I have been asking the question— what is trans film? —for years now somewhat informally and more formally as the unanswerable question that directs my research. I love the uncertainty of an unanswerable question. Uncertainty in the sense that once I think I have part of the question figured out another part of the question becomes unknown.[1] To paraphrase the energy of Judith Butler writing about postmodernism, the question of trans film “is surely a question.”[2] I think this is why I am so drawn to Helen Hok-Sze Leung’s  entry  “Film” from the first issue of TSQ and the series of questions about what is and what could be trans film.[3]  I underline and re-underline the same passage from Leung with every read: 

This last consideration —of the discourse around a film— is perhaps the most significant: when and why a film is talked about as a ‘‘trans film’’ tells us a lot about the current state of representational politics and community reception as well as trends and directions in film criticism.[4]

I am writing about trans films—films as trans and films with trans potential—right now but the “why” of the films I write about as trans is not very clear to me. Why is my own uncertain variable. In this essay I explore the why of my own research into trans film prompted by a question from the Q&A during the panel I was on at 2025 Console-ing Passions Conference at Georgia State University. 

I presented on the “Body Horror” panel looking for feedback on a paper on the films of David Cronenberg. I find transness in body horror and in Cronenberg’s films. I am personally very fond of this paper and larger project. It helped me orient myself academically and identify the objects for my dissertation. I also enjoy presenting this paper and engaging in conversation with body horror scholars with different relationships to film and to bodies on film. I am grateful for my co-panelists for their work and the conversations we were able to have. To clarify, I am not insisting that trans bodies are horrific, but I think that body horror shows the uncertainty of a body in a way that complicates and deconstructs the seemingly rigid links between having a biology, having a body, and having a gender.[5] Even more so, I am not arguing that Cronenberg’s work is definitively trans but that there is a certain trans resonance that is important to consider and explore.[6] I am finding transness and describing trans film by considering the ephemeral, the uncertain, and the not-so-explicitly trans or what film scholar Eliza Steinbock would call, “shimmering.”[7] At the same time, I have often found myself in need of additional perspective to clarify my uncertain approach to trans film. A perspective I received in the form of a question from my co-panelist and film scholar Mychal Reiff-Shanks. 

It was the last question of Q&A, and I have not stopped thinking about it. Paraphrasing, Reiff-Shanks asked what made Cronenberg’s work trans to me personally and further clarified by asking if it was the topic of my conference paper that epitomized transness or if there was something else in addition to my conference paper that spoke to how I am understanding transness in the collected works of David Cronenberg. My thoughts immediately went towards the Cael Keegan’s phenomenological theorization of “transgender objects for public consumption” and more specifically how certain media images were significant to his trans experiences.[8] Keegan’s work scaffolded my approach to Reiff-Shanks’s question and helped me ground and expand my understanding of Cronenberg’s work through all my experiences of becoming through film. Once I found where I was in relation to film, I was able to locate where I found transness in Cronenberg’s work. I thought about an interview Cronenberg did with Serge Grünberg in which Grünberg asked about the significance of birth in his movies. I thought about how Cronenberg resisted the concept of birth in favor of transformation, of rebirth and human creativity.[9] And I thought about how Grünberg paired birth and rebirth with monstrosity to which Cronenberg replied: 

Yeah, but I think that monstrosity is a relative thing. […] What might be considered monstrous in one era becomes normality of the next era. […] So, I think I’m fascinated by the creativity of what is it to be human. Of human existence. It’s constantly creative in ways that we’re not even aware of. […] All of those things are constantly shifting and changing…It’s monstrous but it’s exciting too, I don’t always see them as negative.[10]

The things that I felt strongly towards in this exchange between Cronenberg and Grünberg—the intent to focus on transformation, the desire to reframe the monstrous, the fascination with human creativity, and the understanding that reality and normality are constantly shifting—are what resonates with me as trans in the works of David Cronenberg. At the same time, these are also my defining concepts of trans film (right now).[11] So, what is trans film (to me)? It is the intent to focus on transformation, the desire to reframe the monstrous, the fascination with human creativity, and the understanding that reality and normality are constantly shifting. 

Bibliography

3Blue1Brown, dir. The More General Uncertainty Principle, Regarding Fourier Transforms. 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBnnXbOM5S4.

Butler, Judith. “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism.’” In Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, edited by Seyla Benhabib. Routledge, 1995.

Cronenberg, David. Interviews with Serge Grünberg. Cromwell Press, 2006.

Dimock, Wai Chee. “A Theory of Resonance.” PMLA 112, no. 5 (1997): 1060–71. https://doi.org/10.2307/463483.

Keegan, Cael M. “Revisitation: A Trans Phenomenology of the Media Image.” MedieKultur: Journal of Media and Communication Research 32, no. 61 (2016): 61. https://doi.org/10.7146/mediekultur.v32i61.22414.

Leung, Helen Hok-Sze. “Film.” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, nos. 1–2 (2014): 86–89.

Steinbock, Eliza. Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change. Duke University Press, 2019.