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Start Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
End Date
24-6-2022 12:00 AM
Abstract
Almost a decade after the “trans tipping point,” and in a climate of conservative backlash, what are the biggest challenges, best practices, and engaging pedagogical approaches when teaching media by and about transgender people? This roundtable convened by Nicole Morse and Lauren Herold invites panelists and attendees to critically reflect on their experiences teaching transgender media in the classroom. Participants are encouraged to consider how positionality impacts how they handle “hot moments” in teaching; offer recommendations for effective readings and screening pairings; and share stories of positive classroom experiences when teaching transgender media.
Panelist Responses:
Nick Davis: My most urgent pitch is that faculty not postpone courses in trans* cinema until we feel "ready" or "fully trained," benchmarks some of us won't quickly attain, while curricular gaps and student desires go unanswered. Focused preparation is crucial; so is avoiding endless deferral. I launched my midsized lecture course "Introducing Trans* Cinema" in response not only to direct appeals from Gender & Sexuality Studies majors but to a campus task force's year-end report on the experiences of trans* and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) students, faculty, and staff. This document underscored enormous deficiencies in our classes and our culture. Part of my course's success, I believe, involved circulating that report to students, inviting discussion of its methods and findings, and framing my class as an eager, transparent, but inevitably imperfect effort to answer deep, diverse needs. I worked to clarify these contexts in ways that solicited students' candid engagement and that centered TGNC voices without shifting pedagogical burden onto folks who hold those identities. I will speak to some strategies for doing this and for elucidating departmental, administrative, and field-specific factors that produce and sustain curricular gaps even amid earnest desires to fill them. I will also discuss threading the needle of building a course that tries to gratify students' hopes while necessitating fraught, uncomfortable conversations about visibility and its limits, relations of art and politics, and representational histories full of flawed or damaging images. Lastly, I will describe tactics toward expanding undergraduate advocacy for more courses and hires in trans* studies.
Dan Vena and Nael Bhanji: We draw upon our recently co-edited Journal of Cinema and Media Studies special topics dossier on trans studies and media pedagogies to reflect upon the limitations of teaching trans media within colonial, neoliberal institutional spaces. Through a sustained critique of the ongoing and violent co-option of radical trans politics and artmaking practices by higher education, we bring to the fore questions of authenticity and privilege in trans media representations. What is the relevance of media-based approaches to the understanding or exploration of trans lives, experiences, and narratives? How do instructors and students negotiate the burdens of their own identifications as they navigate trauma in the classroom and beyond? How might trans media pedagogies challenge the everyday violences of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and ongoing imperialism within the neoliberal structure of the university?
Laura Horak: I am a white cis queer scholar who teaches transgender media in Film Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies courses. For me, the biggest challenges when teaching trans media are: 1) Centering trans voices, 2) Ensuring that trans and cis students alike get something out of the course, and 3) Accessing trans-made works. To center trans voices, I ensure that most readings and films are by trans people, with the majority by BIPOC trans people. I invite trans scholars and filmmakers to visit my class and compensate them accordingly. To ensure that trans and cis students alike learn in the course, I start by discussing ethics and positionality to prompt students to think about their position within power relations within and outside the classroom. Their first assignment is to write a “gender reflection essay” in conversation with the readings that considers how they know what gender they are, how other aspects of their identity shape their experience of gender, and ways their gender has been disciplined by parents, teachers, and friends. This exercise can provide new language for trans students to describe the micro (and macro) aggressions they have experienced and invites cis students to pay attention to things they take for granted and realize that they too are not well served by the dominant gender system. Because it can be so hard to access trans-made work, my research team and I are building the Transgender Media Portal, a public database and website showcasing trans filmmakers and their work.
Haley Hvdson: What is TA-led class discussion section as an historico-political formation when teaching trans media studies? As a TA in Cinema and Media Studies at USC, I open my first sections by tarrying with Lauren Berlant’s elaboration of the distinction between belonging and proximity. Berlant holds, “Just because we are in the room together does not mean that we belong to the room or each other.” Together we ask, what are the circumstances under which belonging might take hold of this space we share?
I direct our discussion to move along twin paths. First, we situate section in the legacies of the emergence of the study of “identity knowledges” as what Roderick Ferguson describes as the the re-routing of “originally insurgent formations [...] to normative protocols of state, capital, and academy” through the teaching of Black, Women’s, and Ethnic Studies by minoritized students. Additionally, we join Treva Ellison, Kai M. Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton to think about how this genealogy of the academy’s attempts at management of Black people and liberation movements coordinates itself with “the institutionalization of transgender studies as a discipline.”
Taking quite literally Snorton’s project of “tracing the circulation of ‘black’ and ‘trans’ as they are brought into the same frame,” my students and I interrogate what it means for Cinema and Gender studies to capacitate themselves as disciplines through the seizure of Black trans media objects and to work the space of section towards the insurrectionary ends out of which section, as a form, emerges.
Cael Keegan: In my courses, I assign transgender studies materials that question the value of being seen and that ask students to think critically about the histories of medicine and entertainment that have pathologized and objectified trans and intersex people. I also ask students to consider whether “trans” is something that can be empirically depicted and to grapple with the stakes of attempting/not attempting to capture transgender embodiment in various mediums. Three of the biggest challenges attending these questions are 1. the belief that foregrounding or spotlighting trans bodies is inclusive when mainstream media images are generally constructed as “trans” through contrast with an implicit cisnormative frame; 2. the demand for “realistic” images interpellates transgender into an empirical aesthetics of re-presentation that accentuates the cissexist “hierarchy of verisimilitude” (Malatino, Trans Care, 40); and 3. the assumption that newer media is “better” when it is often guilty of the former two pitfalls in a manner that older and non-indexical texts are not. To induce discussion on these points, I introduce students to abstract and experimental forms of transgender cultural production as well as texts that fail the standards of “good” representation but that present more radical aesthetic approaches. One of the most difficult-to-impart lessons of the tipping point and its aftermath has been that, for transgender people, media visibility does not always equal progress. This reality alone should cause us to question whether calls for increased transgender visibility can act as any kind of overarching antidote to transphobia.
Approaches to Teaching Transgender Media
Almost a decade after the “trans tipping point,” and in a climate of conservative backlash, what are the biggest challenges, best practices, and engaging pedagogical approaches when teaching media by and about transgender people? This roundtable convened by Nicole Morse and Lauren Herold invites panelists and attendees to critically reflect on their experiences teaching transgender media in the classroom. Participants are encouraged to consider how positionality impacts how they handle “hot moments” in teaching; offer recommendations for effective readings and screening pairings; and share stories of positive classroom experiences when teaching transgender media.
Panelist Responses:
Nick Davis: My most urgent pitch is that faculty not postpone courses in trans* cinema until we feel "ready" or "fully trained," benchmarks some of us won't quickly attain, while curricular gaps and student desires go unanswered. Focused preparation is crucial; so is avoiding endless deferral. I launched my midsized lecture course "Introducing Trans* Cinema" in response not only to direct appeals from Gender & Sexuality Studies majors but to a campus task force's year-end report on the experiences of trans* and gender-nonconforming (TGNC) students, faculty, and staff. This document underscored enormous deficiencies in our classes and our culture. Part of my course's success, I believe, involved circulating that report to students, inviting discussion of its methods and findings, and framing my class as an eager, transparent, but inevitably imperfect effort to answer deep, diverse needs. I worked to clarify these contexts in ways that solicited students' candid engagement and that centered TGNC voices without shifting pedagogical burden onto folks who hold those identities. I will speak to some strategies for doing this and for elucidating departmental, administrative, and field-specific factors that produce and sustain curricular gaps even amid earnest desires to fill them. I will also discuss threading the needle of building a course that tries to gratify students' hopes while necessitating fraught, uncomfortable conversations about visibility and its limits, relations of art and politics, and representational histories full of flawed or damaging images. Lastly, I will describe tactics toward expanding undergraduate advocacy for more courses and hires in trans* studies.
Dan Vena and Nael Bhanji: We draw upon our recently co-edited Journal of Cinema and Media Studies special topics dossier on trans studies and media pedagogies to reflect upon the limitations of teaching trans media within colonial, neoliberal institutional spaces. Through a sustained critique of the ongoing and violent co-option of radical trans politics and artmaking practices by higher education, we bring to the fore questions of authenticity and privilege in trans media representations. What is the relevance of media-based approaches to the understanding or exploration of trans lives, experiences, and narratives? How do instructors and students negotiate the burdens of their own identifications as they navigate trauma in the classroom and beyond? How might trans media pedagogies challenge the everyday violences of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, and ongoing imperialism within the neoliberal structure of the university?
Laura Horak: I am a white cis queer scholar who teaches transgender media in Film Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies courses. For me, the biggest challenges when teaching trans media are: 1) Centering trans voices, 2) Ensuring that trans and cis students alike get something out of the course, and 3) Accessing trans-made works. To center trans voices, I ensure that most readings and films are by trans people, with the majority by BIPOC trans people. I invite trans scholars and filmmakers to visit my class and compensate them accordingly. To ensure that trans and cis students alike learn in the course, I start by discussing ethics and positionality to prompt students to think about their position within power relations within and outside the classroom. Their first assignment is to write a “gender reflection essay” in conversation with the readings that considers how they know what gender they are, how other aspects of their identity shape their experience of gender, and ways their gender has been disciplined by parents, teachers, and friends. This exercise can provide new language for trans students to describe the micro (and macro) aggressions they have experienced and invites cis students to pay attention to things they take for granted and realize that they too are not well served by the dominant gender system. Because it can be so hard to access trans-made work, my research team and I are building the Transgender Media Portal, a public database and website showcasing trans filmmakers and their work.
Haley Hvdson: What is TA-led class discussion section as an historico-political formation when teaching trans media studies? As a TA in Cinema and Media Studies at USC, I open my first sections by tarrying with Lauren Berlant’s elaboration of the distinction between belonging and proximity. Berlant holds, “Just because we are in the room together does not mean that we belong to the room or each other.” Together we ask, what are the circumstances under which belonging might take hold of this space we share?
I direct our discussion to move along twin paths. First, we situate section in the legacies of the emergence of the study of “identity knowledges” as what Roderick Ferguson describes as the the re-routing of “originally insurgent formations [...] to normative protocols of state, capital, and academy” through the teaching of Black, Women’s, and Ethnic Studies by minoritized students. Additionally, we join Treva Ellison, Kai M. Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton to think about how this genealogy of the academy’s attempts at management of Black people and liberation movements coordinates itself with “the institutionalization of transgender studies as a discipline.”
Taking quite literally Snorton’s project of “tracing the circulation of ‘black’ and ‘trans’ as they are brought into the same frame,” my students and I interrogate what it means for Cinema and Gender studies to capacitate themselves as disciplines through the seizure of Black trans media objects and to work the space of section towards the insurrectionary ends out of which section, as a form, emerges.
Cael Keegan: In my courses, I assign transgender studies materials that question the value of being seen and that ask students to think critically about the histories of medicine and entertainment that have pathologized and objectified trans and intersex people. I also ask students to consider whether “trans” is something that can be empirically depicted and to grapple with the stakes of attempting/not attempting to capture transgender embodiment in various mediums. Three of the biggest challenges attending these questions are 1. the belief that foregrounding or spotlighting trans bodies is inclusive when mainstream media images are generally constructed as “trans” through contrast with an implicit cisnormative frame; 2. the demand for “realistic” images interpellates transgender into an empirical aesthetics of re-presentation that accentuates the cissexist “hierarchy of verisimilitude” (Malatino, Trans Care, 40); and 3. the assumption that newer media is “better” when it is often guilty of the former two pitfalls in a manner that older and non-indexical texts are not. To induce discussion on these points, I introduce students to abstract and experimental forms of transgender cultural production as well as texts that fail the standards of “good” representation but that present more radical aesthetic approaches. One of the most difficult-to-impart lessons of the tipping point and its aftermath has been that, for transgender people, media visibility does not always equal progress. This reality alone should cause us to question whether calls for increased transgender visibility can act as any kind of overarching antidote to transphobia.
Bio
Nicole Erin Morse is an Assistant Professor of Media Studies and Director of the Center for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Their research has been published in Feminist Media Studies, Porn Studies, Jump Cut, Discourse, and elsewhere, and their book Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art is being published by Duke University in 2022.
Lauren Herold is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College. Her work explores community media, television history, and feminist and LGBTQ cultural production. Herold’s dissertation considers 1970s-1990s public access TV programming made by and for LGBTQ people as a televisual archive that offers insight into the structures of feeling circulating in queer communities. She holds a PhD in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University.
Haley Hvdson is a doctoral candidate and academic laborer at the University of Southern California’s Division of Cinema & Media Studies. Situated in the instances of stickiness between media studies, Black feminist epistemologies, and abolitionist theories, Haley’s dissertation work is a media archaeology that investigates the interfaces that constitute and are constituted by the borders of the prison—from the rolled steel of jail bars to the LED screens of video visitation pods—and looks after the fugitive possibilities that flicker in the formation of intimacies at these boundaries. Her work is forthcoming with Routledge, Journal of American Studies and Synoptique.
Laura Horak is an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University on the unceded, unsurrendered territory of the Algonquin Nation and director of the Transgender Media Lab and Transgender Media Portal. She investigates the history of transgender and queer film and media in the United States, Canada, and Sweden. She is author of Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressing Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, 1908-1934 (Rutgers UP, 2016) and co-editor of Silent Cinema and the Politics of Space (Indiana UP, 2014), Unwatchable (Rutgers UP, 2019), and a special issue of Somatechnics on trans/cinematic/bodies. Horak is a white cis queer settler scholar who is here to leverage her privilege and institutional resources for the revolution.
Dr. Nael Bhanji is an Assistant Professor at Trent University's Department of Gender & Social Justice. As a critical race and trans studies theorist, his research draws upon psychoanalysis and affect theory in order to explore articulations of necropolitics, racialization, and counter-terrorism within an increasingly globalized trans movement. His work appears in Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, Transgender Migrations: The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition, The Transgender Studies Reader 2, Trans Studies Quarterly 4.1, Canadian Ethnic Studies, Trans Lives in a Global(izing) World, The Equity Myth: Racialization and Indigeneity at Canadian Universities.
Dan Vena: I am a queer-trans white settler of Italian descent, who identifies as disabled in relation to capitalist calls towards productivity (under Eurocentric medical models, I am diagnosed with fibromyalgia/chronic pain). I am also radically invested in spirituality and death positivity as part of my pedagogical practice and commitment to decolonial, anti-racist, queer-trans, disabled, anti-capitalist & neurodivergent collaborative world-making.
Cáel M. Keegan is the Fulbright Distinguished Research Chair of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton University and Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Grand Valley State University. He is author of Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender (University of Illinois Press, 2018) and co-editor of Somatechnics 8.1 on trans cinematic bodies. His writing has also appeared in Genders, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Mediekultur, The Journal of Homosexuality, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and FLOW. Currently, he serves as Special Editor for Arts and Culture at Transgender Studies Quarterly. Nick Davis is an Associate Professor of English and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University, where his research and teaching emphasize commercial narrative films in and beyond the U.S., most often from queer and feminist perspectives. His book The Desiring-Image (2013) theorized new models of contemporary queer cinema in dialogue with Gilles Deleuze’s writings on film, desire, and “minor” art. He has published essays on Julie Dash’s Illusions, Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también, and many other movies. For several years he was a Contributing Editor at Film Comment magazine.