Trans Cinema and Its Exit Scapes : A Transfeminist Reading of Utopian Sensibility and Gender Dissidence in Contemporary Film

Abstract

Trans Cinema and its Exit Scapes offers a critical and creative intervention into cultural representations of gendered body dissidence in contemporary film.The study argues for the possibility of finding spaces of "disidentification", so-called "exit scapes" within the films.Exit scapes disrupt the dominant cinematic regime set up for the trans character, which ties them into stories of discrimination, humiliation and violence.In Trans Cinema, for instance films such as Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), Transamerica (2005), Romeos (2011) and Laurence Anyways (2012), scenes of singing, dancing and dreaming allow a different form of engagement with the films.As argued here, they allow a critical re-reading and an affirmative re-imagining of trans embodiment.The aim of this study is to investigate the utopian and hopeful potential within Trans Cinema from a critical transfeminist perspective.While focusing in particular on trans entrants as "spectators" or readers, this study draws on the work of a wide range of feminist and cultural scholars, such as

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