Teaching

Beyond the Tipping Point: Transgender Media Studies and the Politics of Representation

In an article for TIME magazine, journalist Katy Steinmetz famously declared the year 2014 the “transgender tipping point,” naming a moment in media history when transgender people were becoming increasingly visible in the mainstream. The promise of the transgender tipping point was that greater representation would lead to positive change for the trans community; however, this promise has not come to fruition. Rather, in the years since the tipping point, we have seen what media scholar Mia Fischer describes as a “conservative backlash” against trans communities, including violent attacks on trans people and laws introduced in legislatures worldwide seeking to roll back trans rights.

This seminar takes this paradox as a starting point to interrogate the cultural politics of transgender media representation beyond debates over whether visibility is “good” or “bad.” The course is divided into three units. The first unit will introduce students to foundational concepts in transgender studies and transgender media history. The second unit problematizes the issue of media representation, asking students to think critically about how increased visibility has impacted the trans community. The final unit focuses on media produced by transgender artists and the role of digital media technologies in allowing trans producers to bypass legacy media industry gatekeepers.

Throughout the semester, students will view, listen to, and analyze a diversity of media objects, including films, documentaries, television series, podcasts, vlogs, music, zines, and video games. Students will produce a 15–20-page original research paper on a topic of their choice, with smaller constituent assignments designed to scaffold the writing process. In lieu of a final paper, students may opt to take on a creative final project in conversation with the instructor

 

Weekly Schedule

UNIT 1: Situating Transgender Media Studies

Week 1: The transgender tipping point and transgender media studies

  • Katy Steinmetz. 2014. “America’s Transition.”

  • Thomas J Billard and Erique Zhang. 2022. “Toward a Transgender Critique of Media Representation.”

  • Veneno (2021)

Week 2: A brief introduction to transgender studies

  • Susan Stryker. 2004. “Transgender Studies: Queer Theory’s Evil Twin.”

  • Erique Zhang, Julian Kevon Glover, Ava LJ Kim, Tamsin Kimoto, Nathan Alexander Moore, æryka hollis o’neil, and LaVelle Ridley. 2023. “A Tranifesto for the Dolls: Toward a Trans Femme of Color Theory.”

  • Paris Is Burning (1990, dir. Jennie Livingston)

Week 3: Histories of transgender media representation

  • Laura Horak. 2017. “Tracing the History of Trans and Gender Variant Filmmakers.”

  • Quinlan Miller. 2019. “Camp Gender Queer: New Terms for TV History.”

  • Disclosure (2020, dir. Sam Feder)

UNIT 2: The Politics of Representation

Week 4: The problematics of visibility

  • Tourmaline, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton. 2017. “Known Unknowns: An Introduction to Trap Door.”

  • Nathan Alexander Moore. 2021. “Transliminality: Black Transfemmes and the Limit of Visibility Politics.”

  • Framing Agnes (2022, dir. Chase Joynt)

Week 5: Transnormativity and the media

  • Austin H. Johnson. 2016. “Transnormativity: A New Concept and Its Validation through Documentary Film About Transgender Men.”

  • Emily Skidmore. 2011. “Constructing the ‘Good Transsexual’: Christine Jorgensen, Whiteness, and Heteronormativity in the Mid-Twentieth-Century Press”

  • Becoming Chaz (2011, dir. Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato

Week 6: Pose and the question of “positive” representation

  • Alfred L. Martin, Jr. 2022. “The End of the ‘Best Actor’ Discourse?: Pose and the Queer of Color Politics of Casting Trans Roles.”

  • Debra Ferreday. 2021. “From Dorian’s Closet to Elektra’s Trunk: Visibility, Trauma, and Gender Euphoria in Pose.”

  • Pose (2018–2021)

Week 7: The oppositional gaze and the “bad” transgender object

  • bell hooks. 1992. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.”

  • Cáel M. Keegan. 2022. “On the Necessity of Bad Trans Objects.”

  • Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001, dir. John Cameron Mitchell)

Week 8: Transgender visibility and the surveillance state

  • Mia Fischer. 2019. “Sex Work, Securitainment, and the Transgender Terrorist.”

  • Toby Beauchamp. 2019. “Suspicious Visibility.”

  • Lingua Franca (2019, dir. Isabel Sandoval)

Week 9: Disinformation and the rise of TERFs

  • Ruth Pearce, Sonja Erikainen, and Ben Vincent. 2020. “TERF Wars: An Introduction.”

  • Thomas J Billard. 2023. “‘Gender-Critical’ Discourse as Disinformation: Unpacking TERF Strategies of Political Communication.”

  • TransLash Media, “A Voice for Anti-Trans, Mass Media” (2023)

Week 10: We just want to be normal

  • Andre Cavalcante. 2018. “I Sort of Refused to Take Myself Seriously: Transgender Impossibilities and the Desire for Everydayness.”

  • C. Riley Snorton. 2009. “‘A New Hope’: The Psychic Life of Passing.”

  • I Am Jazz (2015–)

UNIT 3: Transgender Media Production

Week 11: Troubling the production/consumption/reception paradigm

  • Aymar Jean Christian, Faithe Day, Mark Díaz, and Chelsea Peterson-Salahuddin. 2020. “Platforming Intersectionality: Networked Solidarity and the Limits of Corporate Social Media.”

  • Jules Rosskam. 2017. “Making Trans Cinema: A Roundtable Discussion with Felix Endara, Reina Gossett, Chase Joynt, Jess Mac, and Madsen Minax.”

  • Her Story (2016, dir. Sydney Freeland)

  • Femme Queen Chronicles (2020, dir. Ahya Simone)

  • That Shit’s Trans (2021, dir. Dylan Bragassa)

Week 12: Independent media and cultural production as resistance

  • José Esteban Muñoz. 1999. “‘The White to Be Angry’: Vaginal Creme Davis’s Terrorist Drag.”

  • LaVelle Ridley. 2019. “Imagining Otherly: Performing Possible Black Trans Futures in Tangerine.”

  • Criminal Queers (2013, dir. Eric A. Stanley and Chris E. Vargas)

Week 13: YouTube, social media, and self-representation

  • Jordan F. Miller. 2019. “YouTube as a Site of Counternarratives to Transnormativity.”

  • Tobias Raun. 2016. “Screen Births: Trans Vlogs as a Transformative Media for Self-Representation.”

  • Kat Blaque, “True Tea” series (2017–)

Week 14: Digital technologies and the transgender imagination

  • Whit Pow. 2021. “A Trans Historiography of Glitches and Errors.”

  • Mel Y. Chen. 2010. “Everywhere Archives: Transgendering, Trans Asians, and the Internet.”

  • micha cárdenas, “Becoming Dragon” (2009) and “Becoming Dragon Redux” (2021)

  • SOPHIE, OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES (2018)

Week 15: Excavating the past, manifesting the future

  • Bernadette Marie Calafell. 2019. “Narrative Authority, Theory in the Flesh, and the Fight over The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson.”

  • Kai Cheng Thom. 2016. Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl’s Confabulous Memoir.

  • Happy Birthday, Marsha! (2017, dir. Tourmaline)

  • Sky Cubacub. 2015. Radical Visibility: A QueerCrip Dress Reform Movement Manifesto.