Shimmering images : trans cinema, embodiment, and the aesthetics of change / Eliza Steinbock.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Steinbock, Eliza, 1980- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Trans people in motion pictures.

Transgender people in motion pictures.

Transsexuals in motion pictures.

Gender identity in motion pictures.

Motion pictures--Social aspects.

Motion pictures.

Motion pictures--Aesthetics.

Physical Description:

xiii, 231 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2019.

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.

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 199-217) and index.

Other Format:

Online version: Steinbock, Eliza, 1980- author. Shimmering images

ISBN:

9781478003243

1478003243

9781478003885

147800388X

OCLC:

1046461682