ABOUT THIS BOOK

2019 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Transgender Cinema gives readers the big picture of how trans people have been depicted on screen. Beginning with a history of trans tropes in classic Hollywood cinema, from comic drag scenes in Chaplin’s The Masquerader to Garbo’s androgynous Queen Christina, and from psycho killer queers to The Rocky Horror Picture Show’s outrageous queen, it examines a plethora of trans portrayals that subsequently emerged from varied media outlets, including documentary films, television serials, and world cinema. Along the way, it analyzes milestones in trans representation, like The Crying Game, Boys Don’t Cry, Hedwig and the Angry Inch,and A Fantastic Woman.

As it traces the evolution of trans people onscreen, Transgender Cinema also considers the ongoing controversies sparked by these movies and series both within LGBTQ communities and beyond. Ultimately it reveals how film and television have shaped not only how the general public sees trans people, but also how trans people see themselves.

Selected Filmography:

Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, All about My Mother, Anak, Austin Unbound, Becoming Chaz, The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros, Boy I Am, Boy Meets Girl, Boys Don’t Cry, The Brandon Teena Story, A Busy Day, Call Me Malcolm, Carlotta, Change over Time, The Crying Game, Dallas Buyers Club, The Danish Gir, The Devil Is a Woman, Drunktown’s Finest, Facing Mirrors, A Fantastic Woman, 52 Tuesdays, Flesh, Girl Inside, A Girl like Me: The Gwen Araujo Story, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, I Was a Male War Bride,Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger, Kumu Hina, La Cage aux Folles, Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink) The Masquerader, Myra Breckinridge, Orlando, Paris Is Burning, Playing with Gender, Psycho, Queen Christina, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Saga of Anatahan, She’s a Boy I Knew, Silence of the Lambs, Some Like It Hot, Southern Comfort, Still Black: A Portrait of Black Transmen, Stonewall, The Tenant, Three Generations. Tomboy, Tootsie, Transamerica, Transparent, Trash, Whatever Suits You, A Woman.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

REBECCA BELL-METEREAU teaches and directs media studies at Texas State University in San Marcos. She is the author of Hollywood Androgyny and coeditor of Star Bodies and the Erotics of Suffering.

REVIEWS

"Highly recommended."

— Choice

"Rebecca Bell-Metereau has already written the definitive work on androgyny in cinema, and now she completes the circle with what is unquestionably the paradigmatic work on transgender cinema. In Transgender Cinema, Bell-Metereau not only provides a series of incisive interpretations of important transgender films but also recognizes how these films present new possibilities for organizing our enjoyment."

— Todd McGowan, author of Only a Joke Can Save Us: A Theory of Comedy

"Rebecca Bell-Metereau’s Transgender Cinema is a superb advance on her early, ground-breaking book, Hollywood Androgyny—it's a scrupulously researched, lucid, major contribution to the study of cinema and gender studies more generally. Timely and both politically and artistically important, it deserves the widest possible readership."

— James Naremore, author of Charles Burnett: A Cinema of Symbolic Knowledge

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
Preface
Introduction
1          Trans Tropes
2          Breaking Boundaries in the New Millennium
3          New Platforms and New Voices
Acknowledgments
Further Reading
Works Cited
Selected Filmography