Berlant began employing this term, "genre flailing," in her writing in the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency in the United States and that serves as her most obvious image of the crisis provoking this flailing. Those circumstances have presented many new iterations of political crises for trans people, yet this can’t be said to be the crisis that organizes Disclosure’s general narrative or its final extravagant genre flail. Instead, the event that serves as Disclosure’s motivating crisis is implicitly “The Transgender Tipping Point”—both the much-discussed 2014 Time article itself and the visibility phenomena it seeks to describe.
The 2014 Time article (accompanied by a glamorous cover photo of Cox) blends a profile of Laverne Cox with an overview of “another civil rights movement […] poised to challenge long-held cultural norms and beliefs.”[13] [open endotes in new window] The article largely conflates the celebrity visibility or trans outness of Cox with that of the visibly gender nonconforming audience attending one of her public talks; a breathlessly voyeuristic description of the crowd opens the article, implicitly figuring all trans bodies (against Cox’s) as immediately readable and unthreatening in a gently comic manner:
“In the beaux-arts lobby of the Nourse theater in San Francisco, men in deep V-necks and necklaces walk by women with crew cuts and plaid shirts buttoned to the top. Boys carrying pink backpacks kiss on the lips, while long-haired ladies whose sequined tank tops expose broad shoulders snap selfies. About 1,100 people, many gleefully defying gender stereotypes, eventually pack the auditorium to hear the story of an unlikely icon.”[14]
The author’s newfound delight in the pleasures of clocking is tempered by later historical references, attesting to the actual long tradition of trans activism (which includes, at minimum, decades of lively debate about the politics of passing, and of the politics of treating passing as voluntary). All the same, the article optimistically claims,
“This new transparency is improving the lives of a long misunderstood minority and beginning to yield new policies, as trans activists and their supporters push for changes in schools, hospitals, workplaces, prisons and the military.”[15]
There is a confidence here, mirrored in the evocative title of the article, that trans people have suddenly arrived as an effectively organized, and more importantly understandable group, and that from this point on our problems will all soon evaporate, turning out to require nothing more than a set of administrative policy adjustments.
Trans activists and scholars have typically been much more hesitant to conclude that 2014 or any year since represents a decisive tipping point against myriad forms of oppression dependent on an institutionalized and culturally engrained system of gender. As an example of what is really a very wide field of engagement, Juliana Huxtable and Robert Hamblin, both of whom are featured in interviews in the excellent 2017 anthology Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, voice serious reservations about the potential rift between the lives of trans celebrities and the lives of those who are most typically subjected to violence on the basis of gender nonconformity.[16] Huxtable claims that,
“there is an actual moment of dynamic and, in many ways, powerful visibility, and perhaps there are reasons why it’s happening that we can point to. I think there are a lot of cultural factors in terms of gender variance that are hot-button issues now. I think, in terms of larger fantasies and narratives around social progress, visibility just fits into an ideal of where we would be at this moment; it’s the next logical step from third wave feminism or cyber culture or the juridical advancements of mainstream LGBT rights.”
“But it’s an empty gesture in a lot of ways. And it’s a gesture that I’m always questioning. Are they—meaning the audiences obsessed with and consuming media about transness—tapping into a derivative pornographic obsession with transgender bodies? Or are they putting me on display as a circus freak show, in a ‘We’re all secretly laughing at you’ sort of way? That’s the anxiety that I’ve gotten from the whole situation, because I think that the policing and the violence against trans people have a direct relationship to that increase in visibility. The people who gain visibility—those whom the media deem to be relatively ‘passable’ in one sense or another—end up being used as examples to police trans people generally.”[17]
We can certainly hope that the respectability of Laverne Cox, Jen Richards, Chaz Bono, or any variety of mainstream trans celebrities might help change cis hearts and minds towards the trans people they encounter in their own lives. As Huxtable points out, however, the trans celebrity could just as easily function as an unrealistic ideal of proper transness, which leaves many people consigned to an abject “bad trans” position.
Hamblin, following attention that the South African media gave to his transition as a white trans man, came to understand that this attention on him as an exemplary highly privileged trans person was actively unhelpful, that his “narrow and privileged view of transgender emergencies was redundant” when “black transgender people were acutely visible and in danger in society, and their rights were nowhere in reach.”[18] Hamblin chose to leave the trans rights organization he had founded and instead work on contributing trans-specific programming to an existing Cape Town sex workers’ organization. I bring up these examples of skepticism about the value of trans celebrity visibility not because I wish to imply that Disclosure is operating in a framework that was already stale at the “Tipping Point” moment. Instead, I want to point out that it can be productive to understand Disclosure as fundamentally organized around feeling out this ambivalence. Is mainstream visibility harmful? Is it ever helpful? If trans visibility cannot produce meaningful positive social changes, then what type of relationship is it possible for trans people to have to popular media? These are the questions that animate the film.
Director Sam Feder has been quite clear about his intentions in this area. Jump Cut published an interview with him in Fall 2016, at which point he was already working on Disclosure. In the interview, he observes that:
“With media attention declaring a shift in visibility as a ‘tipping point,’ I hear liberal allies noting this as a success for trans people in general. However, I don’t see success reflected in our lived reality except for the uplift of a few actors. Visibility is not always or necessarily a good thing. It can leave some people more vulnerable to harm, particularly when we consider the intersections of race, class, citizenship, religion, ability, etc. The recent increase in opportunities for visibility is often framed as success, presuming an improvement for all trans lives. This quick move to call this particular visibility ‘success’ performs two erasures: of the ongoing (or increased) struggles in trans people’s lives and of the previous visibility of trans people in media.”[19]
There is a striking similarity here to Cox’s comments which conclude the film, as we are shown an image of her photo on the cover of Time’s “The Transgender Tipping Point” issue (just before the montages and two figurative scenes I mention above): “We always have to be really skeptical when a few people are elevated, and the majority of people are still struggling.” These comments from Cox are expanded on by Chase Strangio, who the film credits as “Attorney at ACLU” (the American Civil Liberties Association):
“The trans person on the red carpet, or the trans character on television and film, those sort of representations of transness may incite rage in a viewer. And that viewer doesn't have access to the character. They have access to the person on the street. I think that makes it especially important for us to be pushing for actual material redistribution. Otherwise, all we're doing is elevating some people into the sphere of the powerful and not in any way working to disrupt the systems that exclude most trans people from material survival.”
The audio then switches to Susan Stryker (historian, documentarian, and founding editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly), who tells us,
“There is still a lot of work to do, and we can't think that just because you see trans representation that the revolution is over. You know. It's not. Things can spin on a dime. Having positive representation can only succeed in changing the conditions of life for trans people when it is part of a much broader movement for social change. Changing representation is not the goal. It's just the means to an end.”
The final minute of narration is once more in Cox’s voice, and she leaves us with open-ended, but cynical, speculation:
“I wonder if people who watch and love these shows, I wonder if they will reach out to trans people in need and work to defeat policies that scapegoat us, policies that discriminate against us, policies that dehumanize us. Because until that happens, all that energy from the silver screen won't be enough to better the lives of trans people off the screen.”
These comments certainly could be taken as a simple call for positive representation which is part of a wider progress narrative. There is much evidence that this is how many mainstream critics view the film. We can see this in the Rotten Tomatoes film synopsis, for example:
“Disclosure engrossingly illuminates the history and effects of the way transgender lives are depicted onscreen—and outlines how much progress still needs to be made.”[20]
Yet to arrive at this understanding of the film seems to mean total disengagement with Strangio and Stryker’s comments about ‘revolution,’ ‘material redistribution’ and how ‘[t]hings can spin on a dime.’ Even Cox’s own words trouble the narrative of progress as a positive correlation between mainstream representation and trans political agency or liberation. The physical attack from a stranger she experienced November 2020 when walking with a friend in an L.A. park is even more chilling evidence that even Cox herself is not granted immunity from transphobic violence by grace of her celebrated media role.[21] By leaving these comments questioning the value of trans celebrity visibility for the documentary’s last few minutes, the impression is left that the film makes the relationship between mainstream trans representation and progress towards trans liberation less certain, not more.
If we look at Cox’s own work as an example, both on and off screen, this rupture may come into clearer focus. Cox is the face of “The Transgender Tipping Point”—her role as a celebrity, and the role she played on Orange Is The New Black, serve to reassure a cisgender mainstream public that yes, it’s possible to enjoy a trans protagonist and envision a present-future where trans subjects are properly incorporated into liberal politics. While Cox’s activist work around prison abolition suggests a considerably more radical approach, this doesn’t mean that the role she plays as a celebrity cannot primarily serve to produce milquetoast (and apolitical) enjoyment of trans inspiration porn or pity. So how else might we view Disclosure, or view mainstream trans media representation? We’re not hungry simply for a greater quantity of representation—a suggestion Jen Richards makes in the documentary, and which Variety duly records in the closing sentence of its review, as if this was the most insightful concept presented by the film. What we want (by which I mean myself, by which I mean trans people, by which I mean everyone) is fresh genres with new affects.
This problem has received recent attention in trans academia, as our field groans for fresh perspectives under the burden of 30 years of scholarship while we nevertheless are forced to continue marketing ourselves as a nubile emerging subdiscipline. This may be best articulated in the entertainingly edgy dialogue, “After Trans Studies,” between Andrea Long Chu and Emmett Harsin Drager that was featured in Transgender Studies Quarterly’s Winter 2019 issue. While generally critiquing the reflexive anti-normativity of trans studies, our disparaging theoretical treatment of passing, and the degree to which our field uncreatively reuses queer theory concepts, the dialog also uses a psychoanalytic/affect-oriented approach to indicate that different approaches to genre might be the most generative movement today.
Harsin Drager claims.
“In trans studies, it seems to me that we are telling a story of our victimhood (tragedy) or a story of our resistance (romance). I am much more interested in a satire, a genre about how truly disappointing and sometimes even boring it is to be a trans person in this world.”[22]
This description of the scholarly field can equally serve as an indictment of the primary gestures of contemporary mainstream trans representation in television and film. In attempting to free ourselves of the bad tropes of the past, we are left with a very narrow horizon within which we can take pleasure in seeing trans people. We tie ourselves in knots trying to figure out how to represent oppression in a way that renders us dignified and respectable. We risk “humorlessness,”[23] because we so deeply need for the trans object represented to finally appear unquestionably worthy of love and attachment. This burden is simply too much for any trans body to bear, onscreen or off.
At the conclusion of this article, I further address how we might distinguish a camp break from this critical deadlock with one that is more broadly satirical. In arguing that Disclosure is an ironic, campy love letter to the politics of positive representation—which assumes the ultimate failure of this approach, and is thus a fundamentally different approach from that of The Celluloid Closet—I still recognize that there is a good deal of sincere consensus between interviewees on tropological concerns, much of which displays the influence of some of the most prominent media critiques from the field of trans studies in earlier decades.
