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Shimmering images: on transgender embodiment and cinematic aesthetics
Steinbock, E.A.
Publication date
2011
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Final published version
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Citation for published version (APA):
Steinbock, E. A. (2011). Shimmering images: on transgender embodiment and cinematic
aesthetics. [Thesis, fully internal, Universiteit van Amsterdam]. Eigen Beheer.
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Shimmering Images:
On Transgender Embodiment and Cinematic Aesthetics

ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT

ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor

aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam

op gezag van de Rector Magnificus

prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom

ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde

commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Aula der Universiteit

op vrijdag 17 juni 2011, te 13.00 uur

door Elizabeth Anne Steinbock

geboren te Louisville, Kentucky, Verenigde Staten van Amerika
Promotiecommissie

Promotor: Prof dr M.A. Bleeker
Co-promotor: Dr M. Aydemir

Overige leden: Prof dr P.P.R.W. Pisters
Prof dr M.D. Rosello
Prof dr P. Pattynama
Prof dr R. van de Vall
Dr W.B.S. Strauven
Dr S. Stryker
Dr I. van der Tuin

Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen
In one continuous motion, my idea of myself and who I am turns inside out,
like a pond that flips upside down in the spring, when the cold winter water
slides under, and the earth-warmed bottom water rises. The underlife comes to
the surface. All those years I was no obedient asexual girl, but a restless lover
searching for the lost garden, that place of male woman and female man. The
mythic place before the Fall, before Adam was shaped from clay by Lilith, and
Lilith chased out and forgotten, before Eve was torn from Adam’s side and
forced to like down under him. From the beginning I have wanted you. I have
wanted to sit beside you on our bed, touch you, feed you the jewels of
pomegranate torn from the flesh of our lives. I have wanted to walk with you in
that place where we are both at once, to lie down with you under the trees that
have not yet begun to flame with the dividing sword, by the water that
shimmers with heat rising, risen to the light.

Minnie Bruce Pratt, s/he, p. 104

Cinema’s greatest power may be its ability to evacuate meanings and identities,
to proliferate resemblances without sense or origin. … There is no structuring
lack, no primordial division, but a continuity between the physiological and
affective responses of my own body and the appearances and disappearances,
the mutations and perdurances, of the bodies and images on screen. The
important distinction is not the hierarchical, binary one between bodies and
images, or between the real and its representations. It is rather a question of
discerning multiple and continually varying interactions among what can be
defined indifferently as bodies and as images: degrees of stillness and motion,
of action and passion, of clutter and emptiness, of light and dark.

Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, p. 255-256

Table of Contents

Preface 1

Introduction 5
Differencing Transgender Studies -- Towards the Shimmering Light --- Words and Images

Chapter One 23
Secrecy
True Confessions: Foucault and “the dark shimmer of sex”--- “Look! No, Don’t!” Exposure and
Authority ---“I Love a Woman with a Cock” --- Someone’s Crying in the Kitchen. The Limit Case
of Docu-Porn

Chapter Two 61
Fetishism
Buck Angel’s ‘Trademark’ --- Of Sex Conversions and the “Compensatory Substitute” ---
Fungible Fetish --- Pornosphere of Phantasms --- My Body, My Material --- Machines for
Perceiving ‘Self-Evidences’

Chapter Three 95
Cut
Attractions at the Turn of the Century --- Therapeutic Somatechnics --- Aesthetics and
Anaesthestics --- A Bio-Picture Show --- Bridging the Cut --- “The work of [gender] in an age of
technological reproducibility”

Chapter Four 131
Suture
Facing the Mirror: A Stage and a Scene --- Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: The Femme and Her
Other --- The Look of Love --- The Screen of Culture --- Seeing Lacan’s Imaginary Phallus and
Other Eccentric Forms --- The Desire to Be in the Picture --- The Cinematic Subject and Inner
Mimicry --- A Murdered or Vitalized Subjectivity

Chapter Five 179
Curiosity
“Where do babies come from?” or, “Have you got a widdler too?”--- Touch and Corporeal
Openings --- The Openings of Dandy Dust --- The Carnal Density of Vision --- The Stain ---
Curious Theory --- The Commitment to Open-endedness

Epilogue 221

Works Cited 227
Appendix: Trans-Erotic Filmography 245

Acknowledgements 249

English Summary 253
Nederlandse Samenvatting 259

Preface

In the course of researching this dissertation I spent time with a colorful variety of
groups and individuals amassing as well as discussing an archive of trans erotic film
and video. I visited Hamburg for the ever-friendly and helpful “Bildwechsel,” a
feminist arts and culture archive, and spent many happy hours watching hard to find
tapes in Berlin’s “Sexclusivitäten Salon,” hosted by Laura Méritt. I also attended the
first Berlin Porn Film Festival and presented at the second, where trans porn was
screened in its own program and Buck Angel made a cameo. I travelled to
Manchester’s “Get Bent! Queer Festival” with my carefully selected clips of trans
sexual representation to organize a workshop. My own and others’ programming of
trans porn and documentaries that addressed trans sexuality appeared in festivals,
large and DIY, from the late 1990s to now. My video projects on visualizing trans
eroticism (2003, 2005, 2008) travelled on their own from The Netherlands
Transgender Film Festival to San Franscisco’s Trannyfest, New York’s MIX Queer
Experimental Film Festival, Philadelphia, Hamburg, Brussels, and so on.
The growing network I established in interactions, personal and digital,
demonstrated to me that this topic was of vital interest to people whose self-image
was often for the first time projected as sexy rather than as a fetish category to the
general public. My academic training in feminism, sexuality, and film theory shaped
my view on this sex-positive revolution in the transgender community as also being of
vital interest to the scholarship grappling with the transgender provocation. Since the
early 1990s, trans scholars have fought to claim space in academia, particularly in
disciplines that allegedly specialize in trans phenomenon such as sexology, clinical
medicine, sociology and increasingly in cultural studies and philosophy. What might
this material, so preoccupied with themes of representation, sexuality, and gender,
have to say to those academic fields that pretend to be the thinkers of such matters?
Early on, one of the project’s crucial moments of formation occurred during the
heat of August 2004, inside a dusty artist studio in Brooklyn. I sat with multi-media
artist Tobaron Waxman pouring over a personally assembled video and film
collection. Tobaron and I were preparing a presentation on what we were calling the
FtM erotic archive, or “GenderfluXXXors Uncoded: A FTM Supornova,” for short. It
was a mouthful, but we hoped to raise awareness in the breadth of imagery that spoke
of, or struggled with the desire for trans eroticism. The emphasis on female-to-male
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transsexuals or transmasculine characters sought to counter the assumption of active
trans people as only male-to-female and limited to the commercial porn industry’s
“chicks with dicks.” Our presentation, with myself beamed in from Amsterdam, was
held in a community garden in Manhattan’s East Village as a part of their
experimental cinema programming.
Tobaron suggested the archive include films like Being John Malkovitch (1999),
Salmonberries (1991), Yentl (1983), Liquid Sky (1983), Victor/Victoria (1982), and
Desperate Living (1977). In a few months of intensive researching I sought to catch
up with his roving-eye, which had already been searching out moments of desirous
transmasculinity for most of his life. My sensitivity to transmasculinity was more
recently activated, and had focused on the boom in self-produced sexually explicit
material. Most surprising to me, however, was his ‘prologue’ for the archive, a well-
known musical, the 1961 film version of The West Side Story. This film in particular
suggested that our project raised problems of erotic visibility both specific to and
beyond transgender bodies.
West Side Story features the character Anybodys, who wants to be in the Jets
gang composed of white youth, the fierce rivals of the Sharks who are all Puerto
Rican. Gangs are made up of boys and their girls. Anybodys wants to be accepted as
one of the boys, but is rejected throughout the film and told to “put on a skirt.” The
phrase tells Anybodys that she can only be a Jet if she tries to be one of the girls. The
script describes Anybodys as a tomboy, a girl who refuses to express female
identification. For this refusal and for expressing a cross-gender identification
Anybodys is called a “freak.” In the character of Anybodys, we can find anybody and
nobody: everyone and no one. Any and all bodies are subject to the enforcement of a
normative gender expression in alignment with their sex. Any body that cannot or
does not have a recognizable gender expression as a boy or a girl becomes a no body,
a presumably inconsequential body within the social scene. Moreover, this social
scene of gangs organizes around a heterosexual scheme of boys and their girls. Where
might a tomboy body fit into this erotic script?
But at a crucial point in the film, the character Anybodys is consequential
because of what she, or perhaps I should say he, knows. The gang’s fighting has
escalated and the leader of the Jets named Tony has disappeared to hide from his
crime. Everyone wants to find him and find out what he will do next, but he could be
anywhere in the boroughs of New York City, a needle in a haystack. The Jets gang is
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walking through the dark streets trying to figure out how to find their leader. Lacking
a socially normative body, Anybodys says that s/he slips in and out of the shadows,
“like wind through a fence.” Tobaron pointed out, only this transgender character can
move between the barriers erected between the territories of the rival gangs to see and
hear things others cannot. Stretching back to the Greek character Tiresias, gender
ambiguous and gender-changing figures are often the “knowers” of special secrets.
Anybodys might be understood as another one of these fictional invocations
connecting transgenderism with special knowledge. When a gang member says, “Ah,
what’s the freak know,” Anybodys retorts, “plenty.”
As a special agent for the Jets, Anybodys becomes more important to them,
indicated in one scene by Anybodys becoming more visible, moving from the
darkness behind the gang, yelling, “hey buddy boys!” to the side, hissing “listen
listen!” Finally, Anybodys arrives at the center of the group, and under the bright
studio lights delivers the news that Chino of the Sharks has a gun. The gang takes in
this vital knowledge and goes to search for Tony in places like the docks and the
schoolyard, whereas the new leader Ice tells Anybodys to go back to darting in and
out of the shadows. From start to the finish, this scene associates Anybodys with
shadows. Living in the shadows, however, does not mean Anybodys is invisible to all.
Ice alone seems to be able to acknowledge Anybodys: he says, “you done good,
buddy boy,” rhetorically making Anybodys one of the buddy boys he, or she, wants to
be. This validation includes Anybodys in the Jets gang and perhaps more importantly
in the social gang of boys. Anybodys wistfully responds, “Thanks Daddio.” A quiet
exchange that speaks volumes, this is the only point in the script that Anybodys is not
denigrated, the one time that she, or he, is acknowledged with a smile.
This fragment haunted Tobaron for decades, and now me for the entirety of the
project. Strained as it may be, Anybodys’ desire for sameness, to be one of them,
seems to tip over into a homosexual desire signaled by the daddy-boy roles. Out of
frustration, I had to ask, why is it so hard to ‘see’ Anybodys as an erotic being?
Slipping in and out of shadows Anybodys moves into darkness and out of light,
becoming a shimmer of a body, difficult to grasp perceptually and, as the film
suggests, as a known entity. This dissertation has attempted to understand the
difficulties and potential benefits that are posed by Anybodys darting movements. In
these pages, I offer a theory of the shimmering image that Anybodys forms in the film;
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