Staff Pick of the Week LGBTQ+ history

Corpses, Fools and Monsters : The History and Future of Transness in Cinema is my pick of the week for LGBTQ+ history month. Transness, and trans bodies appear in film from the very beginning, often as characters of ridicule, suspicion or 'confused' desire. Willow Maclay and Caden Gardner guide us sensitively and expansively through this often overlooked history suggesting, given the current climate of violence towards queer people, that the narrative around transness, particularly it's otherness, is a story primarily lead by cinematic depictions. Since most people are more likely to see a depiction of a trans person, that to meet a trans person in real life, the perceived veracity of these depictions becomes more important than the lived reality. 

While more positive depictions of trans people have emerged in the recent history of cinema, there is an implicit warning in the book's historical narrative. Much of the recent 'positive' trans representation on screen is characterised by a quiet deradicalization of the 'issue'. Trans people are depicted as being 'just like your or I', that which is different or threatening to the status quo is stripped away and trans characters become at risk of being depicted as benign, corporate or, in other words, not being depicted at all. Since everything that qualifies queerness estranges it from the world, to depict these people and their stories without the pain of this estrangement is an attempt to deny any such estrangement in the first place - and undo important history. 

In a similar way, there is a resistance, often from the LGBTQ+ community, to move away from cinema which revels endlessly in the suffering of queer people. How can new possibilities be imagined if the 'reality' of these lives is shown only as joyless struggle? The book argues that the challenge for queer cinema, moving forwards, is to balance the these two issues. In a world where depictions of reality are more vast, immediate, and accessible, depiction no longer needs to strive to be veridical. Images on screens now have the monopoly on truth; the evidence of ones own eyes, the lived reality of immediate community, history itself - none of this holds the power it once did. It is more important than ever to depict honestly and seriously - lives genuinely hang in the balance. If these stories are not told with honour, passion, dignity, beauty and pain, they will be told for us by slogans, flags and fists.