Ten years on from the so-called “transgender tipping point” that TIME magazine declared with its 2014 Laverne Cox cover issue, trans people have never been more visible than they are today. At the same time, especially for trans women of color, this onrush of visibility has coincided with a wave of vulnerability. As the editors of Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility point out, despite, or perhaps because of, the increased media representation that trans people have garnered over the past decade, they have also become targets of increased violence and political retribution. According to the Human Rights Campaign’s 2023 report, “The Epidemic of Violence Against the Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Community in the United States,” 2022 saw the highest number of anti-LGBTQ hate crimes ever recorded by the FBI and 2023 saw more than 220 anti-trans bills introduced into state legislatures across the country.
To unpack this paradox of trans visibility—wherein the same representation that promises “livable lives” for trans people also exposes them to further alienation, discrimination, and violence—this interdisciplinary seminar examines the representation of trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people across media, modes of thinking, and time. Drawing on examples of trans representation in literature, cinema, journalism, medicine, and art, students will use trans and queer studies, cinema studies, sound studies, visual studies, psychoanalytic and critical race theory approaches to examine the ways in which visual representations both enable and limit our understanding of trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming subjects. Additionally, they will consider how aural modes of perception complicate the dominant role that visuality often takes in crafting the “reality” of trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming subjects.
A central concern of this course will be to examine the ways in which visuality relates to embodiment. We will ask how experiences of looking and being looked at contribute to the ways in which trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming subjects experience embodiment across varying contexts. We will also consider how other sensory perceptions like hearing and being heard impact experiences of embodiment and complicate visually grounded ideas of subjectivity. Throughout the semester, we will attempt to maintain a “prismatic” approach to representation, appreciating the ways in which visual and aural modes of perception refract not just through the appearances, but also the lives of trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming subjects in any given context and moment in time.