Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-217) and index.
Contents:
Preface : Call me they -- Introduction : disjunction and conjunction : thinking trans through cinema -- Shimmering phantasmagoria : trans/cinema/aesthetics in an age of technological reproducibility -- Shimmering sex : docu-porn's trans-sexualities, confession culture, and suturing practices -- Shimmering multiplicity : trans*forms in Dandy Dust and I.K.U. from Dada to data to d@d@ -- Conclusion : an ensemble of shimmers.
Summary:
Traces how cinema offers alternative ways to understand gender transitions through a specific aesthetics of change. Drawing on Barthe's idea of the "shimmer" and Foucault's notion of sex as a mirage, the author shows how sex and gender can appear mirage-like on film, an effect they label shimmering. The author applies the concept of shimmering - which delineates change in its emergent form as well as the qualities of transforming bodies, images, and affects - to analyses of films that span time and genre. These include examinations of the fantastic and phantasmagorical shimmerings of sex change in Georges Méliès's nineteenth-century trick films and Lili Elbe's 1931 autobiographical writings and photomontage in "Man into Woman." The author also explores more recent documentaries, science fiction, and pornographic and experimental films. Presenting a cinematic philosophy of transgender embodiment that demonstrates how shimmering images mediate transitioning, the author not only offers a corrective to the gender binary orientation of feminist film theory; they open up new means to understand trans ontologies aepistemologiesies as emergent, affective, and processual.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.