Haunting and queer histories: representing memory in Jill Soloway’s Transparent

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses Jill Soloway’s TV series Transparent by focusing on its depiction of transgender memory. It looks at Transparent for two key reasons; on the one hand, it is one of the few US televisual works to feature a transgender central protagonist. One the other, the series subverts common televisual tropes by depicting its central protagonist not in opposition to a heteronormative family, but rather as part of familial unit populated by several generations of LGBTQ women. Drawing on this, the article approaches Transparent by looking at how it presents the passage of transgender memory within the family, and among transgender and cisgender queer women. It views the series in light of Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, and argues that it depicts postmemory as a potentially productive vehicle for the development of empathy between individuals and across opposed social groups. In doing so, the article hopes to interrogate the contribution made by the show to transgender and cisgender feminist on-screen representation.