A materialist trans feminist approach to media, text only

Give us our bread and our roses: a materialist trans feminist approach to media

Inside a queer club set in the 1980s, a door opens from the street and a young Black trans woman strides into the shot, moving through a hallway filled with queer and trans people of color. As she walks through the crowd, they wish her luck on her interview for “that modeling campaign.” The camera tracks backward, holding her in frame as she walks down the length of the hallway, barely pausing her forward trajectory as she greets friends with a word, a kiss, or a hug. Moments later, she enters a performance space, and the camera turns to keep her in frame as she advances to stand at the beginning of a spot lit runway, poised to walk its length. Amid cuts away to the emcee, the audience, and the other contestants, we see her walk, pose, turn, and pose again. The spotlight crowns her with its illumination as a series of slightly low-angled shots celebrate her beauty and confidence.

These images from Season 2, Episode 3 of the FX television series Pose (2018-present, Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Steven Canals) ensure that we see Angel—the future model and current rising star of the ballroom scene—as photogenic, gorgeous, and already successful within a community that both imagines alternatives to dominant values and is simultaneously a site of continuous struggle, conflict, and negotiation with those values.[1][open endnotes in new window] Crucially, this scene is juxtaposed with her modeling audition scene, illuminating the distinctions and connections between these spaces and communities. Written by white trans writer Our Lady J and directed by Black trans writer and producer Janet Mock, this episode follows Black trans actor Indya Moore’s character Angel just as she is at the point of breaking into the modeling industry. Praised and celebrated by her friends and chosen family, she’s about to finally get the life she’s always wanted. An outsider, she seems poised to enter into the economic and social structures that have excluded her.

What might a Marxist analysis make of this scene, especially given that this example of trans cultural production is produced by giants of the entertainment industry and explores topics that might seem to be strongly associated with capitalism, like beauty, ambition, belonging (within hegemony), and socially-sanctioned triumph? Based on common (mis)interpretations of trans cultural production that appear in classroom discussions, casual conversations with colleagues, comments overheard at conferences, and online debates about the perils of assimilationism in trans representation, there seems to be an easy answer to that question. Trans issues are a question of identity politics, and are not only separate from but even opposed to Marxist political struggle.[2] From such a position, the show inadvertently reveals that Angel and her community are misidentifying and misunderstanding their situation and are complicit with the racialized, gendered, and cissexist capitalistic values that actually oppress them. But such an interpretation remains incomplete and unsatisfying as it attends only to the surface content of the scene, and not to its formal and affective registers.

In this essay, I use Pose as a case study to examine two competing Marxist approaches to the analysis of trans cultural production. First, I discuss the problems with what I’ll describe as a “capitalist complicity” approach, which I contend is a reductive understanding of the process of participation in (and resistance to) capitalism. Then, I argue for the advantages of a Marxist approach inspired by materialist trans feminism, which considers how trans and queer communities understand, negotiate, and describe the material conditions they confront within capitalism. I contend that a capitalist complicity approach fails to offer productive anti-capitalist insights even though it is a common way for leftist critics to interpret trans cultural production. Instead, I draw on queer of color critique and on Jody Rosenberg’s description of “Transgender Marxism” as a dialectical lesson in how “life is both made and makes other lives possible”[3] to argue that a materialist trans feminist approach that is based in formal analysis allows critics to collaborate with trans artists and creators in envisioning liberatory potentialities.

A capitalist complicity analysis of the scene I described from Pose might focus on how Angel’s desires and ambitions—as well as her ability to be read as cisgender—are shaped by and reinforce the harmful social structures of white supremacist, hetero- and cis-sexist capitalism. It might also regard the entire setting of the scene as further proof of capitalist complicity since the ballroom community devotes so much time and effort to imitating the culture and fashion of the powerful. That analysis isn’t entirely wrong. However, not only does it misunderstand how cultural production emerges from dialectical struggle, but it also presents trans and queer subjects narrowly, and neglects their ability to understand, assess, and transform their material conditions. As Marlon Bailey’s research on ballroom culture in Detroit demonstrates, community members are not actually reiterating dominant social scripts, but instead are constructing new kinship models through cultural production that supports and sustains their countercultural existence.[4] Of course, Pose is fictional, and in many ways it does represent the trend that Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rouke identify when they describe how trans lives are increasingly packaged by popular media in order to interpellate trans people as “properly subjectified market citizens.”[5] Yet such an interpretation of Pose only attends to some elements of what Stuart Hall would call the dominant reading of the show; it also overlooks aspects of the dominant message while simultaneously neglecting to imagine how spectators might engage with this text more complexly.

By contrast, a materialist trans feminist analysis can illuminate the stakes of ballroom culture’s countercultural intervention into hegemony, since it emphasizes societal transformation through coalitional politics among those most marginalized by late capitalism: trans people, people with disabilities, people who are incarcerated, survivors of sexual violence, those engaged in anti-colonial struggle, and others.[6] Attuned to material conditions, materialist trans feminism is also necessarily intersectional and thus closely tied to queer of color critiques of capitalism. Similarly capacious, trans cultural production involves cultural work by trans people in an incredibly wide variety of media and has a long history of radical, leftist critique.[7] Yet instead of looking for the ways that trans and queer subjects might be navigating and surviving the conditions they face, the capitalist complicity approach assumes too quickly that trans and queer subjects who engage with the world as it is are fooled by capitalism. At its extreme, the capitalist complicity approach resembles the transphobic position that trans cultural production—and the very existence of trans people—is deeply and uniquely complicit with capitalism.[8]

Pose stages a desire for success, beauty, and power by constructing situations that demonstrate how complicated both power and desire can be. In the scene I describe above, Angel longs to have her beauty recognized by the outside world in the same way that it is embraced by her community, and her friends and chosen family are simultaneously proud and envious of her. The capitalist complicity approach can’t fully account for the scene’s complex expression of desire, longing, and envy, but a materialist trans feminist approach can examine the feelings felt by the characters within the fiction and analyze how they are communicated to the viewers through formal filmmaking strategies. Form is crucial to my materialist trans feminist analysis, since form itself is how our embodied experiences of media are produced. Additionally, form offers a vital way to engage with trans cultural production in the digital era, since both trans people and digital media are inaccurately imagined as exemplars of late capitalism’s mythicization of fluidity, flexibility, and frictionless interchangeability.[9] As Nathaniel Dickson writes, just as art problematizes “the seeming naturalness of things” through its form, gender transition troubles many of the processes of social reproduction that must be naturalized in order to sustain capitalism.[10]

Gender transition destabilizes capitalist social reproduction not just despite but because of the demand that it makes for access to resources in the name of human flourishing, joy, and pleasure.[11] This “hunger” for what others have and for what trans people are denied is seen as counter-revolutionary by a left that neglects physicality and embodiment,[12] but its particularity and its insistence on access to what makes life livable is profoundly intertwined with Marxist politics.[13] As Carolyn Kay Steedman argues, the “structure of feeling” of envy (of the rich and powerful, or of those in closer proximity to power) is a form of feminist class consciousness, yet its power is all too often dismissed.[14] Steedman writes that only

“by allowing this envy entry into political understanding” can “the proper struggles of people in a state of dispossession to gain their inheritance … be seen not as sordid and mindless greed for the things of the market place [sic], but attempts to alter a world that has produced in them states of unfulfilled desire.”[15]

In other words, the envious desire felt by the oppressed for what the powerful have does not merely reinforce the existing power structures. Instead, it produces an affective friction that strips away the seeming naturalness or rightness of that power. It exposes the cruelty of the system and gives voice to the demand for change.

Keeping this in mind, a materialist trans feminist analysis of the scene might acknowledge that Angel’s pursuit of a modeling career is one of the few possibilities available to her if she wants to leave behind risky survival sex work, and it could attend to the way Angel and her community understand their conditions, their oppression, and their opportunities. In this reading, the pageantry of the balls is not merely complicity with capitalism but is instead a form of class consciousness. Producing a counterculture that pursues beauty and success, this scene can be read as an invitation to imagine what kind of world is possible if pleasure, joy, and luxury aren’t necessarily the property of the bourgeoisie. As suffragist Helen Todd wrote in 1911,

“there will be no prisons, no scaffolds, no children in factories, no girls driven on the street to earn their bread, in the day when there shall be ‘Bread for all, and roses too.”[16]

Today, protest art by contemporary trans activists responds to murders of trans people, especially Black trans women, by demanding, in the words of artist and activist Wriply Bennet, that the public “give us our roses while we are alive.”[17] Cultural production itself is one of the “roses” to which all are proposed to be entitled, and trans cultural production shows us how desire for these “roses” can be understood as a critique of what is in the name of what could be.

As Sam Feder’s Disclosure (2020) examines, trans cultural producers are active in Hollywood but consistently marginalized due to the misperception that there are no trans actors, writers, or directors available to tell trans stories. Pose is featured in Feder’s documentary as an example of correcting this tendency, which has long had serious economic consequences for trans cultural workers. The significant contributions that trans cultural workers have made to Pose are important, both from an artistic standpoint and from a labor equity perspective. Yet I focus on Pose not only because of the many trans cultural workers who are critical to its success,[18] but more importantly because of how it revisits and reimagines the documentary Paris is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990) from the perspective of trans cultural workers. Directed by a white, cisgender lesbian, Paris is Burning follows Black and Latinx trans and queer ballroom performers in the late eighties and early nineties as they compete in balls. Part of the independent film movement identified by critic B. Ruby Rich as “New Queer Cinema,”[19] the documentary was both celebrated and critiqued for its exploration of this particular queer of color subculture. As a result, Paris is Burning has been at the heart of debates about the political economics of trans representation, and it has famously been the subject of numerous interpretations that follow what I call the capitalist complicity approach—some of which I will discuss below. These issues emerge again in Pose, which draws on Paris is Burning for its settings, storylines, and even many of its visual motifs. Yet Pose, by contrast, is shaped by trans creators, and this allows Pose itself to serve as commentary on Paris is Burning some three decades later.

Since its release, some critics of Paris is Burning have suggested that its transgender subjects problematically celebrate consumer capitalism and conspicuous consumption. This position is aligned with a more general concern that transgender people are icons of conspicuous consumption under late stage capitalism or enforcers of patriarchy and neoliberalism.[20] More important, it also emerges in historical materialism when dominant ideologies about gender, race, and sexual orientation are treated as natural. As Ferguson notes, this is a position that reiterates Marx’s own inability to fully understand how capitalism is racialized and gendered.[21] While this discursive tendency is reductive and has been challenged repeatedly, it often resurfaces in casual conversations about trans cultural production, including classroom discussions of trans media production. There’s a discomfort with the idea that gender presentation and access to gender affirming technologies might be a political issue, even among some who consider themselves to be trans allies. Among my colleagues and my students, I notice a lingering assumption that attention to the surface or to appearance is seen as unserious or as disconnected from important political issues. For Julia Serano, this is tied to femmephobia, or cultural discomfort with what is gendered feminine—such as beauty, looks, or outward form.[22] While these ideas might not withstand close scrutiny, they persist and deserve to be interrogated. One solution, following Ferguson, is to “disidentify” with historical materialism’s silences around race, gender, and sexuality.[23] However, as Gleeson and O’Rourke point out, Marx himself was attuned to “questions of social particularity,” and building from such elements in Marx enables them to work toward trans Marxism.[24]

Additionally, after Judith Butler’s influential essay “Gender is Burning” linked Paris is Burning to the academic discipline of Queer Theory, the film and its subjects have all too often been conflated with a discipline that is erroneously assumed to be wholly incompatible with Marxist politics.[25] There’s an irony here—after all, what the film literally documents are trans and queer ballroom performers stealing high-priced clothing and accessories in order to construct a counterculture that was distinct from the surrounding society—though of course, no counterculture can ever be entirely outside of the culture it opposes. As Ferguson notes, since culture “fosters both identifications and antagonisms, culture becomes a site of material struggle,” with the result that queer of color culture is oriented simultaneously toward and against capitalism, producing “unimagined alliances.”[26] Furthermore, Marxist thought plays a significant role in queer of color critique, including Chandan Reddy’s analysis of Paris is Burning. As Reddy points out, the performers featured in Paris is Burning give voice to a critique of the system that excludes them, assessing its inequality and injustice at the same time that they find themselves also interpellated by it.[27] Nonetheless, other critics have described many aspects of the film as indications of capitalist complicity, as I will detail. This ranges from the ballroom practices that the film documents, such as walking categories and striving for “realness,” to the content of the intimate interviews where the documentary’s subjects express their longing for safety, security, wealth, and belonging.

Filmed during the late 1980s, Paris is Burning captures a record of ballroom culture in New York City through direct observational documentary, cinema verité on-the-street conversations, and talking head interviews. Formally, the film invites a number of important critiques. In Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), bell hooks points out that Livingston herself never appears in the film, obscuring the racialized power dynamics that shape the film’s ethnographic gaze.[28] As Jay Prosser notes, the low-budget documentary was made possible in part by the fact that Livingston didn’t pay the film’s participants for their time, labor, and expertise. In fact, the sequence that discusses Venus Xtravaganza’s murder elides that information even as it presents Venus Xtravaganza’s death as the inevitable outcome of the extreme precarity and poverty that required her to engage in survival sex work.[29]

However, most of the discourse about the film isn’t about its ethics or the way it mediates the pro-filmic reality it depicts. Instead, perhaps because of its documentary approach, critics focus on the actions and ideas of the people within the film, as if Paris is Burning offered direct and unmediated access to the full reality of these individuals’ lives, experiences, and situated knowledge. Furthermore, critics seem to expect a fully formulated, radical political analysis from the film’s participants, and they appear disappointed when they encounter casual conversation and joyously messy cultural practices. As a result, ballroom traditions like walking categories, which involve performing stereotypes of white dominant culture, are regarded as wholly uncritical aspirational practices while interview responses that describe a desire for safety and happiness are presented as capitalist capitulation. These reductive ideas have been deconstructed, but many students first encounter the film framed by classic essays by bell hooks and Judith Butler that advance such claims. Although hooks criticizes Livingston’s filmmaking decisions, her political critique is also pointedly aimed at the Black queer community, especially trans feminine people, who she collapses into the category of “gay men.” She writes:

“much of the tragedy and sadness of this film is evoked by the willingness of black gay men to knock themselves out imitating a ruling-class culture and power elite that is one of the primary agents of the their oppression and exploitation.”[30]

Discussing ballroom pageantry, hooks criticizes ballroom performers for upholding white femininity as the ideal, even though she also acknowledges that performers like Dorian Corey voice their own critical analysis of how white femininity is centered—within ballroom culture and within the world at large.[31] Meanwhile, in Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), Judith Butler presents Xtravaganza’s death as an illustration of the psychoanalytic concept that all subjects are alienated without attending to the specific conditions of violence trans women face.[32] As Mari Ruti writes, such a move is common in queer theory and dangerously confuses a universal “constitutive lack” with contingent and socially-constructed oppression.[33]

To some extent, of course, the documentary subjects of Paris is Burning do reinforce hegemonic ideas about “the good life.” But obviously, the same criticisms could be made about much of the media and most of the people who exist within white supremacist, heterosexist, cissexist, and patriarchal capitalism. Moreover, as Reddy argues, the subculture documented by Paris is Burning doesn’t smoothly replicate capitalist ideology; instead, that subculture constructs opportunities for those participating in it to be in conversation with the “contradictory demands and conditions” of the society that has rejected them.[34] Reddy finds political potential in the “confusion” generated by the resulting

“cultural formations that fail to separate cultural productions from material circumstances and political representation, producing powerful confusions of culture, politics, and economic circumstances that engender contradictory subjectivities.”[35]

Clearly, these dialectical exchanges are confusing, messy, and certainly not ideologically pure. As Julia Serrano points out, academics tend to expect trans and queer people to articulate a uniquely radical politics, and often appear disappointed when this expectation isn’t fulfilled.[36] In particular, academia has long positioned trans feminine people as figures for something other than themselves, as Emma Heaney argues in her analysis of the “trans feminine allegory” in fields including queer theory.[37] But these academic approaches aren’t sufficiently attentive to the specificity of trans subjects’ experiences.

Through examining trans people’s lived experiences, it becomes possible to understand how trans subjects are creative and knowledgeable political actors who are aware of the material conditions that shape their lives—and their practices of survival and resistance. Analyzing Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied (1989), another New Queer Cinema documentary which represents Black drag culture, Ferguson attends closely to the physical movement and gesture of a Black drag queen, writing that we can see in her way of being a “hint of pleasure and alrightness” that produces “a critique of commonplace interpretations of her life.” In this reading, she is neither wholly subsumed into “a tangle of pathologies and misfortunes” nor duped by the society that oppresses her, for Ferguson demonstrates that the scene conveys her knowledge of her conditions, including the source of her oppression—which is systemic.[38]

Along similar lines, Steedman provides a way to analyze the political implications of statements that are not necessarily intended to articulate a coherent political program, but which implicitly illuminate the oppressive conditions that the speaker experiences. In Steedman’s work, the point is not to conduct a political critique of the individual expressing longing, especially for seemingly frivolous and femininized things like fashionable clothing. Instead, these statements illuminate material conditions, and allow scholars to interrogate “the structures of political thought that have labelled this wanting as wrong.”[39] Steedman argues that political analysis too often neglects the economic and social significance of fashion, framing it as trivial. Yet impoverished subjects, especially women and those who are feminine, recognize its material importance, including how clothing can be a tool for those who are oppressed as they manage their actual conditions and try to survive.[40]

It’s here that I want to return to the scene from Pose of Angel at the ball. She’s walking the category “femme queen runway,” which describes a fantasy life that is perhaps within her grasp, after the audition she just completed with a modeling agency. Crucially, however, the audition itself is shot quite differently from Angel’s ballroom performance, and this contrast contributes to my materialist trans feminist reading of the ballroom scene. In the interview, the close-ups of Angel primarily show her as if through a video camera. The image is 4:3, low-resolution, time-stamped with the date, and it emphasizes that Angel is in a position of supplication here, appealing to the powerful. The reverse shots of the head of the modeling agency are 16:9 and high resolution, conveying the beauty, sophistication, and polish of the world that Angel desires to enter. These formal choices shape the scene, which immediately precedes Angel’s triumph at the ball. Instead of reading Angel’s performance at the ball as her attempt to enter the fashion industry and to participate in modeling’s problematic structures, the episode makes the distinctions between the ball and the audition quite clear. One is a necessary hurdle where Angel must ask to be allowed into a career that would enable her to support herself and her chosen family. The other is a space of community, celebration, performance, glitter, competition, conflict, and love that stages the power and the peril of white supremacist capitalism in the name of something else.

Although Steedman is discussing working-class British women in the mid-twentieth century, her description of how a politics of envy can mobilize a political relationship to stereotypes and ideals could easily apply to the ballrooms of 1980s New York City when she writes:

“with what creativity people may use the stuff of cultural and social stereotype, so that it becomes not a series of labels applied from outside a situation, but a set of metaphors ready for transformation by those who are its subjects.”[41]

In the ballroom scene, white supremacist, patriarchal, hetero- and cis-sexist capitalism is not absent, but the violence of its standards, barriers, and boundaries are being worked on and worked over to produce a space that contributes to trans and queer survival. As the scene shifts into slow motion, and the triumphant Angel spins in the spotlight, with glittering tickertape floating around her, we see the worldbuilding potential of queer performance spaces—alternative worlds that we can glimpse in such moments of celebration and joy.[42]

Across the remainder of the series (to date), the contrast between the ballroom world and the modeling world continues to be starkly marked, both in the image and in the narrative. Repeatedly, Angel faces the reality of her marginalization, exclusion, and objectification amid her commercial success. Pose juxtaposes these challenges with the distinct interpersonal challenges of ballroom culture, demonstrating Reddy’s argument that one world cannot be reduced to a mere imitation of—or capitulation to—the other. Similar dynamics emerge in other characters’ storylines. These juxtapositions work to reveal the horrors of the white supremacist, capitalist system. They are able to do so through representing the violence within dominant culture, rather than by presenting dominant culture through its own mythologization of itself.

Reading Pose as a commentary on Paris is Burning draws attention to how the earlier documentary juxtaposed scenes of the balls against shots of white, straight, cisgender people walking down the street, capturing dominant culture only in its most acceptable self-presentation. Rather than exposing its horrors, the rhetorical point is merely to suggest that these “normal” people are also performing their identities. Although this is an important insight into the performativity of identity, the formal effect of juxtaposition ultimately centers the dominant culture because it avoids revealing the violence that sustains hegemonic society when it presents the counterculture as a mere facsimile of it—useful only to produce a rhetorical effect. As a result, this universalizing gesture positions the balls as an example of a general condition rather than as a countercultural tactic for surviving and thriving.

This, ultimately, is the real risk of the capitalist complicity approach: it flattens the distinctions between what power expresses and the way oppressed people express their oppression by power. While I have examined only a few minutes of Pose in detail, I hope that I have demonstrated how a materialist trans feminist approach to trans cultural production opens up crucial questions that are foreclosed by the capitalist complicity approach. In the end, expressions of desire, longing, and envy point to the problem—not the solution. They articulate the lived experiences, material conditions, and class consciousness of those exploited and excluded from the beauty, success, pleasure, and luxury they see around them. Through responding to their critique of what is, we can begin to imagine that, as the protest chant tells us, “another world is possible.”

Notes

1. Jules Joanne Gleeson, “How Do Gender Transitions Happen?” in Trangender Marxism, edited by Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rourke (London: Pluto Books, 2021), 82

2. Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O’Rouke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, 3.

3. Jody Rosenberg, “Afterword: One Utopia, One Dystopia,” in Transgender Marxism, 265.

4. Marlon Murtha Bailey, "The Labor of Diaspora: Ballroom Culture and the Making of a Black Queer Community," Dissertation (University of California, Berkeley, 2005). https://go.openathens.net/redirector/fau.edu?url=https://www.proquest.com/dissertations-theses/labor-diaspora-ballroom-culture-making-black/docview/305031111/se-2?accountid=10902.

5. Gleeson and O’Rouke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, 14.

6. Emma Heaney, The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory (Northwestern University Press, 2017), 276-77.

7. For more on trans cultural production, see Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility, edited by Reina Gossett (now Tourmaline), Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).

8. As Jack Halberstam describes, the transgender body has emerged as a site onto which postmodern fantasies of flexibility are projected, while simultaneously, this dream of flexibility and fluidity supports the structures of late capitalism (In A Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives [New York: NYU Press, 2005], 18 – 19).

9. Nicole Erin Morse, Selfie Aesthetics: Seeing Trans Feminist Futures in Self-Representational Art (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 11.

10. Nathaniel Dickson, “Seizing the Means: Towards a Trans Epistemology,” in Transgender Marxism, 206.

11. Michelle O’Brien, “Trans Work: Employment Trajectories, Labour Discipline and Gender Freedom,” in Transgender Marxism, 60.

12. Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, 9.

13. Kate Doyle Griffiths, “Queer Workersim Against Work: Strategising Transgender Labourers, Social Reproduction & Class Formation,” in Transgender Marxism, 1140.

14. Carolyn Kay Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 7.

15. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, 123.

16. Helen M. Todd, “Getting out the Vote,” The American Magazine 72 (1911): 619.

17. Katie Tandy, “Trans Day Of Remembrance Is Resilience Above All,” Medium.com, November 20, 2015, https://medium.com/the-establishment/trans-day-of-remembrance-is-resilience-above-all-2e542fd6b147.

18. Alexandra Pollard, “Pose: With the largest cast of trans actors in TV history, Ryan Murphy’s ballroom drama is a strut in the right direction,” Independent, March 21, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/features/pose-film-review-ryan-murphy-ballroom-drama-movie-video-a8829691.html; Tracy E. Gilchrist, “Pose Hits Its Highest Ratings and Lands Early Third Season Renewal,” The Advocate, June 17, 2019, https://www.advocate.com/television/2019/6/17/pose-hits-its-highest-ratings-and-lands-early-third-season-renewal.

19. New Queer Cinema is a brief yet significant movement within arthouse cinema, and was identified as such primarily by B. Ruby Rich, writing reviews of film festivals in the late 1980s and early 1990s (New Queer Cinema: The Director's Cut [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013]). Rich noticed a new wave of queer authored cinema that countered mainstream representations of queer people with nuanced, complex, and even disturbing fiction films and documentaries. Paris is Burning is one of the better known documentaries from the movement.

20. Sheila Jeffrey’s 2014 book Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism (New York: Routeldge, 2014) is one key example of the continued argument that transgender people who seek transition-related medical care are either victims of false consciousness or actively complicit with a capitalist, patriarchal medical industrial complex that creates “transgenderism” to undermine women in the search for profit.

21. Roderick A. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 5, 10.

22. Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Seal Press, 2007).

23. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 5-6.

24. Gleeson and O’Rourke, “Introduction,” in Transgender Marxism, 4-5.

25. Some of these critiques astutely highlight the emphasis on individual identity and agency within queer theory (Yola Kipcak, “Marxism vs. Queer Theory,” In Defence of Marxism, December 2, 2019, https://www.marxist.com/marxism-vs-queer-theory.htm) while others suggest, absurdly, that questioning the sex/gender binary will lead to dissolving all forms of oppositional politics, including class analysis (Slavoj Žižek, “The Sexual is Political,” “The Philosophical Salon” in The Los Angeles Review of Books, August 1, 2016, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-sexual-is-political).

26. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black,3.

27. Chandan C. Reddy, “Home, Houses, Nonidentity: Paris is Burning,” in Burning Down the House: Recycling Domesticity, edited by Rosemary Marangoly George (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 356.

28. bell hooks, “Is Paris Burning?” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 151.

29. Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 53-54.

30. hooks, “Is Paris Burning?” 150.

31. hooks, “Is Paris Burning?” 148-49.

32. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, [1993] 2015), 131. Ki Namaste critiques Butler’s analysis in “’Tragic Misreadings’:Queer Theory’s Erasure of Transgender Subjectivity,” in Queer Studies: A Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Anthology, edited by Brett Beemyn and Mickey Eliason (New York: NYU Press, 1996), 183-203.

33. Mari Ruti, The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 65.

34. Reddy, “Home, Houses, Nonidentity,” 357.

35. Reddy, “Home, Houses, Nonidentity,” 368.

36. Serano, “Ungendering in Art and Academia,” in Whipping Girl, 195-212.

37. Heaney, The New Woman, 203-52.

38. Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 1.

39. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, 23.

40. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, 89.

41. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, 103.

42. For more on the worldbuilding possibilities of queer performance spaces, see José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009).