Toward a Transgender Critique of Media Representation

Abstract

Toward a Transgender Critique of Media Representation Thomas J Billard (bio) and Erique Zhang (bio) Shifts in media production and consumption along with the emergence of digital technologies have facilitated quantitative increases and (per some critics) qualitative improvements in transgender representation across print media, film, and television.1 The biggest influence on trans media representation has come via social media and other platforms for sharing usergenerated content, which now provide the lion's share of trans media representations. Unlike those of newspapers, studio films, and broadcast television, however, social media representations are not produced by members of the cisgender majority, for members of the cis majority; they are overwhelmingly trans produced. As such, to critique these digital media representations is not to critique regimes of representational power or the machinations of hegemonic media systems. Rather, it is to critique how transgender people choose to represent themselves and the identities they hold. Studies of trans media thus far have tended to employ perspectives from feminist theory and queer theory to analyze transgender representation.2 [End Page 194] However, doing so has posed analytic problems for the burgeoning field of trans media studies. To articulate these problems, we draw on Cáel M. Keegan's analysis of trans studies' position vis-à-vis women's and queer studies, as well as TJ Billard's extensions of that analysis in the specific domain of trans media studies.3 By no means do we assume either feminist theory or queer theory to be monolithic in their approaches; rather, we endeavor to describe the central tendencies of these broad interdisciplines as they exist in their institutionalized forms. Moreover, we draw from sociology of culture frameworks to propose a mode of transgender representational critique that attends to the specificities of trans identity and experience rather than evaluating representation in terms of "good" or "bad." Feminist approaches to media studies often maintain a model whereby men dominate women and patriarchy works through media narratives to maintain male dominance.4 Misogynist representations are "bad" and those that oppose it are "good."5 Trans media representations challenge this thinking by disrupting the hierarchy of domination that feminist theory posits. Where does the trans man fall in the hierarchy of patriarchal domination? Does he now dominate women by virtue of his transition? Where does the trans woman fall? Is she now dominated by men, or—as trans-exclusionary radical feminists have argued—does she dominate "real" (i.e., cis) women by virtue of the sex she was assigned at birth?6 Where does the nonbinary person fall, whose existence challenges the binary required for this hierarchical understanding of power? While much feminist theory is invested in a model of binaristic sexual subordination, queer theory is invested in deconstructing the binary gender system as a means of "unravel[ing] heteronormativity."7 Queer theorists often interpret transness either as "some 'ultimate form' of queerness that manifests literally the metaphor of gender transgression" or as an anti-queer impulse toward binary conformity.8 From a queer theoretical perspective, [End Page 195] then, transgender representations should be evaluated as "bad" to the extent they uphold the validity of binary gender identity and "good" to the extent they disrupt the binary gender system.9 Trans identity disrupts this theoretical model, as trans people variously identify with and against a binary gender system in a complex field of valid identities.10 Accordingly, transgender media representations cannot be simply read through the queer political fantasy of counter-normativity. Beyond their theoretical limitations, both approaches also present methodological shortcomings: feminist and queer theories claim to offer a "more rigorous excavation of subjectivities" than sociological accounts, but they have tended to do so via analyses that superimpose the anti-patriarchal and antinormative political investments of the theorist onto the objectified trans figure.11 Put differently, these theorists project their own universalized interests onto the trans figures whose identities they claim to excavate. Consider, for instance, two competing readings of the film Paris Is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1990) by Black feminist theorist bell hooks and queer theorist Judith Butler. For her part, hooks reads the representations of trans women in Paris as "bad" because they uphold the subordination of Black women...