeles, Cassils gave a first performance of the ongoing artwork Becoming an Image (a work that combines performance, photography and sculpture).1 In a dark room, Cassils repeatedly aggressed a 2000lb clay block, kicking and punching it. This sustained assault was recorded intermittently by…
“The eight delightfully eerie stories in Apsara Engine are a subtle intervention into everyday reality: a woman drowns herself in a past affair, a tourist chases another guest into an unforeseen past, and a non-binary academic researches postcolonial cartography. Imagining diverse futures and rewriting old mythologies, these comics delve into strange architectures, fetishism, and heartbreak.…
Cinematic bodies. Cinema captures bodies, their sounds and their appearances, and transmutes them to ones and zeroes, to emulsion, to magnetized tape. It cuts them up and pastes them together, and presents them, on screens and speakers large and small, to other bodies – bodies that stand, sit, walk, or lie, alone and in crowds,…
By Cael M. Keegan, 2021 What is trans cinema, and how do we know? Drawing on methods from the emergent field of trans studies, this chapter takes up the classic trope of the mirror scene as technique for expanding the archive of purportedly “transgender” cinema. Redeployed as a beside strategy, the mirror scene reveals contemporaneous…
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…