The New Border War? An Intergenerational Exchange on Bad Trans Horror Objects

Abstract

The New Border War?An Intergenerational Exchange on Bad Trans Horror Objects Dan Vena (bio) and Islay Burgess (bio) Sold in the gift shop of the Museum of Transgender Hirstory & Art, Chris Vargas's three-part poster series "Trans Video Store" displays a hand-drawn catalog of videocassette-styled covers of historic trans films. Mimicking staff picks at a local video store, these selections, which include controversial entries such as Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), were chosen by Vargas through conversation with other trans individuals and represent the artist's mission to bring "a cohesive visual history of transgender culture into existence."1 Fittingly, Vargas's work is also displayed at the Transgender Media Portal office at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. When I visited the Portal's office in 2018, project director Laura Horak explained that the posters had recently been "revised" by two of her undergraduate research assistants, who placed blue stickies atop presumably transphobic titles, including the aforementioned horror films and others, including The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975), Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (Kim Henkel, 1995), and Ticked-off Trannies with Knives (Israel Luna, 2010). As a trans horror fan and scholar, I (Dan Vena) was disgruntled by this intervention, and I grumpily relayed [End Page 188] this anecdote to my Queer Cinemas class at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. I talked to the class about the need for complicated archives of trans representation, identification, and affective attachments that include supposedly bad objects such as horror films made by cis creators. Inspired by the subsequent class dialogue, this co-authored article is taken from a series of recorded exchanges over email and Zoom between myself and my former student, Islay Burgess. As a white, thirty-something millennial trans man, I turned to the misfits of horror cinema after reading Susan Stryker's "My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage" in graduate school.2 Burgess, who identifies as a white, transmasculine member of Generation Z, developed his passion for horror in childhood but did not become an ardent fan until recently. As he recalls, "It was (embarrassingly) during our Queer Cinemas class that I realized my feelings about horror cinema were academically backed. I wasn't just an enthused fan—I was a student of trans identification and affect!" Although we came of age a generation apart, we share a complicated affinity for horror, a genre that shocks through representations of morphologically unintelligible bodies often predicated on racist, ableist, and transphobic understandings of the human. Other trans scholars have made clear, however, that the troubling vilification of gender-bending or gender nonconforming others on-screen that lends horror its status as a "bad object" can also provide a sense of catharsis and validation for some trans viewers.3 As Burgess pointed out to me, these expressions of desire are often articulated on social media, where one Twitter user recently anticipated the future of trans identification with monstrosity: "Really looking forward to how LGBT cinema can continue to express monster metaphors [while being] completely open about identity and self-love."4 I was motivated to record this dialogue between Burgess and myself because of the initial discomfort I felt toward the Transgender Media Portal's research assistants censoring important horror films from Vargas's depiction of trans cinema history. I was angry, and more than that, I was afraid at the ease at which they, as members of a younger generation, disregarded texts that were meaningful to other (older) trans individuals. As a result, I expected the generational attitudes between Burgess and myself to be [End Page 189] similarly conflicted. Yet, through compassionate listening and mutual introspection, we began resolving previously differing perspectives and working toward a more "cohesive" approach to trans film and media history, to borrow from Vargas. For the sake of clarity, we have preserved the dialogic form of our interactions, edited for length. Dan Vena: Okay, Islay. Let's start with the assumptions we each hold about one another's generations. From my "OK Millennial" vantage point, I worry that younger trans community members (like Gen Zers...