Decent portrayal of transsexuality? ANYWHERE?

[elettaria]

Is there anywhere on TV or film which can manage a decent portrayal of transsexuality? The ones I've seen have ranged from mediocre to downright awful. I suppose they do have a serious problem in that most people don't know much about it, and the little they know is likely to be horribly wrong, but the attempts at audience education always seem

Comments

[eustaciavye25]

And I don't know about Television, but TransAmerica is good, and possibly Hedwig from Hedwig and the Angry Inch (but there are some serious problems with her character) and Marieta from 20 Centimeters. I am researching trans representation in film, but I left television off my list (for obvious reasons).

[elettaria]

What are the obvious reasons?

I haven't seen the third film, but I've seen the first two and found them rather mixed. I've read quite a lot of criticism of both from the trans community. There was the stereotype of the transwoman who has been living as a woman for years but mysteriously hasn't worked out how to apply make-up properly yet, for instance, and the whole botched surgery thing with Hedwig upset a lot of people.

[eustaciavye25]

The obvious reason is that in my discipline we still do not examine television as a mainstay. There are problems with both films, especially Hedwig and the Angry Inch; however, after reading Sandy Stone's work I think those problems are actually quite significant. Before I read her work I found the botched surgery and several other issues (including the sexual abuse by the father) extremely offensive--I still do, but the botched surgery actually further disrupts the binaries between male and female and position Hedwig beyond gender divides so zie stands in a liminal space (historically, bodily, in terms of gender, geographically, etc . . .) and Stone insists that it is important for transsexuals not to pass and that a true discourse involves speaking from beyond the gendered binaries which are traditionally believed to be the only space in which discourse is made possible. The fact that Hedwig doesn't pass--refuses to pass and is unable to pass is significant. The film is definitely ambiguous and ambivalent in some disturbing ways

[elettaria]

I'm afraid that I didn't read the Stone quite as closely as it probably warranted, I was tired and have trouble with reading critical stuff now that my cognitive function is worse these days. Is she arguing that transsexuals shouldn't try to pass, or that there should be space for them to pass or not as they choose?

[eustaciavye25]

She is not insisting that it is wrong for people to pass, she is just saying that not passing is a way to create a positive space for the transsexual voice to emerge. By passing they end up reasserting gender binaries and are asked to efface parts of themselves and their pasts and identities in order to fit into preset "boxes" but by not passing they can disrupt those categories and create a space through which to speak outside the system. In psychoanalytic theory there is a lot of emphasis placed on gendered language and genital status in terms of discourse so I think she is also working out of that tradition--child enters symbolic order (and therefore can speak) by either discovering her lack or by discovering his possession of the phallus (think Freud and Lacan) but Feminist psychoanalytic theorists (such as Kristeva) try to work around this. If you are interested in theory and haven't already read the stuff it is pretty interesting