Trans Riot: Transmasculine of Colour Expressions and Embodiments in the Films of Christopher Lee

Abstract

This article focuses on transmasculine mixed-race Asian American filmmaker Christopher Lee’s documentaries and pornography of the 1990s. At a moment before today’s reduction of transgender experiences to spectacles of transitional assimilation, bio-social disorder, and death by dominant—or even authoritarian—white cis-heteropatriarchal culture, Lee’s films gave expression to the gender subversions of trans people of colour and their co-conspirators. In solidarity with Lee’s work, I produce critical creative language about racial transgender social identities. At a current moment offering more abundant critical resources and intersectional transgender movement-building, I also seek to re-harness Lee’s transmasculine imagery towards the trans of colour feminist work of transforming the white Western cis-binary gender/sex system and its perceptual structures. I view the communities represented in Lee’s filmmaking as confronting the contradictions of a post-Civil Rights neoliberal multiculturalism that promises minimal access while institutionalizing white cis-binary formations of gender/sex fundamental to the US nation-state.