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Lecture: Trans Feminism and Popular Film: Meeting the anti-Gender Moment

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In the current anti-gender moment, cis and trans women face shared structural threatsthat popular film has historically worked to obscure rather than illuminate. This lecture argues for trans feminist solidarity, built through what I call unruly alliances, as a vital response—and for popular cinema as an unexpected site where such alliances can be cultivated. Drawing on a classroom archive from a semester-long mixed graduate and undergraduate course on trans cinema, I trace how popular film has rendered transness as a scandalous othering disconnected from cis misogyny, foreclosing trans–cis solidarity. Against this dominant archive, I identify a counter-archive of ensemble films spanning 1982 to 2023—Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean; All About My Mother; Tangerine; and Joyland—in which cis women learn from trans women, inverting the familiar pedagogical hierarchy. Borrowing Masculinity in Transition and the argument I made regarding the feminist Western, I will assert that the ensemble cast is the formal device by which trans feminism can disturb (rather than disavow) gender on screen. Through teaching such popular ensemble films, the classroom can become a small-scale laboratory for the solidarities our political moment demands.

Further information (including details on how to participate online): https://www.uni-giessen.de/en/faculties/ggkgcsc/ggk-gcsc-calendar/summer-semester-2026/collaborative-research-events/trans-feminism-and-popular-film-meeting-the-anti-gender-moment