“Bodies,” writes Marquis Bey (2024, 163), “do not preexist their beholding.” Rather, being beheld entails being constituted as an embodied subject along predefined, classificatory lines. Writing at the intersection of blackness and nonbinariness, Bey refuses to be “fixed” in this way. To refuse to be seen, they argue, is to thwart the extraction of an apparently inviolable confession of gendered and racialised subjectivity. Any such confession, Michel Foucault ([1981] 2014, 17) reminds us, requires that the subject “bind” themselves to this supposed “truth”; we are impelled to acquiesce to a binary framework of “man” and “woman”, to (mis)recognise ourselves in its stiflingly rigid categories. But what does it mean to refuse? What happens if, like Bey (2024, 169), we engage in practices of “nonconfession”—practices, not of representation, but of “facelessness”? There would, of course, be immediate, material repercussions. Technologies of surveillance, from the hospital ward to the photobooth, determine access to healthcare, housing and mobility. To dream of refusal is not to deny this fact. Rather, it is an abolitionist imperative, a gesture towards alternative modes of societal organisation and collective liberation. 

Here, I ask what it might mean to take up Bey’s invitation through the medium of cinema. If it has long held the promise of radical reimaginings, cinema remains—perhaps frustratingly, for a project of facelessness—inextricably bound to the act of looking. On the one hand, visual representation has afforded increased visibility to certain trans experiences in recent years (contained, it should be stressed, within resolutely transnormative boundaries). On the other hand, the instruments of representation cannot be detached from those apparatuses of classification, exposure and surveillance long deployed against trans and gender-non-conforming persons. How, at a time when transphobia is being weaponised as a tool of ‘fascist energizing’ (Cram 2024) can we ignore the genealogical links between cinema and the imaging technologies of biomedicine, border violence and the prison system? Indeed, many contemporary cinematic treatments of trans life—and death—have only served to amplify the violent fantasies of a white, ableist and cisheteronormative order. A politics based on “visibility” cannot hope to overcome this; nor can it contribute to our liberation. Questioning the prominence awarded to identity papers in the utopian narrative of Paul B. Preciado’s Orlando, My Political Biography (2023), Grace Lavery (2025) highlights the longue durée of “legal surveillance and biopolitical control” against trans bodies. Those structures will not be overturned merely by making ourselves visible (if anything, they will only be reinforced). We cannot limit our attention to winning “discrete, individual rights,” nor to our “insertion into a representational logic […] always coded along racial & gender lines”. Rather, we must break “the very machinery that doles out rights & is coeval with violence” (Bey 2022, 114). 

Only accessible, at the time of writing, as a three-minute teaser, activist-filmmaker bruce’s Vos papiers (ID, Please, France, 2013) suggests one set of possible answers to these questions. In the documentary, seven trans participants are invited to reflect on their relationship to their identity documents. Each interview is framed in the style of a passport photograph: the participants stand against a neutral backdrop, as if in a photo booth; they appear variously in profile, frontally, or—as in the excerpt which remains online—with their backs to the camera. Reworking the visual grammar of state surveillance, Vos papiers playfully reimagines the contrôles d’identité (identity checks) routinely demanded by the French state of its citizens, among them the notorious contrôle au faciès (racial profiling); these are the procedures through which Frenchness, in its enduringly colonial mode, is rendered synonymous with whiteness, and by extension, cisness. The film thus attempts a “pattern-jamming” of the medico-legal sex/gender regime—a move which, to borrow Nicole Archer’s (2017, 298) description, is at once “a serious mode of political resistance and a strategic plan for everyday survival.” Such an approach “aims to ensure that nonbinary gender variance is not simply reduced to the proliferation of tick-boxes on tomorrow’s identity papers”; at issue is not simply the narrowness of the labels “male” and “female”, but the desirability, or necessity, of identity documents themselves. 

In the excerpt above, the viewer is led, quite literally, to confront these questions from a new angle. “Can we know what people are from behind?”, asks the interviewee, as they refuse the normative injunction to be filmed facing the camera. Their monologue interrogates the futility of assigning sex/gender based on fragmentary body parts: “if I tie my hair up, would you say, “they’re a guy”, “they’re a chick”, “they’re trans””; “I could easily ditch the bra, and people would say I’ve got a man’s back.” The supposed markers of “maleness” and “femaleness”, so regularly cited to justify degrading, conspiratorial “transvestigations”, are revealed to be entirely aleatory. Random though these assignations may be, they are not without their power: these are the criteria which underpin the triad of whiteness, cisness, and sexual difference operative in France, as elsewhere, to such devastating effect (Heaney 2024). In this sequence, however, the documents intended to shore up that exclusionary regime lose all authority. When the speaker casually holds up their identity card, any textual details are indiscernible. The essentialising categories of “male” and “female” are blurry, out of focus— they are, after all, the very “tick-boxes” that the film itself works against. 

By refusing to corroborate, indexically, this binary framework, Vos papiers emphasises the generative potential of disavowal. In his theorisation of an anti-capitalist “aesthetics of refusal”, Kenneth Berger (2020) sees such an aesthetics as not merely “pure negation”, but as a mechanism for “perceptual incitement” (15). The indexical instruments of the cisnormative status quo are left “anxious and frustrated” in their futile attempts to categorise and fix, in every sense of the word, the speaking subject. Eschewing cinema’s atomising tendency to define its trans protagonists by the illusory “truth” of their anatomy—from Tom Shaydac’s Ace Ventura (1994) to Céline Sciamma’s Tomboy (2011)—, Vos papiers directs our attention to the speaker’s own pronouncements—to their own sense of self, and to a gendered subjectivity brought into view, paradoxically, by their own facelessness. 

In Vos papiers, refusal is at once an aesthetic, political, and ethical gesture. The dissemination of the film in the years since its original release is highly instructive in this regard. Previously available to view, in full, online, only a short extract of the film remains readily accessible. This is, of course, the very segment of the film which, in its embrace of facelessness as an aesthetic strategy, goes furthest in its refusal of technologies of surveillance; now, the film itself becomes faceless. Whilst we can only speculate about the reasons for restricting access to Vos papiers, the decision suggests a broader ethic of care towards the participants. As early as 2016, bruce had acknowledged the difficulties participants faced in watching images of themselves at an earlier point in their transition; the film was recut a year after premiering, after a participant asked that their scenes be removed (Arroway 2016). 

In other words, refusal must not stop at the level of the image. It must extend to all aspects of the filmic process, from conceptualisation to distribution, lest we reproduce the disregard for trans life so pervasive in mainstream cinema and in culture writ large. Refusal demands a communal effort, one which recognises that no project of liberation, filmmaking included, can ever reach a fixed, finished form. Finally, this requires that we do not fall into the trap of limiting “trans cinema” to an unsustainable, and ultimately unenforceable, definition of “trans” itself. The work of refusal must be creative if it is to effect material change; it means rethinking established categories, not retreating into them. “Visibility” and “rights” are insufficient against the weaponisation of transphobia by new fascist formations; nor can we settle for the promise of new papers. Turning our backs to the camera does not mean shying away from these responsibilities. On the contrary, to do so might yet be a necessary first step towards assuming them.  

Works cited

Archer, Nicole. 2017. “Dynamic Static.” In Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, edited by Tourmaline, Eric A. Stanley & Johanna Burton. MIT Press.

Arroway. 2016. “Interview du réalisateur bruce (1/2) : « aujourd’hui, c’est important de voir des personnes trans, et des personnes trans différentes ».” Le cinéma est politique, January 26. https://www.lecinemaestpolitique.fr/interview-du-realisateur-bruce-12-aujourdhui-cest-important-de-voir-des-personnes-trans-et-des-personnes-trans-differentes/. 

Berger, Kenneth. 2020. “Cinema Against Communication: Spectacle, Anxiety, and the Aesthetics of Refusal.” differences 31 (1): 1–35. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-8218746. 

Bey, Marquis. 2022. Cistem Failure: Essays on Blackness and Cisgender. Duke University Press.

–––. 2024. “Faceless: Nonconfessions of a Gender.” In Feminism Against Cisness, edited by Emma Heaney. Duke University Press.

Cram, Emerson. 2024. “Fascist Energizing: Rhetorics of Transantagonism as Affective Metabolism.” Quarterly Journal of Speech110 (3): 442–479. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2024.2368572. 

Foucault, Michel. 2014. “Inaugural Lecture” [delivered at the Catholic University of Louvain on April 2, 1981]. In Wrong-Doing, Truth Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, edited by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt, translated by Stephen W. Sawyer. Chicago University Press.

Heaney, Emma. 2024. “Introduction: Sexual Difference without Cisness.” In Feminism Against Cisness.

Lavery, Grace. 2025. “Papers Please: Poignancy in the Age of State Surveillance.” Salvage Zone, June 11. https://salvage.zone/papers-please-poignancy-in-the-age-of-state-surveillance/.