Genderqueer Representation in Film: Looking Outside the Western Perspective
[Written for a class on post-colonial lit]
I. How do we depict genderqueerness without reducing it?
Common conceptions often limit genderqueerness to being in a transitional state between two set genders, either with regards to one’s body, their social roles and/or their sexual roles. Such is mirrored in narratives that essentialize genderqueerness as “being trapped in the wrong body” or claims that one has a “male/female brain”. Less favourable reads might understand gender deviance within the invalidating rhetoric of the past: as ‘playing dress-up’, a ‘chemical imbalance’ or tied to sexual confusion. All of these understandings, I argue, run into the problem of being bound by dichotomies, essentializing one's biology or applying tolerance to what is irrefutably, to them, an error. Given the ubiquity of the western perspective and the projected universality of marriage and child-rearing within the human experience, mainly due to colonialism, conceptions of sex and gender must be taken as objective dynamics to perpetuate these narratives. Few beyond queer individuals who feel incomplete within these dynamics and artists are compelled to conceptualize the vastness of what exists beyond the binary.
Art and pre-colonial cultures are both pivotal in making visible and actualizing one’s feelings of queerness. Pre-colonial traditions allow us to view past canons of culture, views of which are often erased for how they challenge western hegemony. Art, especially in visual mediums, allow audiences to find freedoms outside their limited self-conception, broadening one’s possibilities for being and conducting themselves beyond societal presets. Tragically, many films and post-colonial readoptions bear the scars of colonialism into their imaginings. Film budgets for telling queer stories are more regularly granted to cis directors (as is the case with all but one example below), leading to an extrapolation rather than necessitated reflection on the queer experience. Indigenous tribes, due to their historic suppression, must operate with an even greater trepidation in disturbing the status quo. If we are to win the fight for representation with both hands tied, we must look for the light beyond these barriers of proper visibility.
This essay will take on three questions of how we might visualize revolutionary reimaginings of gender, finding pairings between popular films centering a trans/queer subject and the voices of two-spirit Indigenous Americans on their spiritual identity. I’ll look at existing films I feel succeed at embodying the queer spirit in their shape, gaze and lifestyle of gender while also critiquing queer-centered stories that reinforce the status quo perceptions introduced above.
II. What is the shape of gender?
A line, says the western view, a dot on either end for the feminine and masculine. Any sexuality that doesn’t cross the line all the way is queer. Queer genders, in the best cases, are only given the tools to envision crossing the line all the way if they insist on changes with any acceptance. Films such as Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Perez embody the necessity of crossing this binary rift, where the titular subject must pay for all the surgeries, kill her past life and leave a ruined family in tow if she is to be accepted as a woman. Further, in scenes where she is reunited with her wife and son (by deceiving them to work as a servant, a la Mrs. Doubtfire, whom few genderqueer individuals would probably claim), Emilia Perez tells us that no matter how much a trans woman does, the man is still there underneath, still in control. Trans women will always reek of him no matter who or how they change. Such portrayals construct a double-bind, where one cannot kill the past, yet they must to fully cross, leaving no hope or liberation from choosing to change. Such also put a class barrier on queerness, where necessary dysphoria requires a lifetime of medication and several five-figure surgeries to slot back into society; a tollbooth to tolerance. This is the trap of the line: queerness can only sneak through if it behaves and pays its indulgences. The financial and social onus fall completely on the queer person for daring to identify with divergence.
From the name “two-spirit people”, one might assume Indigenous traditions of gender also exist within this binary conception. However, like queer, the title is more properly an umbrella term for various concepts of a spiritual or social gender that don’t cleanly align with the western expectations of one’s sex [For more specific terminology, NativeOut provides loose translations for terms of two-spiritedness in 70 different tribal languages: here!]. Colonial scars make it hard to get a complete understanding of these terms as they were historically used, as many had greatly fallen out of use until the late 20th century. Given the many different interpretations, this paper will understand two-spiritedness as greatly congruous with the queer/genderqueer umbrella with the addition of embodying distinct (either tertiary or compounded) social and cultural roles within indigenous societies. Frameline Voices 1991 interviews with two-spirited people provide helpful insights into the myriad indigenous conceptions of gender. Psychologist Terry Tafoya, one among many interviewed, claims that rather than a line, gender and sexuality are imagined as a circle, on which there are many points that one passes between in their lifetime. They also claim that, sexually, two-spirit people are viewed as a third sex. Regardless of birth sex, those who are two-spirited are only considered homosexual when engaging with other two-spirited people. Speaker Randy Burns adds in his own experience that, while roles are sexed, those roles are chosen, meaning a two-spirit arises without judgement from uptaking one’s more authentic-feeling social role. This separates gender from conflation with one’s sexual role, and leaves it as a social and spiritual choice, both of which transcend one’s body.
Given such, an effective, de-colonized and representative portrayal of genderqueerness ought to visualize it as infinite, fluid and from one’s spirit/will. While gender expression can certainly be bodily, it is also important to note it doesn’t have to be. Sam Levinson’s Euphoria does a terrific job at capturing a similar view. In a scene from Episode 7, titled “The Trials and Tribulations of Trying to Pee While Depressed”, we witness a scene between Jules, a trans woman, and her queer friend Anna. Jules metaphorizes adopting more socially feminine traits as “levelling up”, claiming she can’t place what level she is, but that there’s continually further to grow. She also feels intercourse with men moves her towards “conquering femininity” so that she can “obliterate it, then move on to another level”. To this, her friend replies “queerness is infinite”. In this, there’s a clear parallel to Tafoya’s circle. She avoids the metaphor of being in a transitional state, rather claiming there is a narrative of growth, growing towards authenticity and oneself, that continues on and on in all directions throughout one’s life. Queer stories such as these, that shape their own metaphor to articulate queerness not as an absolute, but a move towards one’s best self, do terrific work to reclaim queerness from the colonial tendency of finite boxes and binaries.
Euphoria should further be lauded for not compromising Jules to give an easy narrative to a straight audience, allowing her flaws and storyline to exist alongside, not informed by, her confident trans identity. Her plotline is defined more by her free-spiritedness coming into conflict with her role as romantic partner and stabilizer to the show’s narrator and teen narcotic-addict, Rue. Not once in the show does Jules have her identity challenged, tested or labelled by anyone outside of herself, nor does she have her sexuality capped. She is, sexually and gender-wise, liberated to be herself (even to a reckless degree), leaving her very likely the happiest/bubbliest character in an otherwise quite miserable show. This is an exception amidst the overwhelming number of portrayals that frame the experience of being genderqueer as dour and mired with suffering, which leads us nicely into our next question.
III. How should we frame genderqueer lives?
In many genderqueer stories targeted towards a cis audience, much like many white-directed films on a black subject, directors adopt a tragic and/or mystical lens of their queer subject. These depictions, while sympathetic, are problematic in showing that to be queer is, often for vaguely conveyed reasons, helpless. A strong example of this trope is in Sebastián Lelio’s Una Mujer Fantástica [other examples, in my opinion, include Danish Girl (2015, covered later), Breakfast on Pluto (2005) and, to a degree, Tomboy (2011)], which spends most of its run-time depicting Marina, a trans woman, being socially humiliated. She has her ID scrutinized, her genitals inspected, is forced to dress as a man and is continually harassed by and denied the spaces of the family of her dead lover. While there is, of course, truth to queer suffering, it must be coupled with a pointed critique as to not misconstrue queerness itself as inherently miserable. Stories, when told like Una Mujer Fantástica, create a negative spectacle of our lives, encouraging their cis audience members to empathize with a straw-manned oppression that absolves them of being as anti-queer as these exaggerations. Straight audiences are provided these films to wash their hands with a “they’re so brave” and “well at least I’m never that awful”, before leaving the theater and continuing to uncritically perpetuate colonial perceptions of gender. This brand of suffering, not unfamiliar to one who has seen even a handful of genderqueer-focused films, is using a marginalized group as martyrs so that the dominant group can feel better about their banal oppressive tendencies. While portraying one’s trauma is undoubtedly valuable when it creates a shared experience, portraying cruelties at the hands of individuals, rather than underlying systems, guards the closet, creating fear of embracing one’s queer identity. Suffering becomes, from an outside perspective, intrinsic to queerness. This mirrors the rhetoric of right-wing gender essentialists like youtuber Blair White, where authentically transitioning inherently requires surgeries, the pains of dysphoria and other unclear sufferings that, if you haven’t suffered and aren’t able to suffer, you don’t have the right to call yourself queer. It is crucial to note here Suffering, to White (herself a wealthy, white cis-passing trans woman) also entails pulling up the ladder out of an entitlement she feels she has to a seat at the table, even where such a seat serves as a token in right-wing spaces for neutralizing the perceived harms of transphobic rhetoric. If we accept suffering as natural, we take responsibility away from those who propagate it.
Returning to the anecdotes of two-spirited people within the Frameline documentary, suffering is certainly in the conversation. Two-spirit individuals in the post-colonial era are often disowned or mistrusted as their identity, often due to an instilled submission to colonial values. This is in contrast with the historical role of two-spirited people as unique and important, typically more trust-worthy and capable in spirit than those of solely a masculine or feminine spirit. The indigenous history-keepers and families that do uphold traditional conceptions of gender view the reality of two-spiritedness as unquestionable, quite normal and a choice all can make without judgement. Paula Gunn Allen, an English Professor interviewed by Frameline, makes it clear that what dissent there is comes from the active “agonies of colonization”, that lack of belonging for two-spirit individuals was an imposed belief over two-hundred years of westernization. Speaker Randy Burns further explains that they’ve had to look to two-hundred year-old anthropology books and in the earliest recorded observations to find proof of the reality of queerness. Such allowance for queer expressions of gender undoubtedly became a marker of “savagery” next to the Christian “civility” of binary oppositions. With history written by the conqueror, western narratives of gender precedingly suppressed or defeated all ideas that wouldn’t be cleanly slotted in alongside the colonial establishment. This leaves the onus of suffering for two-spirited and gender-queer individuals undoubtedly on the colonial and unimaginative assertions of the establishment.
That being said, if modern queer stories are to be told in a decolonized fashion, we have a few options in approaching the framing of our lives amidst suffering. Firstly, we can seek to move past the “agonies of colonization”, as Gunn Allen nicely worded it, using art to provide a hopeful future through the lessons of the past. The second is properly orienting suffering as to reflect restrictions of queerness as the pain, rather than queerness itself.
Jane Schoenbrun’s 2024 film, I Saw the TV Glow, balances both of these imaginings incredibly well while also signal-boosting the power of art in queer liberation. The film observes the feeling of being represented by queer characters in our childhood media and how such feelings become signs of a better, more authentic being. In its best scene, where its two queer protagonists, Maddy and Owen reunite in their young adult years. Maddy, now out of the closet, recounts “time was flying by like chapters skipped over on a DVD”. “This isn’t how life is supposed to be”, they say, begging Owen to see the possibilities. Owen, meanwhile, “can’t understand” them and is trapped in the closet, unable to ever move or imagine what’s outside of it. Maddy transcends the prison of the film’s reality, imploring her old friend to “return to the TV world” and become one with the queer character they felt represented by in their youth. Owen, by not being able to understand or follow Maddy, spends the next 30 years physically ill, stuck dissociating as time blasts by in a dead-end job. The film ends with Owen, now in their 50’s, screaming for help at a child’s birthday party, for their life to finally be lived. The last shot is of “There’s still time” written in chalk.
Reviews I’ve heard by cis friends and reviewers speak of the film as critiquing our nostalgia obsession, the lack of temporality in media and/or colouring how autistic individuals relate to each other. While all of these are valid and substantial reads, they lack the distinctly queer perspective underlying all of these which might be hard to imagine having not lived the feelings oneself. From a queer perspective, the film portrays the depersonalization and unreality of living while not being one’s whole self. The TV world is imagining beyond being represented in art, yet it’s still not enough on its own to realize the possibilities for reality outside the straight, colonial world. Being inside the closet, in its most grueling form, is having no conception that a world exists outside the closet. Suffering is oriented not towards being genderqueer, but from the horrifying prison that finite conceptions of gender entrap everyone in, but especially those who, in their heart, know embodying queerness is the only way to feel truly alive. So long as more films like this can exist, there will be more TV worlds with eyes able to free themselves in them, more hope and identity made real through art, more wake-up calls to live an authentic life. This is how liberatory queer art ought to look: with a framing of queerness as liberation.
IV. What should genderqueerness look like?
While the first question is theoretical and the second is from the viewer’s perspective, we are yet to address how we might use art to visualize what living as an out queer person is. Tom Hooper’s Danish Girl assumes the genderqueer end is not liberation, but integration. The film embodies several fatal tropes that give damaging views of the acceptable ally and the dysphoric gaze. Framing trans narratives across one’s transition (a favourite of cis directors) alongside the repeated deployment of the mirror cliche (staring at and correcting one’s body in an attempt to see their real self within the prison) are tropes (deployed by both prior films as well) that turn the act of transitioning into a shocking spectacle, something both perverted and to be dazzled by. In the experience of myself and many I know, to transition is often a private act, an awkward phase, a second puberty. For a trans audience, it pairs the cringing of coming-of-age films with an amplification of dysphoric insecurities into the dramatic, the to-be-wept-over, which few who have lived as trans would classify these eras of experimentation and discretion within. Critiques I’ve read also note that the transition story also confuses cis audiences as to what names and pronouns ought be used where both identities temporally coexist, goading incorrect pronoun usage and deadnaming between scenes, as well as understanding transness as only real once the transition is undergone.
To fully come into oneself and live as genderqueer is to not be mired by one’s past, slashing away at it, but to confidently subsume it into your current narrative of self as an act of freeing. It should not have to be a rift which only the strongest, most tolerant relationships can survive. In reference to the identity of two-spirited people and much of our previous discussion, to be queer must be understood as a social and spiritual role. In ByKids’ documentary, Against the Current, JuRay Cook describes her two-spiritedness as the ability to do “either-or” with regards to ceremonial gender roles. As gender lies in the spirit, having both the masculine and feminine spirit within you, according to Paula Gunn Allen, “you are not less [of spirit] than other people, but more”. To be queer is to be greater than the sum of the before and after. To transition is not unilateral or a reduction (as a perspective concerned with the intersectional burden might see it as). It is, as Jules in Euphoria claimed, “levelling up”, evolving beyond one’s station. If we go beyond the oppression and the reductionist cis perspective, there is an all-around flourishing and privilege in being the best one can be.
Jenny Livingston’s legendary 1990 documentary of queer ball culture in New York City, Paris is Burning, gives voice and audience to diverse queer perspectives to colour the elevating and liberatory nature of the ball. The ball is “our world”, a slice of a reality where authentic queerness is rewarded, valorized and celebrated. According to drag queen Dorian Corey, it’s an escape from poverty where black, queer bodies can get a glimpse of stardom, for even if only a few remember your name. The performer’s goal at a ball is bringing “realness”, as dressing and performing a straight role with a passing authenticity. In short, they are reappropriating the masks straight society forces upon them to throw a masquerade ball. Realness, and the performativity that comes along with it, means different things to each speaker. To some, like Corey, it is a going back in the closet to reclaim it, with the ability to pass fluidly between singular roles (or genders) as allowing one’s queerness to permeate all stations. To the trans queens, it is a move towards the ideal. Octavia St. Laurent claims “Women don’t have to go out of their way to be women. I went out my way because I want to be the best I can be. This is not a game, this is something I want to live”. A stable gender, for some, can itself be liberatory and a path towards embodying one’s potential for greatness. To Venus Xtravaganza, realness is a path towards claiming the luxuries promised by the straight white world that are rightfully yours. A sex change operation would liberate her, “no more skeletons in my closet” barring her from transcending her socio-economic class. There is idealism in fully embodying a gender, for within traditional roles is the authenticity of claiming a chosen “realness”. The ball is shelter, where one can put their guard down, be adopted into a “house” and collectively become authentically queer. "If everybody went to balls, did less drugs, it would be a fun world," Corey says, denying that one has to suffer for being queer, no matter what social cards they’re dealt.
Balls have since greatly vanished, with most of the film's stars lost to the AIDS epidemic. Yet, through film we can remember their faces as the stars they fought to be. Through their stories, we can see the communities and mindsets that carried those like us through the worst times and situations. Finding joy and authenticity within their gender and queerness is not transitory, not ephemeral, not individual, but an unrelenting, shared fight to be who we are. If there is one lesson to be taken, it is that authentic expressions of genderqueerness will overcome all to truly be greater than the sum of their masks.