Chapter | Trans Reads

New Halves, Old Selves: Reincarnation and Transgender Identification in Ōshima Yumiko’s Tsurubara-tsurubara

By tr | March 3, 2022 by tr

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…

Art Essay Humanities Nonfiction Social Sciences Theory

Introduction: Trans-: Across/Beyond

By tr | March 3, 2022 by tr

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…

Biography Fantasy Fiction Graphic Novels/Comics Humanities

Swandive

By tr | March 3, 2022 by tr

“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.…

Art Critique Essay Humanities Nonfiction Social Sciences Theory

Cinematic/Trans*/Bodies Now (and Then, and to Come)

By tr | December 25, 2021 by tr

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,…

Art Critique Essay Humanities Nonfiction Social Sciences Theory

Mirror Scene: Transgender Aesthetics in The Matrix and Boys Don’t Cry

By tr | December 25, 2021March 3, 2022 by tr

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…

Essay History Humanities Natural Sciences Nonfiction Other Social Sciences Theory

Trans as Bodily Becoming: Rethinking the Biological as Diversity, Not Dichotomy

By tr | December 25, 2021 by tr

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…

Art Essay History Humanities Nonfiction Other Reference/Guide/Manual Social Sciences Theory

Transgender Studies, or How to Do Things with Trans*

By tr | December 25, 2021 by tr

What is transgender studies, and what are its major methods? While the field itself is oriented against definitive answers to such questions, transgender studies does indeed possess a history and an emergent set of critical tools, both similar to and yet divergent from the more institutionally embraced field of queer studies. Drawing on Janet Halley’s…

Adventure Art Critique Essay Humanities Social Sciences Theory

Transgender without Organs? Mobilizing a Geo-Affective Theory of Gender Modification

By tr | December 25, 2021December 25, 2021 by tr

This essay is animated, then, by the question of how our styles of affect and movement may become “trans” in ways that cast doubt upon our current valorization of cities in representations of queer space. How might we trouble our certainty that small towns need to be escaped, that less populous cities can never quite…

Fiction Mystery Other

The Girl In The Mirror — A excerpt from the novel, “Is That Me?”

By tr | December 15, 2021 by tr

Waking up in a strange girl’s bed isn’t how Alex typically starts his day, but what really surprises him is his reflection in the mirror. Who is this girl, and how did Alex get in her body? — “Is That Me?” is erotic fiction made for trans people, featuring body exploration, queer dating, gender euphoria,…

Critique Essay Nonfiction Social Sciences

Gendering the Fat Body: Rhetoric and Personhood in Transition

By tr | December 15, 2021 by tr

Though ciscentric discourses often claim that genitals alone define gender, public disciplining of gender deviance suggests a move toward a broader and less genital-focused concept of gender, even among people who explicitly object to the normalization of trans people in society. In this chapter, I explore genital focused and holistic concepts of embodied gender in…