Why Trans Cinema Doesn’t Exist

This essay illustrates how queer cinema studies has been structured by a negative co-history with trans that has driven the texts and questions it can take up, the temporalities governing its formation, and the rhetorical shape of its intellectual products. It argues that the ground from which queer cinema studies has traced the evolution of queer cinema – from an outsider form to a now tenuously global force – is terrain established via a cordoning-off of the disruption that trans enacts on the binary sexed forms necessary to “same-sex” desire. Therefore, the essay claims, the field of queer cinema studies has emerged through an agentive commitment to non-transsexuality as an unacknowledged speaking position from which its textual analyses are performed as performative.