Bodies at the Limits of Knowing: Transgender Subjectivity On Screen

Abstract

Film is a medium uniquely suited to tell transgender stories. Fusing temporal, visual, and narrative elements, films can uphold the narrative discontinuities that give all subjectivities their uniqueness and specificity and do so with emphasis on the visual realm, recreating those moments of glancing, gazing, identifying, and desiring which play special roles in transgender self-understanding. Why, then, do so many movies about trans experience feel inadequate to trans audiences? This essay suggests that these films fail to account for the unique intersections, in transgender experience, between embodiment and narrative. Drawing on the writings of Judith Butler, Jay Prosser, Jack Halberstam, and others, and through textual analysis of three films, XXY (Luci?a Puenzo, 2008) By Hook or By Crook (Harry Dodge, Silas Howard, 2001), and Markie in Milwaukee (Matt Kleigman, 2019), it establishes that films which interrogate or experiment with formal cinematic processes of storytelling, and which pay specific attention to experiences of embodiment, allow for more comprehensive representations of queer gender variance.