Transgender Media Studies

Abstract

Transgender media studies is a fairly recent area of scholarship emerging at the intersections of communication studies, cultural studies, digital media studies, film studies, gender studies, media studies, television studies, and transgender studies. The earliest scholarship in this field primarily consisted of analyses of portrayals of transsexual characters on the screen. With the gradual broadening of LGBTQ scholarship facilitating coverage of trans issues, the growing global visibility of trans, transgender, non-binary, and gender non-conforming people, and the intermittent expansion of trans legal and human rights, transgender media studies began to develop as a vibrant area of study of its own. Transgender media scholarship moved from pathologizing approaches to victimizing approaches to resilience-focused approaches while keeping the empirically documented and often legally enshrined marginalization and discrimination of transgender people in public consciousness. At this moment, transgender media scholarship continues to examine the portrayals of transgender characters on screen, but the methodological and epistemological approaches to transgender media have greatly expanded to include, for example, how transgender people use media to organize, how print and digital media influence transgender identity development, how media can be used to educate publics and provide support, how cisgender people respond to transgender portrayals in digital, print, and broadcast media; and how researchers can help challenge normativity, pay attention to intersectionality, and surface marginalization. Early dominant portrayals of transgender people consisted of white, middle-class, middle-aged heteronormative transgender women, and scholarship reflected these dominant portrayals. In the 21st century, transgender media discourse has mostly broadened to include transgender men and gender non-conforming people, people of color and Two-Spirit people, people of a range of sexual orientations and gender identities, young people and seniors. Arguably, much of the increased diversity in transgender media research is attributable to the fact that transgender and gender non-conforming researchers came out publicly and/or entered the academy and brought forth research agendas informed by lived experience. This bibliography is not exhaustive. It seeks to reflect the range of transgender media scholarship at this point in time, acknowledging that “transgender media” as a conceptual category captures a particular moment in time only. As social and biological understandings of “gender” and “sex” begin to shift and loosen, it is likely that media scholarship will present a more holistic approach to the complex relationships between (trans)gender and media.