The aim of this special issue is to enable a dialogue between masculinity studies and transgender studies and attempt to find common areas of inquiry and mutual knowledge production in such conventionally divided arenas. The contributions to the issue explore a multiplicity of masculinities, which are seen as situational positions that can be deployed and activated by a variety of bodies, and in this way attempt to de-essentialize masculinity as grounded in a cis-male body. In this introduction, we discuss how masculinity studies have approached transgender issues, its general lack of interest in trans masculinities, as well as how transgender studies have related to masculinity theorizing.
This article is an exploration of trans and non-binary representation in independent Swedish film productions. Two award-winning films, Pojktanten (She Male Snails, 2012) and Nånting måste gå sönder (Something Must Break, 2014), created by director Ester Martin Bergsmark (in collaboration with author Eli Levén), will be in focus and discussed through their ecological aesthetics that build on what I call intimate otherness. The two films represent not only a significant debut moment for Swedish trans cinema, but also offer a radical engagement with nature and the unnatural. While Bergsmark’s films incite a vivid aestheticisation of environmental pollution, ranging from items of garbage in the forest to untidyrooms, unwashed clothes, and dirty bathing water, the films’ ecological aesthetics, as I argue, imagine an enchanted space in which the trans body emerges as livable. Historically reduced to an “unnatural” and “contaminated” embodiment, trans bodies in the films form an intimate otherness with non-human objects and landscapes at the urban peripheries, at the margins of normativity and productivity. The films’ ecological aesthetics shift gender non-conformity from “unnatural” into a possibility. These aesthetics, I suggest, unfold into a gender-dissident´ landscape of rebellious and poetic, intimate otherness.
Tracing ticks in two different artworks and Leslie Feinberg's activist writing, Wibke Straube takes their lead in this article from philosopher Donna Haraway and her suggestion to think about engagement with the environment through an "ethics of response-ability." By deploying close readings, Straube discusses the affects represented in the video installation Act on Instinct (2013) by Elin Magnusson, a sequence of the film Something Must Break (2014) by Ester Martin Bergsmark, and blog entries from the "Lyme Series" by the late trans activist Leslie Feinberg. Through these works, Straube explores the meaning of this correlation between ticks and transing bodies for environmental ethics as well as for the forging of livable lives for trans people. Toxicity surfaces as a link in these works. The notion of feminist figuration, developed by philosopher Rosi Braidotti among others, allows Straube to discuss toxicity as a material-discursive figuration, which highlights how human societies in a Western context approach the body of the Other, in this case the transgender body as a human Other and the tick as animal Other. As a figuration, toxicity then becomes a shared meeting site that helps to problematize the Western pathologization of trans bodies and asks what ethics emerge in this proximity between ticks and trans bodies. Toxicity exists in the discussed works in particular as a complex material-discursive trajectory. Although some discourses on toxicity uphold social hierarchies and racist assumptions, as illustrated by Mel Y. Chen, for example, the works here seem to reappropriate the status of the toxic body as a strategy for adjustment and alliance and a site of ethical engagement with the world. The tick is Straube's guide in weaving together stories of different bodies and of what Deborah Bird Rose and Thom van Dooren call the "unloved other."
Trans Cinema and its Exit Scapes offers a critical and creative intervention into cultural representations of gendered body dissidence in contemporary film. The study argues for the possibility of finding spaces of “disidentification”, so-called “exit scapes” within the films. Exit scapes disrupt the dominant cinematic regime set up for the trans character, which ties them into stories of discrimination, humiliation and violence. In Trans Cinema, for instance films such as Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), Transamerica (2005), Romeos (2011) and Laurence Anyways (2012), scenes of singing, dancing and dreaming allow a different form of engagement with the films. As argued here, they allow a critical re-reading and an affirmative re-imagining of trans embodiment. The aim of this study is to investigate the utopian and hopeful potential within Trans Cinema from a critical transfeminist perspective. While focusing in particular on trans entrants as “spectators” or readers, this study draws on the work of a wide range of feminist and cultural scholars, such as Sara Ahmed, Susan Stryker, José Esteban Muñoz, Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway.
The thesis etches out cinematic spatiotemporalities that unfold possibilities of utopian worlding and trans becoming through a set of conceptual innovations. By utilising a critical approach to audio-visuality and feminist film theory, the thesis re-conceptualises haptic spectatorship theory and its critique in western modernist ocularcentricism through a set of conceptual innovations. The methodological tools developed in this thesis, such as the “entrant”, the “exit scape” and “sensible cinematic intra-activity”, feature here as a multisensorial methodology for transdisciplinary transgender studies and feminist film theory as well as visual culture at large.
In meinem Beitrag möchte ich die Bedeutung der Transgender Studies für die Weiterentwichlung der Gender Studies diskutieren. In den meisten Fällen geht die herkömmliche Geschlechterforschung von einem binären, cis-geschlechtlichen Subjekt aus. Nur sehr selten gibt es theoretische oder empirische Ansätze, die grundsätzlich Menschen jenseits einer binären, cis-Positionierung mit einbeziehen. Wie können wir dieses “proper object” (Butler) – oder vielmehr das “richtige Subjekt” der Geschlechterforschung in Frage stellen und Veränderungen erzeugen? Die Infragestellung dieses “objects” der Gender Studies stellt Heranforderungen an epistemologische Herangehensweisen und an die Ontologie der Geschlechterforschung. In meinem Vortrag werde ich der Frage nachgehen, welche onto-epistmologischen Herausforderungen das im spezifischen Fall der Transgender Studies sind. Dieser wichtige und sehr junge Forschungsbereich der Gender Studies stellt ähnlich wie Postcolonial Studies und Queer Studies ein Bereich dar, der nicht abgekoppelt von sonstiger Forschung in den Gender Studies geschehen sollte, sondern eine grundstätzliche Verschiebung der Forschung, von Methodologien und Empirie, erzeugt.
In the film Something Must Break (2014) objects of nature, landscape, city, environmental pollution and waste are enacted in close connection to the gender non-conforming body. The human gender non-conforming body appears in this film to be 1) de-centered in the sense of a posthumanist destabilisation of taxonomies of life and 2) is the human subject placed in close-proximity of and in intra-action with a range of different non-human bodies, such as animals, trees, water, and waste. I would like to discuss in my presentation how the film enacts the human body in such a close connection with objects, living and non-living materailities that new forms of intimacy arise. The film produces a strong aestheticisation of waste and garbage and connects this always with the trans- body placed in connection with it. Via an intersectional discussion of class, whiteness, and trans embodiment will I being to begin to draw out what this proximity means for modernity’s dualisms, the deconstruction of notions such as pollution and purity as well as a transfeminist and eco-critical agenda. Ecofeminism has for many years been discarded as gynocentric and essentialising. I would like to elaborate how a new feminist materialist/posthumanist approach allows to theorise ecofeminist epistemologies that theorise and investigate nature, environment and gendered bodies without gender essentialism.