In 1991, Jennie Livingston’s Paris Is Burning (1990) won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, positioning it squarely at the center of a movement that B. Ruby Rich first named the “New Queer Cinema,” an emerging group of independent films marked by a diversity and range of styles and subject matter but…
The history of transgender and gender nonconforming people in the United States is one of struggle, but also of self-determination and community building. Transgender groups have participated in activism and education around many issues, including gender expectations, depathologization, poverty, and discrimination. Like many other marginalized people, our history is not always preserved, and we have…
We are living in a time of trans visibility. Yet we are also living in a time of anti-trans violence. Tese entwined proclamations—lived in the flesh—frame the conversations, interventions, analyses, and other modes of knowing that are captured in Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility. Consequently, we come to this project…
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.…