Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Trans Comedy as Trans Care

2022; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/ff.2022.0042

2151-7371

Rox Samer,

LGBTQ Health, Identity, and Policy

Trans Comedy as Trans Care Rox Samer (bio) "There is a skill of playfulness just for keeping yourself alive." —Stephen Ira, Framing Agnes (2022) As a media and cultural studies scholar reading Hil Malatino's Trans Care (2020), I was struck by the author's regular turn to artworks and other cultural artifacts, past and present. Some are nominally trans texts, made by, for, and/ or about trans people: Malatino compares two billboards, one declaring "Trans lives are sacred," found in Detroit in July 2019, and one stating "Trans people deserve health care, support, justice, safety, love," stationed near the border of Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms in November 2018 (2020, 25–26 and 30–31). Others are works of art from a not so distant but just out of reach past, the contents of which trouble any contemporary identitarian identification, such as a photograph of Claude Cahun's, the ambiguity of which, Malatino writes, "renders Cahun a kind of universally fungible object of desire—maybe a boy, maybe a girl, maybe a man, maybe a woman, but precisely none of these things" (2020, 52). It is the viewer who is left "to grapple with their own crisis of meaning about attraction to nonbinary bodies. It's not [Cahun's] problem. They're busy becoming otherwise" (54). Still other artworks Malatino writes about puzzle the author himself, sparking speculation regarding their appeal in the trans world they have made their way into, including the Fall Out Boy t-shirt curiously donned by a baby trans masc in a protest photo accompanying the Times' 2018 article "'Transgender' Could Be Defined Out of Existence under Trump Administration" (Malatino 2020, 15–18). This book is rich with such art and artifacts. And yet, Trans Care is not a formal work of trans media studies. With each artwork he analyzes, much as he is across the book, Malatino is trying to understand how trans people care for one another. I would like to explore what it might mean for trans media studies to take up Trans Care. It is worth noting that the field of trans media studies has been practicing its own care work fairly consistently for the last five years, as evidenced [End Page 161] in the special issues/sections of Spectator, Somatechnics, the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and Jump Cut featuring contributions and editorial work of a small overlapping body of largely junior scholars.1 It is a huge relief to receive feedback on one's scholarship, which, however substantive, does not question the worthiness of such study. The same cannot often be said working with cis scholars unfamiliar with trans studies. I am guessing that is true for many in other disciplines—thus the formation of TSQ and more recently the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies. Arguably, as trans media studies has historicized the emergence of trans representation en masse across the 1980s and 1990s, its scholars have practiced a form of care that turns the scholarly gaze on late-twentieth century cis society, rather than those trans figures it threw violently into the spotlight. Trans media studies has developed methods for analyzing what was trans about past genres and modes. These scholars practice a form of care for trans creators and audiences not unlike that Malatino argues is integral to trans archival research more broadly. Their work reckons with the very language appropriate to write of them, with them, for them, without presuming too seamless a relation to them (Horak 2016; Horak 2017; Miller and Rand 2017; Miller 2019; Samer 2022). Following Malatino, we might continue such work with even greater aplomb, while expanding our method of inquiry further. A trans care media studies methodology might take up questions like: In a world where whole systems fail to show up for us, what media routinely provide practical and/or affective support for trans viewers? What does turning to each other look and sound like in the context of trans media and culture? How do we as media studies scholars show up for trans artists and audiences alike? With this essay I would like to provide a preliminary sketch of some answers to a couple of these questions...