This article returns to the First International Transgender Film and Video Festival (TFF) in 1997 to historicise transgender artistic production and its relation to queer theory and aesthetics at a time when the categories "transgender" and "queer" were being formed. Identifying the twin discursive sites of cinema and scholarship as forums for claims about definition, the article tracks the self-conscious production of transgender studies and its objects of study in proximity to queer. By moving through the writing of the festival panellist and academic Jay Prosser and Jason Barker's *St. Pelagius the Penitent* (1997), one of TFF's programmed films, the article situates the field of transgender studies in a British context. The article brings a humorous attitude to the various promises and limitations offered by queer and trans thinking at this historical juncture in the 1990s, which accommodates a material approach to transgender studies not limited by appeals to the real.
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Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell (2025) studied this question.
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