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SPECTACLES IN TRANSIT: READING CINEMATIC PRODUCTIONS OF BIOPOWER AND TRANSGENDER EMBODIMENT A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA BY MICHAEL DAVID FRANKLIN IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY RODERICK A. FERGUSON, KEVIN MURPHY ADVISERS JANUARY 2011 © Michael David Franklin 2010 All rights reserved i Acknowledgements______________________________________________________ Near the end of a month-long research trip that I took in the summer of 2006 for this dissertation, my mother was hospitalized. For the year and a half prior, her health had deteriorated due to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a disease that took the life of her mother, my grandmother Mary Lee Arganbright, in 1992. She died soon after this trip, on August 24, and this project came to a standstill for a year as I groped my way onward, stunned and winded. Although my mother always wished I had attended medical school, she nevertheless was my biggest cheerleader. Many people before and after her passing have helped me in ways I touch upon below, but this dissertation is primarily dedicated to her. I want to begin, then, by thanking my mom and dad, Kay and Joe Franklin, for giving me the space, love, and support for intellectual curiosity throughout my upbringing in Oklahoma. I also want to thank my Grandma (Mary Lee Arganbright), and my Grannie Annie and Papa (Ann and Jim Arganbright), who passed away within three months of each other in 2009. Although my mother’s university education in the late 1970s was sidetracked when she unexpectedly became pregnant with me, she’d agreed with my grandparents that she would re-enroll as soon as I started kindergarten. In the final years of their lives, my Grannie Annie and Papa delighted in the fact that although my mother never followed through on her promise to re-enroll, I was still in school some thirty years later. I wish they all be here now, as I sit in my room at twilight on an early January evening in 2011, thinking about all that has brought me to ii this moment. Their support, their confidence, and their love live on as a part of me and have been a vital force behind this project. My dissertation advisors, Rod Ferguson and Kevin Murphy, consistently provided sound feedback and smart advice when I felt like I was floating in deep space, while Jigna Desai and David Valentine were engaging coursework instructors and generous dissertation committee members. The Graduate School and the Department of American Studies at the University of Minnesota provided financial support for coursework, research, and travel throughout the program. Julia Ehrhardt, Larry Frank, and Sarah Tracy were my faculty mentors during my undergraduate education at the University of Oklahoma, and each helped lay the groundwork for this dissertation. The interest that these faculty took in me as an undergraduate and then a graduate student have helped me find my voice as a writer, have taught me how to make connections, and have shaped me. Thank you. My fellow graduate students and professional colleagues have been a collective source of encouragement, diversion, critical feedback, and inspiration in class, in conversation, and in writing groups. Former and current fellow graduate students from the University of Minnesota who fall into this category include Liz Ault, Joseph Bauerkemper, Emily Smith Beitiks, Pam Butler, Ryan Cartwright, Steve Dillon, Doug Jensen, A.J. Lewis, Cathryn Merla-Watson, Rafia Mirza, Ryan Murphy, Soo-Jin Pate, Rebecca Scherr, Maura Seale, Harrod Suarez, Dorthe Troeften, Amy Tyson, Alex Urquhart, Steve Young, and Melissa Williams. Other faculty members at Minnesota and elsewhere who have supported my work, invited me into their classrooms as a student and a presenter, or asked me to present at conferences include Jennifer Pierce, iii Bill Leap, Scott Morgensen, and Laurie Ouellette. Susan Stryker generously offered to speak by phone with a second-year graduate student about her archival research about Christine Jorgensen, shared her notes from her visit to the Christine Jorgensen Collection at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, and years later mailed me digitized copies of Jorgensen’s travel films. She also put me into touch with Ms. Bob Davis, who kindly allowed me to conduct research in her unparalleled private transsexual and transgender archive. Dean Spade hosted me when I attended the L.A. Queer Studies Conference in 2007 and can always be counted on for his charisma as much as for his trenchant activism and scholarship. I currently work as a dissertation doctoral advisor at a private university in downtown Minneapolis, and four colleagues from which I’ve learned so much over the last two years are Farrah Fossum, Constance Davis, Vera Kovacovic, and Melissa Williams. My sprawling queer family is concentrated in the Twin Cities but spans North America and the Atlantic. Lindsay Hockaday has always been there at the right time to talk with me about food, politics, art, performance, and figuring out life at thirty. Her friendship is deeply cherished. Michelle Horton has had many outbursts of outrageousness—most of them inappropriate and involving alcohol—over the past six years that make me laugh to this day. Rachel Hadfield, John Gibson, and Alex Webb are friends made when I was a teenager in Oklahoma in the 1990s, and I’m glad that each has become a permanent fixture in my life all these years later. Carrie Elizabeth Kaplan talked me off the ledge one night in the final hours of my dissertation. Lucas Hilderbrand and Elijah Edelman are dear friends made during the writing of this dissertation. iv Since 2007, a queer activist performance and art scene has blossomed in Minneapolis that has variously been called the Revolting Queers and Pegasus and has most recently manifested as an open queer community space/scene in south Minneapolis known as Madame. Regulars who I am always ready to climb into a neon- lit, stripper-poled party bus with for a wild ride include Bethany Hart, Elliot Jobe, Anne Erickson, Consenticorn Triskit, Lady Enchantress, Erma Bublitz, Ryan Murphy, Lauren Deland, Jeff Hnilicka, Eric Jones, Jack Randol, Andrew Boos, Peter Hogan, Jared Maire, James Andrew, Angela Gerend, Anne-Kristin Thordin, Becky Smith, Chris Roberts, Katie Delaney, Scottie Brat, Ilana Percher, Joe Sullivan, Meredith Cain- Nielsen, and the fabulous LaMay family (Towanda Cave Pearl, Viktor Dazzle, Dusty Ferdinand, Frankie, Donovan Lipsic). Here’s to many more art projects, road adventures, gay interruptions, glitter performances, and fierceness! The Luedtke family—Marilyn and Dick, Joel and Emily Dyer, Dave and Sarah—have been instrumental in making Minneapolis into my home. And finally, thanks to Daniel Luedtke for keeping me on my toes, for dazzling me with the breadth and energy of his artistic output, and for buttering both sides of my toast these last six years. v Dedication_____________________________________________________________ To my mother, Russella Kay Franklin To my grandmothers: Mary Lee Arganbright, Ann Arganbright, Dorothy Decker And to Danimal: You and me in time vi Abstract_______________________________________________________________ Spectacles in Transit: Reading Cinematic Productions of Biopower and Transgender Embodiment looks at transgender cultural production on film and video in order to theorize biopower at the intersection of medicine and mass visual culture. In the decades following World War II, the development of medical technologies like reconstructive surgery increasingly allowed for the human body’s modification and enhancement, while the commercialization of communication technologies like film cameras gave middle-class consumers greater expressive autonomy. Medicine and mass visual culture have notably influenced the U.S. popular imagination about the body, social difference, aesthetics, and identity. And the role of biopower—the power to induce or administrate all aspects of human life by state and corporate entities—has intensified in everyday life in part due to these developments. This dissertation analyzes four cases from the past sixty years in which transgender individuals articulated their social, political, and economic self- determination through their self-representation onscreen. These cases are selected from four different cinematic genres: the transatlantic travel films of Christine Jorgensen from 1953; mondo films from the 1970s that graphically document genital reconstruction surgery; transsexual pornography from the early 1980s that probes the politics of heteronormative fantasy; and experimental video art from a post-9/11 feminist DIY media conference. This dissertation illuminates how biopower shapes and inflects self-representation of transgender embodiment in each instance and argues that every cultural producer responds with a cinematic assertion of social belonging. Thus, it explains how each cinematic production engages affect, values, aesthetics, and vii fantasy in relation to embodied intersections of gender, sexuality, race, class, and nationality. Spectacles in Transit shifts conversations about biopower away from the biopolitics of medical research, warfare, and population management and toward the cultural work of a social group defined by a medicalized mode of difference, a group that historically has signaled the sensational and the spectacular in the U.S. popular imagination. viii Contents_______________________________________________________________ List of