Girl Talk and Hold Music

Abstract

Abstract In this article, the author visits filmmaker Wu Tsang's 2015 short film Girl Talk at the New Museum in New York. The film's documentation of a dance, the author's fieldwork in the museum, and Tsang's cinematography evidence how feminine boyhood and trans girlhood are better supported in the music, conversation, and dance of what the author calls “girlfriend performance.” Against the violence of adult-authored accounts of trans feminine childhood, this article argues that children's friends should tell the story of trans feminine childhood instead. The author examines Tsang's film for its depiction of friendship in queer and trans feminine childhood and develops a transfeminist educational theatre exercise inspired by its repertoire of conviviality—of “girl talk and hold music”—for applied theatre artists, drama educators, and art therapists working with queer and trans youth, specifically feminine boys and transgender girls, and their friends.