‘Caitlyn Jenner “likes” Ted Cruz but the feeling may not be mutual’: Trans pedagogy and I Am Cait

Abstract

When the Olympian and reality television star formerly known as Bruce Jenner appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair in 2015 under the headline ‘Call me Caitlyn’, there was widespread celebration of this unprecedented moment of transgender visibility. However, the positive reception of Jenner as an out trans celebrity has become increasingly complicated by the conservative Republican politics she identifies with. This article examines how those tensions inform the reality series I Am Cait, which repeatedly features Jenner in political conflict with a group of trans activists who are helping to facilitate her public transition. It asks whether the ‘education’ of Jenner that becomes the primary narrative of the text reaffirms or troubles the neoliberal ideology at the core of her conservatism. In order to explore this, I examine the series’ framing of productive gender normative citizenship, the intersection of its corrective pedagogies with the reality television context in which they take place, and the series’ representation of transgender heterogeneity. This article forms part of ‘On the Move’, a special issue marking the twentieth anniversary of the European Journal of Cultural Studies.