Sam Feder’s evocative documentary Disclosure: Trans lives on screen traces transgender representation across the history of western cinema. This history ranges from D.W. Griffith’s 1914 film Judith of Bethulia up to Ryan Murphy’s 2018 series Pose. It stars trans actors and activists such as Bianca Leigh, Laverne Cox (who also co-produced the documentary), Jen Richards, Alexandra Billings, Susan Stryker, Yance Ford, to name a few.
The documentary shows some of the most problematic and offensive representations of transgender people on screen from the 90s, such as Soap (1977) or the Luci-Desi Comedy Hour (1957), where the presence of transgender characters on screen was accompanied by a raucous laugh track. A popular trope in cinematic representation from the time, one that manifests in recent retellings of stories involving transgender characters, was the horror of cis-gendered men ‘discovering’ that the women they were attracted to are ‘dudes,’ or trans-women attempting, often by force, to seduce cis-men.
Laverne Cox explains how crossdressing prevalent in early films (The Old Maid Having Her Picture Taken 1901; Meet Me at The Fountain 1904), where men dressed as women participated in exaggerated orchestrations of buffoonery, seemed to suggest that femininity was inherently silly, or that womanhood was a farce. Fantasies of transgressing gender and race lines, apparent in films such as A Florida Enchantment (1914), use the dual tropes of crossdressing and blackface to produce a racist and transphobic commentary on the intersections of race and gender.
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