Abstract Transtv: Transgender Visibility And

ABSTRACT

TRANSTV: TRANSGENDER VISIBILITY AND REPRESENTATION IN SERIALIZED TELEVISION

by Joshua Blake Jones

With the increased visibility of transgender figures in serialized television comes a plethora of case studies to examine the ways in which transgender identity is culturally represented and perceived. My thesis examines the representations of transgender figures in the contemporary American serialized television series Orange Is the New Black, Transparent, and I Am Cait. My goal is to explore how these male-to-female transgender people embody alternative masculinities and femininities as well as how their transitions are received by those around them. Their trans identity, I argue, results in negative treatment caused by (and especially due to) their socioeconomic status and race. The introduction outlines the film, critical race, and transgender theoretical frameworks informing the project, followed by an exploration of the three aforementioned series. The first chapter embarks on a study of the ways in which the casting of transgender actors is crucial to provide a meaningful significance to the narrative. This argument carries into the second chapter, which discusses what happens when a cisgender actor is cast as a transgender character. The final chapter moves away from casting practices and instead highlights the social ramifications of nonfictional transgender narratives on television.

TRANSTV: TRANSGENDER VISIBILITY AND REPRESENTATION IN SERIALIZED TELEVISION

A Thesis

Submitted to the

Faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Joshua Blake Jones

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2016

Advisor: Dr. Katie Johnson

Reader: Dr. Erin Edwards

Reader: Dr. Anita Mannur

This thesis titled

TRANSTV: TRANSGENDER VISIBILITY AND REPRESENTATION IN SERIALIZED TELEVISION

Joshua Blake Jones

has been approved for publication by

The College of Arts and Science

and

Department of English

______Dr. Katie Johnson

______Dr. Erin Edwards

______Dr. Anita Mannur

Table of Contents

Introduction: It’s Not Just about Bathrooms 1

Trans(face) Is the New Black(face): On Laverne Cox and Casting Transgender Congruity 12

Transparent, A Cautionary Tale of Privilege, Injustice, and History Repeating Itself 26

Cait’s Makeover: “Jenner Trouble” in I Am Cait’s Transgender Activism 39

Bibliography 51

iii

List of Figures

Figure 1: 2 A woman holds a sign petitioning the abolition of "bathroom bill" legislation that targets the transgender community.

Figure 2: 16 Sutured to Sophia through an over-the-shoulder shot, we look with her as Healy disengages from her request

Figure 3: 17 Sophia reaches for a bobble-head, symbolic of the pawn-like status that Healy possesses within the prison industrial complex.

Figure 4: 19 The camera captures an extreme close-up of Sophia right before she endures a physical hate crime.

Figure 5: 22 Once the officer places Sophia in solitary confinement, the camera watches from outside the cell as she breaks down into sobs.

Figure 6: 28 The camera swivels as Maura and her daughters walk by, heading toward the women's restroom.

Figure 7: 29 The camera becomes sutured to Sarah as she confronts the woman who demands that Maura leaves the women's restroom.

Figure 8: 36 As Ali searches for Maura, she stumbles across Yetta in a cross-temporal moment that connects the past with the present.

Figure 9: 36 Ali holds the hand of young Rose, who will become Maura's mother, while the camera sutures us to Gittel in an over-the-shoulder shot.

Figure 10: 47 In this screenshot, writer Jen Richards makes eye contact with health educator Chandi Moore and professor Jennifer Boylan after Jenner makes a comment that highlights her social conservatism regarding people who allegedly take advantage of welfare systems.

Figure 11: 48 Jenner reacts with shock as she hears Laya Monarez discuss the violence she endured when her transgender identity was discovered by one of her clients.

Dedication

To the lives that allow this thesis to exist: I hear you, I see you, and I stand with you.

Acknowledgements

So many people have supported me throughout this process, and yet I’m sure to forget several of them in the brief space I have to list out my acknowledgements. I apologize in advance for being so neglectful. First, to my committee chair, Dr. Katie Johnson, who has seen this project from its cloudy beginnings to its lengthy finale, who has provided unwavering support while I sobbed in her office during bouts of writer’s block and reveled in my writing breakthroughs. Thank you, Katie, for your passionate mentorship; I am forever indebted to you. To my other readers, Drs. Erin Edwards and Anita Mannur, I thank you for providing a safe space to experiment with my ideas, for your flexibility, and for the encouragement to continue fleshing out this argument in future endeavors. I would be remiss not to also mention the Miami University English Department as a whole, for its members—from tenured professors to fellow graduate students—have allowed me to bounce ideas off them without judgment and ramble on and on about my ideas while providing a safe and encouraging space to expand the parameters of what constitutes an “English degree.” Prior to beginning this degree, I never would have thought that I would be able to write a thesis about television shows, and I am extremely grateful for and excited about the opportunity to do so. In particular, I would like to thank the graduate director Dr. Madelyn Detloff for having an open-door policy as well as Dr. Yu-Fang Cho for facilitating a seminar that provided the theoretical connections that tied many of my ideas together. And to my brilliant best friend, my fierce ride or die, Michelle Christensen: Thank you for never letting me spiral into the pit of despair and for being my rock during this grueling process by reminding me to take time for myself so as to avoid overexertion. I love you. I appreciate you. I admire you. To my family: Mom, Dad, Krysta, and Adam. Thank you for always reminding me of my potential, for continuously telling me that I’ve got this. You were right. And, silly as it may be to do this, thank you to my fur-babies, Myles and Julian. Your feline sass and deep loyalty to your papa kept me grounded and entertained while I spent hours reading (and re-reading) books and articles, and watching (and re-watching) Netflix. It can’t be easy being a grad school pet, and your warmth while curled up beside me and your patience while I worked nonstop did not go unnoticed. And to the names of people I’ve forgotten, know that your support has meant the world to me. Thank you.

vii

Introduction: It’s Not Just about Bathrooms

A middle-aged woman wearing dark blue jeans and a gray hooded sweatshirt stands in the center of a photograph capturing a seemingly banal scene. Her fading auburn hair sways wispy in a slight breeze; her lips are pursed in mid-sentence as she directs her gaze at someone just to the right of the frame. She stands on a gray cement sidewalk, framed by two other people who look away from her and from the camera. There is a line of vehicles parked behind her, and behind that a green awning attached to a tan brick building. But it isn’t the building, the awning, the vehicles, the sidewalk, or even the people in the photo that demand the most attention. Rather, it’s the large sign that the unnamed woman standing in the center of the photograph holds. Her hands grip the top of the white poster. Black, handwritten letters scrawled across the sign spell out: “It Wasn’t About Water Fountains In the 60s and It Isn’t About Bathrooms Now. Stop the Hate.” This unnamed woman’s message, forever captured and uploaded to the Twitter- verse, echoes the message that I want to convey throughout the course of this thesis. In seeking an anecdote to begin this thesis, I searched for something that would encapsulate the epitome of my argument. Did I, as a cisgender white gay man, dare to write about my own journey into transgender studies? How would such a move appeal to the community to whom I feel so passionately allied? Deciding against an autobiographical narrative, I continued my quest. It was not until very late into the writing process that I stumbled across this photo, included below, as a I scrolled through my Twitter feed. This woman’s message responds to the “bathroom bill” legislation controversy that has been gaining political traction over the last few years—legislation that regulates who uses which public restroom, legislation that directly stigmatizes the transgender community. As this new vector of identity has become increasingly more visible in mainstream media, it has been repeatedly questioned and challenged for its non-normativity and perceived deviance. Transgender studies pioneer Susan Stryker has documented this stigmatization in Transgender History, in which she provides a century-and-a-half chronology of transgender identity and the historical forces that have shifted from the pathologization of transgender identity to its beginnings of acceptance and intelligibility. She begins with an analysis of the nationwide municipalities that began outlawing the act of cross-dressing in the mid-nineteenth century and marches forward through discussions of pivotal figures such as sexologists Richard von Krafft- Ebing, author of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), and Magnus Hirschfeld, inventor of the term “transvestite” and founder of the Institute for Sexual Science (1919). (Hirschfeld makes a significant appearance later in this thesis during my analysis of the Amazon series Transparent, for the show depicts the transgender movement through the framework of queer temporality wherein Weimar Republic-era Berlin is overlapped with present-day storylines within the show.) Stryker provides sophisticated details of mid-twentieth century transgender liberation movements, identifying key moments such as the 1959 incident at Cooper’s Donuts in Los Angeles, the 1965 sit-in at Dewey’s in Philadelphia, the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in San Francisco, and—the moment popularized by mainstream media as the first LGBT rights protest—the 1969 Stonewall Riots. She goes on to identify a rift that occurred in the 1970s between the gay and lesbian rights movement and the transgender movement; as activists worked toward the depathologization of homosexuality, the pathologization of transgender identity continued with little support from the gay and lesbian communities. The current wave of transgender activism began in the 1990s, when the term “transgender” started to become

1 popularized. Stryker identifies “small-scale, self-financed, homegrown resources [that] characterized the bulk of what passed for transgender community organizations before the 1990s,” which is still in the process of shifting toward national recognition of transgender rights and an increase in the life chances of this marginalized community (122). Indeed, as Stryker notes in her final words, “much work remains to be done” (153). Since I am a cisgender white gay man, I find Stryker’s linear history of the transgender movement and the community’s visibility to be profoundly enlightening, for it tells a story previously unbeknownst to me. Stryker’s historical narrative for newcomers to transgender studies, people not unlike myself, helps us to navigate difficult terrain as we continue fighting for transgender liberation.

Figure 1: A woman holds a sign petitioning the abolition of "bathroom bill" legislation that targets the transgender community. (Source: Still, Keith B. (@NaYaKnowMi). “‘it wasn't about water fountains in the 60s and it isn't about bathrooms now.’” 26 Apr. 2016, 4:09 PM. Tweet.)

Furthermore, the argument presented in this Twitter photograph directly links the systemic violence directed toward African-Americans during the Civil Rights movement to the struggle for transgender equality today. It dismantles the notion of integration as the ultimate win for both racial segregation as well as the stigmatization of transgender identity. Just as communities of color were perceived to be subhuman, resulting in the forcible use of different water fountains prior to the Civil Rights Movement that demanded integration, so too transgender people are being forced to disclose the sex they were assigned at birth in order to be granted access to public restrooms. Yet, this woman’s message challenges the notion of inclusive laws working toward the integration of racial and transgender communities; indeed, as she notes, “It wasn’t about the water fountains in the 60s.” Rather, it was about racism and combating the violence that communities of color faced. Just because segregation is supposedly over in terms of legislation does not signify that we live in a postracial society. Indeed, the 1960s Civil Rights Movement presented a starting point for black liberation that continues today, manifesting in, just to name one example, the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Similarly, just because transgender people may or may not be able to use the bathroom that corresponds to their gender identity does not signify an end to the stigmatization of their community. Trans is not the new black; the emergence of transgender studies does not signify the end of black liberation. Rather, trans is a new and exciting facet of identity that adds to the cultural work of intersectionality.1 Accordingly, Dean Spade provides another theoretical framework informing my project. He discusses the ways in which anti-discrimination and hate crime laws do not promote cultural change; indeed, it is nearly impossible to execute and police adherence to these laws. Furthermore, such legislation ignores systemic violence that the transgender community faces. So-called inclusive legislation normalizes transgender identity through mainstreaming it in a neoliberal landscape. The television series and films I analyze throughout this thesis provide, on the one hand, a normalization of transgender identity through increased visibility. To be sure, the historical moment in which we are situated has provided a culture that allows such series not only to exist but also to be broadcast throughout the country. Ostensibly, such visibility of a marginalized community would seem to create understanding through the normalization it garners via increased representation. The transgender narratives that I examine here are by no means the only ones within the rapidly expanding transgender archive. And yet, while visibility creates some forms of understanding, it is not always a productive site of resistance, for it can recreate systemic violence against the minoritarian communities upon whom it sheds light. Indeed, here I invoke performance studies scholar Peggy Phelan’s argument that visibility can be a trap, thus complicating the politics of normalization through visibility. In her book Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, she notes that visibility “summons surveillance and the law; it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession. Yet it retains a certain political appeal” (6). Phelan points out a seemingly unsolvable double bind: for minoritized communities to obtain increased visibility in the media, the ethical appeal of inclusivity and empowerment is achieved; yet, merely by achieving such visibility, the minoritized communities

1 I borrow the term “intersectionality” from Kimberlé Crenshaw, who uses the term to discuss the ways in which different vectors of identity interact and further expose a subject to various oppressive power structures. Crenshaw focuses on the intersectionality of race and gender, particularly in terms of women of color. Many scholars have built upon this theory to include the ways in which sexuality, gender identity, ability, and class operate under hegemonies. (See Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241-1299.) 3 can become subjected to the scrutiny of the public gaze. Not unlike Phelan’s “trap of visibility,” Dean Spade identifies a similar concern for trans-inclusivity off-screen. He discusses the ways in which equality-based legislation such as anti-discrimination laws and hate crime laws are an effort to normalize transgender identity through inclusion. This juxtaposition of Phelan’s “trap of visibility” with Spade’s “myth of inclusion” extends the visibility of transgender narratives in film and television into the realm of social reality. Ultimately, I offer Spade’s work on “critical trans politics” as a potential solution to the double bind that Phelan identifies, circumventing the trap of visibility. Normalization via increased visibility in textual and media representation attempts to cultivate cultural intelligibility of transgender identity. Crucial, then, to this goal, as well as to my overall project, is Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity, first articulated in her essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1980). In this groundbreaking essay, Butler famously asserts that gender is “an identity instituted through the stylized repetition of acts” (519; original emphasis). It is, in other words, something that we do rather than something that we are. Drawing her analysis from Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (1976) and Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), Butler explains how a subject’s identity is the product of Foucault’s “matrix of discursive power,” a paradigm that concretizes “sex, gender, and heterosexuality as historical products which have become conjoined and reified as natural over time” (Butler, “Performative Acts” 525). Butler extends these thoughts throughout her oeuvre, which includes Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (1993), and Undoing Gender (2004). In Bodies that Matter, for example, she integrates the notion of iterability to clarify her theory of gender performativity: “The Derridean notion of iterability, formulated in response to the theorization of speech acts by John Searle and J.L. Austin,” she writes, “also implies that every act is itself a recitation, the citing of a prior chain of acts which are implied in a present act and which perpetually drain any ‘present’ of its presentness” (Butler, BM 244, footnote 7). In other words, she claims here that there is no pre-existing subject prior to discourse and cultural performance; the so-called naturalness of gender and sex is therefore a fiction because the subject is constituted by the repetition of gender acts. Her most recent book, Undoing Gender, takes a more social activist approach to the ways in which gender is constituted. When a person transgresses gender prescriptions, Butler points out, they are no longer recognizable as legible, or real to hegemonic culture: “[T]o be called unreal […],” she says, “is to become the other (against whom or against which) the human is made. It is the inhuman, the beyond the human, the less than human, the border that secures the human in its ostensible reality” (UG 30). When one is perceived to be unintelligible, one does not conform to the hegemonic cultural codes defining normative embodiment and performance. One such community that remains culturally unintelligible is the transgender community, for it resists the cisheteropatriarchy. Such nonconformity renders many transgender people victims of violence, which, in Butler’s words, “emerges from a profound desire to keep the binary gender natural or necessary […] precisely as the demand to undo that legibility, to question its possibility, to render it unreal and impossible in the face of its appearance to the contrary” (UG 35). This violence is an all too real experience for many transgender people, including those whom appear throughout this thesis such as the fictional characters Sophia Burset and Maura Pfefferman as well as the real-life Caitlyn Jenner.

Transgender embodiment has been addressed also by queer theorist Jack Halberstam.2 In his book In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, Halberstam discusses the transgender body “as a contradictory site in postmodernism” (18). On the one hand, he notes, the “gender flexibility” of a transgender subject positions transgender identity in direct opposition to the gender inversion that psychoanalysis pathologized alternative sexualities and gender identities in the early twentieth century, creating “futurity itself” (Halberstam 18); on the other hand, transgender identity has opened space for a “post-gender world” where “the idea of ‘labeling’ becomes a sign of oppression,” but such a positionality erases the activist histories that fought for recognition of those labels (Halberstam 19). Furthermore, Halberstam positions transgender identity within queer temporalities and spaces, a framework in contrast to the chronologocentric history that Stryker presents. Queer temporality, he asserts, is an alternative to dominant ideology: “Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” he notes. “They also develop according to other logics of location, movement, and identification” (1). Halberstam contests, in other words, how hegemonic structures like cisgender identity, heterosexuality, and patriarchy shape our temporal understandings. Those who do not embody or adhere to the demands of these power structures are likely to have a different, a queer, relationship with time. Indeed, Halberstam identifies the AIDS epidemic among gay men in the late twentieth century as the impetus for reevaluating temporality, for the death-sentence nature of this diagnosis forced this subcultural community to question notions of hegemonic, linear temporality. Furthermore, performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider identifies the ways in which temporality creates a reciprocal relationship between past and present performance. In her book Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, Schneider discusses the “slip and slide” of temporality as texts, cultural production, and embodiment are performed and re- performed: “Identicality is already undone in all of these words,” she asserts, “as they are all words for the side-step operation by which one thing stands in for another thing, either as the same or as almost the same but not quite. There is something, too, of queerness in this slip and slide” (18). Although Schneider is specifically interested in the operations of temporality vis-à- vis American Civil War reenactments, her argument is not that different from Halberstam’s. While Schneider theorizes a more general approach to the ways in which re-performance manifests throughout time, Halberstam provides a more specific interest in the re-performance of transgender embodiment. Queer temporality allows me to consider the ramifications of the performance and re- performance of transgender identity as citational and dragged across temporalities. Such terms as “citational” and “dragged” I borrow from Judith Butler and David Román, respectively. For Butler, citationality refers to “the citation of that metalepsis by which the subject who ‘cites’ the performative is temporarily produced as the belated and fictive origin of the performative itself” (Excitable Speech 49; original emphasis). In other words, the performative always already cites that which has come before, but that which it cites has no actual origin. Such a claim, of course, hearkens back to her earlier discussion of iterability in Bodies that Matter. Although Butler’s Excitable Speech (1997) moves away from gender performativity and instead becomes an extension of Austinian performative speech acts to examine hate speech, it nevertheless addresses speech acts that are uttered under duress: when one’s gender or sexual identity is perceived as deviant. Similarly, David Román’s notion of “archival drag” is “a performance that

2 Although In a Queer Time and Place, the book from which I draw my analysis of Halberstam, was published under his former name, I will refer to Halberstam with male pronouns and his chosen name, Jack. 5 sets out to reembody and revive a performance from the past” (“Archival Drag” 140). Interested in the re-emergence of eighteenth-century British stage actress Sarah Siddons in the late twentieth century and tracing this iteration all the way to drag artists doing Bette Davis (doing Sarah Siddons), Román traces the ways in which performance and re-performance creates a “cultural afterlife” (141). This “cultural afterlife” demonstrates the citationality of each re- iteration of Siddons and her performance, for each iteration always already connects to the others, both past and future. Although Román’s term clearly invokes the necessity of embodiment in the re-performance whereas Butler’s does not, both concepts require the queering of time and space, Schneider’s “slip and slide,” in order to address the ways in which each performance or performative act speaks to the past, the present, and the future iterations of itself. Given that the texts I discuss throughout this thesis are television series, film theory has greatly informed the ways in which I establish and maintain my argument. Indeed, feminist film scholars such as Laura Mulvey and Teresa de Lauretis provided groundbreaking ideas about the gendered gaze and cross-gendered identification in cinema. Mulvey’s essays “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema” and “Afterthoughts,” for example, position the filmic gaze as male. As Mulvey has persuasively shown, the cinematic male gaze created a “to-be-looked-at-ness” in female subjects of the camera, a regime in which “women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact” (2088). Teresa de Lauretis extended gaze theory in much of her work; Technologies of Gender, for example, to argue for cross-gender identification that is more fluid. As film scholarship expanded, scholars such as Chris Straayer and B. Ruby Rich lent a queer eye to cinema, helping to reevaluate the power dynamics between film and sexuality. In Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies, Straayer adds another layer to Mulvey’s male gaze. Indeed, he observes that “the question ‘Is the gaze male?’ needs to be combined with the equally pertinent question ‘Is the gaze heterosexual?’” (3). Furthermore, B. Ruby Rich’s New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut is a revised version of her compilation of essays tracing the development of what she calls the “New Queer Cinema,” or NQC. For Rich, this cinematic subculture is a “place of reflection, nourishment, and renewed engagement” that rose from “the emergence of ‘queer’ as a concept and a community” (xix, xvi). As queer cinema has continued to evolve, it has transformed from subcultural to blockbuster (Rich xxvi). Rich aptly notes that “it’s become clear that trans is the new queer” (xxvii), which signals another stage of evolution for New Queer Cinema and queer film theory. Rising scholars such as Jeremy Russell Miller continue the work that scholars like Rich, Straayer, and de Lauretis have begun. Indeed, in their3 dissertation Crossdressing Cinema: An Analysis of Transgender Representation in Film, Miller examines 24 films featuring (potential) transgender identity with release dates ranging from 1959 to 2010. Ultimately, Miller argues that transgender films “support the distancing of the characters from the audience. This distancing effect is rooted in a lack of legitimacy ascribed to transgender identities of the characters” (15). Drawing from Halberstam’s “transgender look,” which I discuss at length below, Miller states that this distancing effect is produced through one of three gazes: trans-misogynistic gaze, transphobic gaze, or trans-pathetic gaze (30-31). As I hope will become clear as this thesis unfolds, I disagree with the distancing effect Miller advances. In the forthcoming discussion of Kaja Silverman’s cinematic suture, I outline how the camerawork tethers us to the transgender- identified characters within these series. As a result of this suturing, we do in fact identify and

3 In the dissertation, Miller includes a personal story about coming out as a transgender woman. Since there are no preferred pronouns provided, I will refer to the author by name or using third-person plural pronouns (i.e. they, theirs, them). 6 empathize with these characters. This sort of identification seems to harmonize with Miller’s trans-pathetic gaze, which “positions [transgender] characters as objects of sympathy for all the difficulties they endure in their attempts to live their lives as the genders with which they identify” (45). And yet, as Miller later asserts, “The visual codes of the trans-pathetic gaze include attention to dressing, reminders of the body, and sympathetic recognition by others” (173-174). For Miller, then, the trans-pathetic gaze focuses on the corporeal body, which ultimately creates an identificatory fissure between the transgender characters and viewers. I, on the other hand, extend the sympathy exuded by the trans-pathetic gaze away from the transgender body and toward the structures, such as the prison-industrial complex in Orange Is the New Black, that work against transgender identity as a whole, utilizing a focus on the film work of the camera. The term suture, cinematographically speaking, comes from Kaja Silverman’s influential The Subject of Semiotics. Silverman draws upon Lacanian psychoanalysis to discuss the ways in which camerawork sutures viewers to the character with whom they identify. In her analysis of Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), Silverman notes, “We have no choice but to identify with Marion in the shower, to insert ourselves into the position of the wayward subject who has strayed from the highway of cultural acceptability, but who now wants to make amends” (226). This identification relies upon camerawork that establishes a gaze that centers upon a subject and willingly refuses other gazes or “looks.” Such a controlled identification enhances the audience’s relationship with the subject onto which the camera lingers. Identification with this “wayward subject,” then, is inevitable in part because, much like the mirror stage, when the infant looks at a mirror to gain a sense of identity, so too the screen serves as a way in which the camera forges one’s identity and desire for “cultural acceptability.” Furthermore, Silverman discusses the “lure of narrative” in establishing identification and empathy for the subject to whom we become sutured: “the match of subject and cinematic discourse occurs not just at the level of the shot but at that of the story—that films reinterpellate the viewer into preestablished discursive positions not only by effacing the signs of their own production but through the lure of narrative” (228). While Silverman approaches the suturing effect through psychoanalysis, I depart from such a framework. Indeed, I suggest that the scenes I analyze throughout the forthcoming chapters create what Jack Halberstam calls the “transgender look,” or the “certain formal techniques [within a film that] give the viewer access to the transgender gaze in order to allow us to look with the transgender character instead of at him” (78). The formal techniques to which he refers are the cinematographic choices in camerawork, which de-fetishize the transgender body and thus eliminate what Judith Butler would call the cultural unintelligibility of transgender identity (or what Silverman describes above as “cultural acceptability”). Halberstam traces the ways in which the transgender look operates in the films The Crying Game (1992), Boys Don’t Cry (1999), and By Hook or By Crook (2002). In his first example, Halberstam points out the “misuse or simply the avoidance of the transgender gaze” that ultimately “uses Dil’s transvestism only to re-center the white male gaze” (80). This film, Halberstam asserts, continues the fetishization of the transgender body through the illegibility of Dil’s transvestism. Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry, however, sustains a transgender gaze throughout most of the film; yet, the transgender look ultimately falters and becomes a lesbian gaze after the scene in which Brandon Teena is raped (Halberstam 89). As a result of Brandon’s murder, moreover, the gaze must shift because the protagonist to whom we have become sutured is no longer on screen. Finally, Halberstam shows that By Hook or By Crook sustains the transgender gaze throughout the entire film through its “refus[al] to acknowledge the existence of a straight world” (94).

Despite the productive trend that Halberstam analyzes in transgender cinema, he utilizes the terms “gaze” and “look” interchangeably; Miller, too, drawing from Halberstam, collapses these terms into a singular usage. Such a collapse ignores the nuances within camerawork that create various identificatory effects. As a solution, then, I offer the following distinction between the two: the transgender look that Halberstam offers is a way of looking with the character rather than at them, whereas the transgender gaze constitutes looking as the transgender character. In other words, I argue that the transgender gaze is established through point-of-view shots as the transgender character while the transgender look is created by camerawork that does not put us in the eyes of the transgender character. Indeed, in the analyses that follow, I employ the use of the term “transgender look” to situate the camera as a third party between the transgender character and the audience. In such a role, the camera carries the ability to continue fetishizing the transgender character, certainly, but I demonstrate how it actually sutures us to transgender figures like Sophia Burset, Maura Pfefferman, and Caitlyn Jenner to create a transgender look. The transgender characters and figures in the television series that I examine are not without historic or literary precedent, however. As a result, I transition now to a brief genealogy of queer and transgender identity in literature and film prior to these current shows. Early twentieth-century literature, for example, begins to make same-sex desire explicit. Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament” (1905) is a frontrunner to portrayals of homosexual male characters, while Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933) and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) illustrate explicit lesbian desire. Importantly, Barnes’s Nightwood provides what may be one of the first articulations of transgender identity in American literature. Amidst the narrative concerning the same-sex desire between Robin and her two lovers, Nora and Jenny, is the cross-dressing Doctor Matthew Dante O’Connor. The act of cross-dressing clearly resists the gender binary and gender norms of the early twentieth century, but the doctor’s narrative goes much deeper than that. Indeed, he wonders, “[A]m I to blame if I’ve turned up this time as I shouldn’t have been?” (97). Such a pondering alludes to a wrong-body narrative that so thoroughly saturates current mainstream discourse surrounding transgender identity. Furthermore, he states that “no matter what I may be doing, in my heart is the wish for children and knitting. God, I never asked better than to boil some good man’s potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months by the calendar” (98). Not only does the doctor feel as though he was assigned to the wrong body at birth; he desires a female body. He wants a womb from which he can bear children for his husband; he wants to take on the female role in a couple. Although Barnes relies on a wrong-body narrative and the adherence to traditional gender roles, she offers one of the first manifestations of transgender identity in modern American culture. Given that this portrayal of (proto-)transgender identity is coupled with a love story of lesbian desire in this classic novel, a desire that was just beginning to be culturally and scientifically investigated, Barnes crossed the threshold into new terrain and provided the gateway for further representations of both sexuality as well as transgender identity. The visibility of same-sex desire and transgender identity simultaneously continued throughout future literature, significantly examining other important vectors of identity such as race. Future iterations of same-sex desire surface in James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956), a bildungsroman that examines how sexualities are culturally mandated and racialized; as well as Audre Lorde’s poetry and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1987), both of which address the ways in which woman of color feminism has shaped discourse about alternative sexualities. Transgender narratives that also feature race include David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly (1989) and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, Parts 1 and 2 (1992). Hwang offers a narrative that

8 addresses colonialist desire, interraciality, and alternative gender performance: male-bodied and male-identified Song Liling dresses as a woman in order to extort the French diplomat Rene Gallimard for information. Drawing from the opera Madama Butterfly (1904), in which a French diplomat falls in love with a Japanese opera singer who commits suicide when he leaves her, Hwang retells the narrative with a critique of Western colonialist desire. In his version, it is Gallimard, the French diplomat, who commits suicide when he realizes not only that he cannot be with Liling, but that the relationship threatens his heterosexual masculinity. Although Liling’s cross-dressing does not necessarily constitute a transgender identity, it is, in fact, a transgender act in that it traverses gender lines. Indeed, Stryker and Halberstam both point out that the term transgender does not always mean an identification with a different gender. In fact, they note that any act that crosses the gender line can be considered transgender (Stryker 1, Halberstam 18). Despite the useful critique of a white man fetishizing an Asian woman that Hwang creates, he also produces a complex relationship with transgender identity through Liling’s cross-dressing. On the one hand, this performance necessitates a reflection about white heterosexual masculinity, particularly through the lens of colonialism. The fetishization of Asian women is condemned in M. Butterfly, for the cross-dressing Liling effectively generates Gallimard’s reflection and subsequent alternative gender performance when he takes on the role of the Butterfly in the end. And yet, on the other hand, Hwang’s take on transgender performance positions cross-dressing as a means to critique Western colonialist desire. When Kushner’s Angels in America, Parts 1 and 2 (2003) emerged a decade and a half later, cross-dressing, queer desire, and politics are redeemed to an extent. This drama, which narrativizes the AIDS epidemic of the 1990s, features a secondary character, Belize, who is a black ex-drag queen. Belize becomes nurse to Roy Cohn, a deeply closeted gay politician who covers his AIDS diagnosis by calling it liver cancer. It is important to recognize that Belize’s former career as a drag queen is an artistic performance while Liling’s performance as Butterfly is a social performance, occurring outside the subcultural gay scene. As a result, although Kushner moves away from the demonization of transgender performance through the favorable nature of drag that Belize embodies, the act of drag, while subversive, is part of the character’s past, positioned as an artful exaggeration of femininity rather than an intrinsic female identity. Hwang’s Liling, living socially as a woman, demonizes transgender identity because of the ways in which it is positioned as deceit. Neither narrative, then, provides a positive manifestation of transgender identity despite the transgender acts that the characters deploy. As B. Ruby Rich points out, filmic manifestations of transgender performance have increased in visibility over time. Indeed, although Kimberly Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry (1999) was a landmark film for its mainstream success, it was not the first film to feature transgender identity or performance. Hector Babenco’s film Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) and Jennie Livingston’s documentary Paris Is Burning (1990), for example, highlight such visibility. Kiss of the Spider Woman, based on a play of the same name published a decade prior to the film adaptation, highlights the criminalization of alternative gender identities and sexualities in Latino culture. Molina (William Hurt) is incarcerated for engaging in sexual acts with an underage boy, thus ostensibly positioning him as a gay character. While the film criminalizes homosexual identity, it collapses sexuality and gender identity. It seems to ask: why would a homosexual male not exhibit feminine characteristics? And yet, Molina continually identifies himself as a woman, for he uses female pronouns throughout the film and rejects not only masculine identity, but also maleness in general. He creates an alter ego, the Spider Woman, who embodies the femaleness that corresponds to his own points of identification. Ultimately, the film serves as a

9 precursor to the current movement to de-criminalize transgender identity, a cause acquiring much political traction and media visibility in series such as Orange Is the New Black. For Molina to possess such a nuanced sense of self, one that understands the differences between sexual and gender identity, illustrates a resistance to mainstream discourse that tends to position them as interchangeable terms. Furthermore, Livingston’s Paris Is Burning details the lives of drag queens who participate in Harlem drag balls. The documentary sophisticatedly points out the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and race, ultimately becoming one of the first films in transgender cinema to feature nonfictional accounts of transgender performance within communities of color. It also addresses drag as art rather than as transgender identity, challenging the notion that drag queens desire to become women. (As portrayed in the documentary, it is important to note that some drag queens do in fact desire a male to female transition, but drag does not necessarily require female-identified embodiment.) As transgender cinema moved from subcultural to mainstream, films like Boys Don’t Cry (1999) and Duncan Tucker’s Transamerica (2005) have emerged. Peirce’s Boys Don’t Cry is indeed a landmark film for transgender cinema, for it is the first mainstream feature film that addresses transgender identity while garnering positive critical reception. Indeed, it is a film that many scholars— Halberstam included—return to, applauding the moves that it makes in terms of its transgender look as well as its distinction between gender identity and sexuality. Transamerica moves away from a transition or passing narrative that other films sustain. Instead of focusing on the transition that Bree (Felicity Huffman) undergoes (indeed, it is barely featured at the end of the film), Transamerica tackles family structures and relationships. Assigned male at birth, Bree came to father a now-estranged son (Kevin Zegers). The film follows Bree’s journey with her son as they trek across the country re-establishing their relationship as parent and child. The difference between these two mainstream films, then, is that Boys Don’t Cry continues the separation of gender identity and sexuality that Kiss of the Spider Woman begins while simultaneously eliciting empathy for those transgender-identified figures who are criminalized for their identification. Rather than focusing on transgender identity, Transamerica, on the other hand, engages with the question of homonormativity through its emphasis on kinship, a universal experience lived by transgender people and non-transgender people alike. It positions Bree’s transgender identity as “just like” cisgender identity because a transgender person experiences similar struggles as non-transgender people. Furthermore, each of these films engage in casting practices that ostracizes transgender actors, a regime that I discuss in detail in my first chapter. The chapters in this thesis examine a shift away from filmic adaptations of transgender identity toward manifestations within contemporary American television. Nevertheless, they are the result of decades, centuries even, of the rupture of gender boundaries and hegemonic structures in written and filmed narratives. The first chapter, entitled “Trans(face) Is the New Black(face): On Laverne Cox and Casting Transgender Congruity,” enters into two conversations: first, I examine the problematic nature of cisgender actors portraying transgender characters. Using Brian Eugenio Herrera’s work on “racial congruity,” a casting practice that calls for actors to intrinsically identify with the race they portray on-screen, I argue that casting practices should also employ “transgender congruity,” whereby the actor intrinsically identifies with the gender identity they portray on-screen. The second conversation into which this chapter enters is that surrounding the prison-industrial complex and the ways in which it targets and exploits minoritarian communities, particularly transgender women of color. Since my case study is the Netflix original series Orange Is the New Black, I not only examine the transgender congruity of casting Laverne Cox as Sophia Burset, but also discuss the ways in which the

10 prison-industrial complex attacks Sophia’s personhood. Cox’s portrayal of Sophia, in combination with the camerawork during her scenes, cinematically tethers us to her and invites audiences to identify not only with Sophia, but also with her ideologies and demands. I argue that through the camerawork in Sophia’s scenes, the series activates social consciousness about the ways in which the prison-industrial complex targets and exploits transgender women of color, inviting audiences to reevaluate the effectiveness of incarceration. The following chapter, “Transparent, A Cautionary Tale of Privilege, Injustice, and History Repeating Itself,” continues the discussion of transgender congruity. The choice to cast Jeffrey Tambor, a cisgender male actor, as Maura Pfefferman, the transgender protagonist of the series, results in “transgender mimicry,” a term I employ through revising Herrera’s “racial mimicry.” Racial mimicry, or the use of actors who do not identify as the race they portray on- screen, often results in black-, brown-, yellow-, or redface; similarly, transgender mimicry, wherein an actor does not share the same gender identity as the character they portray, results in “transface.” Despite the problematic nature of the transface employed within the series, Transparent breaks new ground by including what series creator Jill Soloway has called a “transfirmative action plan,” which prioritizes the employment of transgender people over non- transgender people in the production crew. Furthermore, the series contains a message that warns audiences not to let history repeat itself. Through the overlapping of the past and the present, critiquing the Nazi regime’s condemnation of Jewish and queer identities, Transparent echoes this critique in its commentary of present-day condemnation of transgender identities. The final chapter shifts away from fictionalized transgender narratives and examines Caitlyn Jenner and her documentary series I Am Cait. Using Brenda R. Weber’s analysis of the makeover genre as a framework, I position I Am Cait as an ideological makeover show, particularly given that the narrative structure begins with the reveal of her physical transformation rather than ends with it. As a result, the show documents the ways in which Jenner, with the help of a selected group of transgender friends, transitions not only her corporeal body, but also her neoliberal narrative of progress. I critique Jenner’s goal to make transgender identity “the new normal” through the myth of inclusion that legal scholar and trans activist Dean Spade identifies. Ultimately, I suggest that while the series has its certain points of activism, it nonetheless prioritizes white and wealthy transgender identity.

Trans(face) Is the New Black(face): On Laverne Cox and Casting Transgender Congruity

With its sixteen Primetime Emmy Award nominations and four wins, Orange Is the New Black is one of the most popular contemporary American television series. It is well known for its portrayal of various forms of womanhood, highlighting the intersections of gender (identity), sexuality, race, and class within the prison-industrial complex. Indeed, in his review of the series’ second season, New York Times critic Mike Hale notes, “The show can be applauded for giving opportunities to a wide range of talented actresses and for representing a multiplicity of ethnicities and orientations in its characters” (Hale, “No Time Off”). While these accolades applauding the portrayal of many diverse women are true, however, I want to flesh out another, perhaps less obvious, reason for the show’s success, especially given its setting within the prison-industrial complex, a notoriously violent institution. In this chapter, I focus my analysis on the narrative and casting of Sophia Burset, the transgender woman of color who is incarcerated at Litchfield Penitentiary, the fictional prison that serves as the primary setting for the Netflix original series. The theoretical framework that begins this chapter includes a (very brief) genealogy of film theory and queer cinema, followed by a discussion of performance scholar Brian Eugenio Herrera’s notions of “racial mimicry” and “racial congruity” in conjunction with queer theorist Jack Halberstam’s “transgender look.” Building on these scholars’ works, I make a case for what I identify as the prevalence of “transface” performance in American television and cinema. I revise Herrera’s call for “racial congruity” to my own demand for “transgender congruity”: casting transgender actors as transgender characters for the transgender narratives that are gaining visibility in the media. From there, I outline the ways in which transgender congruity creates more meaningful performances and cultural discourse. With Sophia as a case study, I examine two moments in her narrative: first, the removal of her hormonal treatment in “Lesbian Request Denied” (1.3); and second, the hate crime and the subsequent punishment that she endures in “Don’t Make Me Come Back There” (3.12). Because the series narrativizes the systemic violence within the prison-industrial complex’s targeting and exploitation of racialized and gendered bodies, I also utilize Dennis Childs’s analysis of the prison-industrial complex, particularly with regards to solitary confinement, and Dean Spade’s “critical trans politics” and his call for prison abolition. After demonstrating the importance of transgender congruity, I deploy the notion of the white savior narrative to critique how Sophia’s story and the diverse ensemble cast serve as periphery to the central, cisgender, white female protagonist Piper; this white savior narrative complicates the significance of the transgender look that the series creates. In the same way that white hegemony purports to “save” communities of color, I propose that cisgender hegemony does the same for the transgender community. In the pages that follow, I argue that in casting transgender activist Laverne Cox as the incarcerated Sophia Burset, Orange Is the New Black creates transgender congruity and calls attention to the ways in which the prison-industrial complex targets and exploits transgender women of color. By suturing the audience to Sophia’s character with both narrative and camera work, the show facilitates identification with transgender peoples’ struggles, ideologies, and demands regarding this institution. The series therefore activates social consciousness about the prison-industrial complex and the ways in which it targets and exploits the community that Sophia represents. Although the cultural text I analyze in-depth in this chapter—and, indeed, in the chapters to come—are television series, film theory has greatly impacted how I approach a television show. As I detailed in the introduction, feminist film scholars Laura Mulvey and Teresa de Lauretis provided groundbreaking theories about the male gaze and cross-gendered identification

12 in cinema, respectively. The frameworks posited by these two scholars then prompted further theories on the cinematic gaze, particularly in terms of queer cinema as B. Ruby Rich outlines it. Chris Straayer, for example, has critiqued the gaze as heterosexual by default; Jack Halberstam, furthermore, has addressed the transgender look. Drawing from Kaja Silverman’s notion of suturing, or the methodology by which the camerawork creates identification between the audience and the cinematic subject, Halberstam has traced the ways in which the transgender look operates in film. In doing so, he has provided the gateway for rising scholars such as Jeremy Russell Miller to expand the transgender gaze to fall within one of three categories: trans- misogynistic, transphobic, and trans-pathetic. However, Halberstam and Miller both collapse the transgender look and the transgender gaze, using these terms interchangeably. Allow me to once again distinguish the transgender look from the transgender gaze: As I see it, the transgender gaze is the result of a point-of-view shot from the perspective of the transgender character; we are literally seeing as they would see. On the other hand, the transgender look is the camerawork that creates identification with the transgender character by suturing the spectator; we look with the transgender character.4 In the scenes that follow, we do not see as Sophia—we are rarely granted that point-of-view shot that allows us to see through her eyes—but rather we look with her. The camerawork tethers us to her, creating identification with her struggle, her ideologies, and her demands. Before discussing the transgender look and how it operates in Orange Is the New Black, however, we must examine the innovative casting choice that the series makes with Laverne Cox. The choice to cast Laverne Cox, who is a transgender woman of color, as a transgender woman of color, challenges the typical practices within Hollywood, mainstream stages, and television. As performance scholar Brian Eugenio Herrera notes, Hollywood and Broadway have a long history of “miscasting” roles, a process whereby actors perform ethnicities and races with which they do not intrinsically identify (58). This miscasting results in what he identifies as “racial mimicry,” or “the imitative practices of racial impersonation, wherein performers of any cultural or racial background might […] present themselves as characters of an apparent, distinct, and different ethnoracial background” (58-59). Herrera reveals the ways in which casting practices result in the problematic whitewashing of roles with actors in black-, brown-, yellow- and redface. Although Herrera’s specific project outlines how Latina/o identity has been historically miscast and mimicked, the same casting practice has occurred with regards to transgender narratives in popular culture. Indeed, Hollywood has long resorted to the use of cisgender actors to portray transgender characters, documented by Vito Russo and Jack Halberstam, among others.5 Akin to Herrera’s “racial mimicry,” the “miscasting” occurring in transgender narratives has resulted in “transgender mimicry,” whereby instead of portraying another race or ethnicity, the actor portrays a gender identity with which they do not identify. The practice of calling upon cisgender actors to portray transgender characters, then, is a type of “transgender mimicry” that prohibits transgender actors from achieving the same visibility and cultural production as their cisgender counterparts, thereby perpetuating the marginalization of

4 I refer here to Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema,” de Lauretis’s work in Technologies of Gender, Straayer’s Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies, B. Ruby Rich’s New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut, Halberstam’s “The Transgender Gaze,” Silverman’s “On Suture,” and Miller’s Crossdressing Cinema: An Analysis of Transgender Representation in Film. (See Jones pp. 13-15) 5 The Celluloid Closet, a 1981 book by film historian Vito Russo that Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman later adapted into a documentary, traces the evolution of the portrayal of the LGBT community in cinema. Furthermore, Jack Halberstam discusses the choice to cast cisgender-heterosexual actress Hilary Swank as Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry. 13 the community and its needs (as well as depriving transgender actors real jobs). This “transgender mimicry” results in the practice of “transface,” as some popular journalists have called it, whereby cisgender actors appropriate and perform transgender identities.6 Just as the practice of black-, brown-, yellow-, or redface is seen as an appropriation of racialized identities onto white bodies, so too the practice of transface appropriates transgender identities onto cisgender actors. Although my introduction provides a historical genealogy of transgender identity in literature and film, other recent examples that include “transgender mimicry” and resulting “transface” include William Hurt in The Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985), Felicity Huffman in Transamerica (2005), Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club (2013), Jeffery Tambor in Transparent (2014 – present), and Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl (2015). Significantly, in virtually all these roles, the actors were either nominated for or won awards for engaging in transface. To justify such a practice, they note the importance of research about the transgender community as a methodology to provide due diligence to their roles.7 While I can certainly congratulate the efforts of these actors for studying that which is foreign to them in order to provide excellence in their filmic adaptations of transgender identities, there is still an element of appropriation from the producers and directors for ignoring the talent of transgender actors and the significance of their telling their own stories. Given this history of “transface” performance, Orange Is the New Black charts new ground, for it is one of the first television shows to include a transgender female actor cast as a transgender woman, thereby creating transgender congruity. While advocating for racial congruity, Herrera’s point is relevant here: “the principle that performers should, in some meaningful way, be of a kind with the character being portrayed, and that such congruence […] necessarily amplifies the aptness of the subsequent performance” (59). Without attending to congruity, Herrera notes the disconnect between the identification of the character and the identification of the actor. Furthermore, his words that the actor should “meaningfully” identify with the character demonstrate the affective appeal of actor/character congruence. Extending Herrera’s notion of “racial congruity” to “transgender congruity,” I argue that in order for the audiences to identify with the transgender character, there must be something “meaningful” about the relationship between the actor and the character. “Transgender congruity,” then, would emphasize the unity between the gender identity of the actor and the gender identity of the character they portray. Given Orange Is the New Black’s innovative casting practice, it is one of the few contemporary media texts that exemplify this congruity. In an interview she gave with The Advocate, a pro-LGBT magazine, Cox discusses the ways in which her own lived experience collides with the experience of her character, Sophia Burset. Although Cox herself has not been incarcerated, her mother constantly reminded her during her childhood in Mobile, Alabama that

6 Several popular sources have begun addressing this casting practice. A simple Google search of the term “transface” displays an article from Advocate, a pro-LGBT magazine, a YouTube video from the Grishno channel, and even a Twitter hashtag. 7 Indeed, in a televised interview with ABC News, Felicity Huffman notes that she “tried to immerse [her]self in the world, in the transgendered [sic] world” (DesperateAddicts). Jared Leto, too, described in a promotional video for Dallas Buyers Club how “wonderful” it was to “learn about a side of life that [he] hadn’t known before” when he met with transgender people who “spoke open and freely about some of the challenging parts of their lives” (“Making Rayon Real”). And according to an interview with Out magazine, there was a three-year period between Eddie Redmayne’s being cast as Lili Elbe and his playing her, during which time he researched texts by Jan Morris and Kate Bornstein, as well as meeting extensively with transgender activist Paris Lees (Flynn). Jeffrey Tambor also mentions his “teachers” transgender professor Jennifer Boylan and transgender performance artist Zackary Drucker during his award speech for winning the 2015 Emmy Award for Best Actor (ABCEntertainment). 14

“all the black men are going to jail or they’re gay—this is what [she] heard growing up” (Breen). Cox’s mother’s words underscore the ways in which queerness was not condoned in Mobile, but it more importantly recognizes the egregious criminalization of black men. As Cox eventually grew to accept and embody her own transgender identity, she encountered the criminalization of transgender identity first-hand: Indeed, she says, “I’ve experienced so much street harassment living in New York. There have been so many moments I’ve walked down the street and been called a man, called the f word […] I could easily have been CeCe” (Breen). Here, she alludes to the story of CeCe McDonald, a black transwoman who was incarcerated after the death of one of her own attackers. These words establish a sense of kinship between Cox and McDonald, despite their not having (yet) been introduced to each other. (Notably, after hearing about McDonald’s case, Cox began producing a documentary entitled Free Cece, which is set to be released sometime in 2016.) This affinity to CeCe McDonald creates the “meaningful” identification between actor and character that Herrera mentions, intensifying Cox’s suitability to portray not only a transgender woman of color but also one who is incarcerated. As a result, Cox is able to provide a performance in Orange Is the New Black that sutures the audience to her character, thereby activating social consciousness about the ways in which the prison-industrial complex targets and exploits transgender people of color. In the season one episode “Lesbian Request Denied” (1.3), Sophia’s loss of hormonal treatment to supplement her transition serves as an excellent example of state institutional violence against a transgender subject of color, revealing institutional racism but also eliciting empathy for Sophia. When they remove her estrogen, Sophia attempts to file a grievance with her social officer, Officer Healy. The scene begins with a medium shot of a set of bobble-head toys that Healy has placed at the front of his desk. The camera zooms out slightly, blurring these figures and focusing instead on Healy behind them, his head buried in paperwork while he nonchalantly tells Sophia that the prison will no longer be able to provide her hormones. The juxtaposition of Healy with his bobble-head toys wryly critiques the prison system, suggesting that Healy is not unlike the wobbly toys situated at the front of his desk. Since Healy fails to understand the importance of Sophia’s hormonal treatment, in addition to the cinematic lack of identification with him, the audience’s identification with Sophia becomes amplified. A jump cut back to her shows her in a medium shot, sitting on the other side of Healy’s desk, gazing intently upon him as he looks down at his paperwork. While she discusses the withdrawal that her body will suffer without the hormonal treatment, the camera cuts back to Healy dismissively reacting to her concern. At this moment, the camera is subjectively positioned over Sophia’s shoulder, establishing not only her gaze but also our identification with her. In an effort to make him understand, Sophia then resorts to graphic language to describe the surgical procedures she endured to create her current body and what her body will do without the estrogen to which she no longer has access. In the shot/reverse shot sequence that occurs between her and Healy during these lines, Healy’s gaze remains downcast except for a brief moment when he meets her eyes during the description of the surgical procedure. Since Healy is a figure of power within the prison-industrial complex, his transphobia is highlighted when his gaze returns to his paperwork, clearly uncomfortable by what she says. As a result, Orange Is the New Black situates our identification with Sophia in this scene; we desire the reinstatement of her hormonal therapy, and, by doing so, we also critique the institutional transphobia that the series emphasizes here. At the end of her description of the surgical procedures, she demands to a see a doctor. Healy, of course, denies this request, noting that a doctor’s visit is only available when there is an emergency. Within the prison system, Sophia’s transition and the medication required to

15 accompany it are not viewed as essential. When Healy—and, by extension, the prison-industrial complex—do not recognize her, she makes a move that forces them to attend to her demands. In a medium shot of Sophia, the camera catches her gaze drop, for the first time, away from Healy; instead, she looks at the bobble-heads. The camera shoots a cut-in of Sophia’s arm and follows her hand as she reaches out for one of the toys. In an act of collected defiance (if not symbolic castration), she tears the head from one of Healy’s bobble-head figures and swallows it, saying, “I’d like to report an emergency.” The camerawork in this scene, cutting between Sophia’s passionate cry for recognition and Healy’s disavowal of her needs, sutures the audience to Sophia. We are, in other words, compelled to identify with Sophia because she is passionate, nearly desperate for recognition from Healy and, by extension, from the state—both of which display repugnant ambivalence to her demands. Because we are compelled to identify with someone who does not embody the universalized human ideal, Orange Is the New Black invites spectators to redefine the parameters of the human by denaturalizing the process of criminalization of minoritized communities and expanding the definition of what is normative embodiment.

Figure 2: Sutured to Sophia through an over-the-shoulder shot, we look with her as Healy disengages from her request. (“Lesbian Request Denied.” Orange Is the New Black. Netflix. Writ. Sian Heder. Dir. Jodie Foster. Netflix. Web.)

Figure 3: Sophia reaches for a bobble-head, symbolic of the pawn-like status that Healy possesses within the prison industrial complex. (“Lesbian Request Denied.” Orange Is the New Black. Netflix. Writ. Sian Heder. Dir. Jodie Foster. Netflix. Web.) This scene moreover illustrates the ways in which transgender people of color are criminalized and devalued through the mechanics of biopower.8 As Michel Foucault points out, biopower is “a power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (42). Through various institutions like the prison, biopower establishes and maintains control over health initiatives that govern the life of the social body. Foucault goes on to discuss “the deployment of sexuality” as one of the modalities through which the force of biopower exerts itself on the populace (45). Sex, gender (identity), and sexuality are strategically regulated to establish the universalized human ideal as white, heterosexual, cisgender, wealthy, able-bodied, and male. Since Sophia does not embody this human ideal in several ways, she is punished through and by the biopolitics that govern her; this punishment comes in the form of criminalization and, subsequently, incarceration. Indeed, scholars such as Elias Walker Vitulli describe the ways in which transgender communities are affected by state surveillance and the prison-industrial complex, highlighting the danger that comes from being a transgender person of color. In his article in the debut issue of Transgender Studies Quarterly, Vitulli notes, “Today,

8 I utilize the term criminalization as defined by Lisa Marie Cacho in her work on social death, where she notes that to be criminalized is “to be prevented from being law-abiding” (4). She discusses the ways in which the universalized human ideal attacks the personhood of those with different forms of embodiment, specifically in terms of racialized communities. She goes on to note that “social value requires rejecting the Other” (17). In order for the universalized human ideal to be normativized through a specific form of embodiment within the mechanics of biopower, the social stratification of various communities must render those with allegedly deviant embodiment culturally unintelligible. Source: Cacho, Lisa Marie. “The Violence of Value.” Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. New York, NY: New York University Press, 2012. 1-33. Print. 17 people who are visibly gender nonconforming, especially those who are also marked as racially and/or economically deviant, are often viewed by police as particularly suspicious and subject to intense surveillance, violence, and arrest” (163). Here, Vitulli points out the ways in which intersectionality affects those who are entrenched in the oppressions of state surveillance. He underscores yet another modality through which state violence is systematically and systemically targeting populations that do not adhere to the universalized human ideal. Moreover, prison abolition advocates Bassichis, Lee, and Spade reaffirm this argument about the criminalization of transgender and queer communities: “Queer and trans communities are disproportionately policed, arrested, and imprisoned,” they agree, “and face high rates of violence in state custody from officials as well as other imprisoned or detained people” (19). Bassichis, Lee, and Spade have shown that the universalized human ideal has become so ingrained in the cultural imaginary that the transgender body gets targeted not only institutionally through the state but also socially through the ways in which other populations perceive them. The transgender look that Orange Is the New Black creates through cinematic suture also surfaces in an episode from season three featuring a hate crime. In “Don’t Make Me Come Back There” (3.12), a series of scenes not only successfully create identification with Sophia, but also stimulate social consciousness regarding the horrors within the prison-industrial complex. In the first scene, three unnamed female characters (one black, two white) visit the in-prison salon that Sophia manages. As the scene begins, the camera is in a relatively neutral position, gazing at the entrance to the salon. The three soon-to-be attackers walk into the frame, and the black prisoner tells Sophia that a rumor is going around that she “still has [her] dick.” As she finishes the line, the camera cuts to a medium shot of Sophia looking at the speaker with disgust. Sophia sighs, dismissively turning away from them and nonchalantly telling them that her genitalia is her own business just like their genitalia is theirs. A few shots later, the camera cuts back to the previous speaker who claims that Sophia is “pretending to be a female.” Not only does the camera capture this line by looking at the speaker through a mirror (itself perhaps a nod to the incomplete mirror stage), but it does so by positioning itself over Sophia’s shoulder. Significantly, we are on Sophia’s shoulder; the camera has come closer to her, thus creating our intimacy with her. Indeed, the camera continues to cultivate this intimacy and empathy, for it cuts to an extreme close-up of Sophia’s face immediately as the speaker finishes this line. She wears a look of resignation and disappointment, almost as if she knows what’s coming. These two shots—the first, not unlike the positioning over Sophia’s shoulder as she spoke with Healy about her hormonal therapy; and the second, a close-up that examines Sophia’s facial expression as she internalizes the present situation—suture the audience to Sophia, establishing empathy for her in this intensifying conflict. Collecting herself, Sophia turns back to the trio of women berating her, and the camera cuts to a medium shot of the primary attacker’s back, thus eliminating our identification with the attacker, as Sophia speaks to her: “Do you have any idea how ignorant you sound?” she asks, trying to convey strength and resilience despite the inner fear and turmoil she feels as represented by the close-up of her face in the previous shot. When Sophia refuses to oblige the attackers’ request to see her vagina, their verbal harassment turns into physical violence. The camera is detached, situated behind the primary speaker as one of the white attackers comes up behind Sophia and grabs at her wig. Before the attacker can remove the wig entirely, the camera cuts away. We now see a medium shot of Sophia’s back as the white attacker grabs hold of her body. This camerawork allows us to further empathize with Sophia because we are in her position and share her vulnerability. As a disembodied voice, presumably one of the unnamed white attackers, calls Sophia a “she-male,” there is another cut to the

18 primary speaker as she stands up, and another as she grabs a pair of Sophia’s haircutting shears and rushes at Sophia. This phallic object further sexualizes the violence; this moment becomes a symbolic rape. Sophia is able to protect herself from penetrative stabbing, but despite Sophia’s desperate attempt to ward off the attackers, she ultimately gets pinned to the floor. Acting as if it is somehow injured, the camera quivers as it catches another close-up of her face on the floor while she asks a female officer, who has rushed to the salon, for assistance. The camerawork in this scene further sutures us to Sophia; we identify with her because the camera continually grows closer to her and places us in similarly vulnerable positions. As a result, the empathy the audience feels toward Sophia further situates Orange Is the New Black as a series that interrogates the prison-industrial complex for how it affects transgender people, particularly transgender women of color.

Figure 4: The camera captures an extreme close-up of Sophia right before she endures a physical hate crime. (“Don’t Make Me Come Back There.” Orange Is the New Black. Netflix. Writ. Sara Hess. Dir. Uta Briesewitz. Netflix. Web.)

This brief scene highlights the ways in which Sophia’s culturally unintelligibility, as Judith Butler has put it, has subjected her to violence. Not only has she been a victim of systemic violence because of her race, but she also continues to be attacked within the prison as a result of her non-normative gender identity. As Judith Butler notes, “Certain humans are not recognized as humans at all, and that leads to yet another order of unlivable life” (2). Sophia is not recognized as a human outside of the prison because of the criminalization of her queerness and blackness, but she is not recognized as a human within the prison either. As a result of this unrecognizability, she is subjected to violence. The violence enacted against non-normative bodies, as Butler later asserts, emerges from a profound desire to keep the order of the binary gender natural or necessary, to make of it a structure, either natural or cultural, or both, that no human can oppose, and still remain human. If a person opposes norms of binary gender not just by

having a critical point of view about them, but by incorporating norms critically, and that stylized opposition is legible, then it seems that violence emerges precisely as the demand to undo that legibility, to question its possibility, to render it unreal and impossible in the face of its appearance to the contrary. (35) Here, Butler points out the power dynamics between the attacker and the attacked: because of the unintelligibility of the non-normative transgender body, those with normative embodiment assert their cultural and social dominance through violence. Sophia possesses a body that is not defined within the parameters of normativity, and she has spent thousands of dollars to create a body that is not only comfortable for her but also culturally legible. (Notably, it was through credit card fraud, a result of her criminalization, that Sophia funded her transition, which subsequently caused her incarceration.) In this scene, the violence that occurs begins with verbal harassment and escalates to physical assault. Sophia is left unable to defend herself once the verbal harassment becomes physical. As a result of the transgender congruity within the show’s casting as well as the transgender look the camerawork creates, Orange Is the New Black sets forth a reassessment of the prison-industrial complex, especially given the prison’s response to her hate crime. When the attack occurs, a white female officer is alerted; she makes eye contact with Sophia, who is immobilized on the floor, but the officer does not know how to respond and instead calls for the assistance of the male warden (Caputo). Several scenes later in the episode, Sophia meets with the warden individually after the attack. The scene opens with another over-the-shoulder shot from Sophia’s perspective. We sit with her on the other side of Caputo’s desk, with Caputo standing opposite Sophia. As before, the subjective camerawork creates identification with her. The next shot begins when Sophia delivers her first line in the scene, “None of this is my fault.” The camera is situated somewhere on Caputo’s desk, significantly refusing to look at her from Caputo’s perspective and therefore refusing a gaze that would sympathize with Caputo and—by extension—the prison-industrial complex at large. As the camera captures Sophia delivering this line, we see her for the first time since the hate crime; she is battered, with bruises covering her face. She no longer has her wig, and she sits with her arms crossed and hunched over. She is vulnerable, left powerless after the violence she endured. Significantly, the camera does not disempower her—in fact, quite the opposite. Although Caputo makes it a point not to blame Sophia for the attack, his solution is to put her under surveillance. She is to have officers near her at all times so as to “protect” her from any further physical attacks. The physical violence that Sophia suffers as a result of the hate crime is obvious, but the violence against her that the state enacts only worsens. Placing an incarcerated transgender person under surveillance is not an uncommon procedure when they suffer physical violence, but Sophia urges Caputo to see the bigger picture. She calls for the female officer to be fired for not intervening immediately and for more intense crisis and sensitivity training for all officers, threatening to go to the media if he does not respond accordingly. Sophia’s demands underscore the prison reform movement that has recently been gaining political traction, so much so that President Barack Obama addressed the issue in his speech at the 2015 NAACP national convention.9 Yet, what Sophia suggests as adequate action falls short

9 Indeed, the White House’s official website includes a blog post from July 15, 2015 with an embedded YouTube video of President Obama’s speech and also includes summaries of the speech, media reaction to the speech, and statistics informing President Obama’s stance on prison reform. See: https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2015/07/15/president-obama-our-criminal-justice-system-isnt-smart-it-should-be 20 of the radical structural transformation for which Bassichis, Lee, and Spade call. Indeed, they would see Sophia’s demands as a short-term solution that merely “[a]dvocate[s] for ‘cultural competency training’ for law enforcement and the construction of queer and trans-specific and ‘gender responsive’ facilities” (19). They ultimately promote prison abolition: while reform is arguably a step in the right direction, abolition would provide the necessary structural transformation to end systemic criminalization and imprisonment. Despite the seeming radicalness of their proposal, prison abolition ensures social equality by distributing resources equitably. Later, they assert, “Building a trans and queer abolitionist movement means building power among people facing multiple systems of oppression in order to imagine a world beyond mass devastation, violence, and inequity that occurs within and between communities” (35). Ultimately, then, while Orange Is the New Black does not explicitly endorse the abolition movement, through suturing the audience to Sophia (among other incarcerated characters), the show does critique the prison-industrial complex and call for prison reform. Because the camera continues to tether us to Sophia while refusing to do the same with prison personnel such as Healy and Caputo, the series creates sympathy for transgender characters, showing how physical and systemic violence is enacted, and hopefully encouraging audiences to take action against it. In Sophia’s final scene of the episode (and, indeed, the last time we see Sophia in the third season of the show), the systemic violence toward and dehumanization of transgender people within the prison-industrial complex reaches its climax. Caputo’s presumably more permanent solution to dealing with the hate crime is to put Sophia in solitary confinement under that guise that it is “for [her] own protection” (3.12). The scene begins with a medium close-up of Sophia as she examines the bruises and cuts through the mirror in a makeup compact, reminding us of her vulnerability and powerlessness in the situation. In the next shot, the officers arrive and tell her that she needs to go with them. The camera is positioned overlooking Sophia’s cell; her back is to us and we face the officers. Although confused by the decision to place her in solitary confinement, Sophia collects herself and surrenders herself. The camera pans, beginning with Sophia’s profile in a medium shot sitting on her bed and the officers in the background and then swiveling to face her at a 45-degree angle. Such a move suggests a disruption from the subjective camerawork in previous scenes with Sophia. And yet, we still identify with her because of the significant amount of suture that has been previously implemented. We do not see her straight on, but we are no longer looking at her profile either. The officers are no longer part of the frame, so our focus is solely on Sophia. As a result, the tethering to Sophia continues, and the erasure of the officers urges us to continue empathizing with Sophia and her struggle to retain her personhood. She stands, and several shots of her walking in front of the three officers ensue, following her journey to solitary confinement. Time decelerates in these shots, for they are in slow motion. The final shot of the episode before the end credits captures a cut-in of an officer’s torso closing a dark red, rusty prison door. As he locks the door with a bang, the camera pans and swivels to face the door straight-on. The camera, no longer attached to a human point of view, gazes at Sophia through a small window: She stands solemnly with her hands at her sides, breathing heavily as she begins to sob. She sinks to a seated position, and the credits roll. Structuring the final moments of the episode in such a way positions Sophia as one of the “legally disappeared bodies” that Childs fears. Indeed, the series creates a cliff-hanger that is still unresolved, for Sophia does not reappear anymore in the remaining episode of the season.10

10 It is important to note, however, that a recent teaser trailer for the upcoming season of the show has a brief clip of Sophia. Even if the prison-industrial complex wants to remove her from visibility, Sophia is determined and resolute not to go down without a fight. 21

Figure 5: Once the officer places Sophia in solitary confinement, the camera watches from outside the cell as she breaks down into sobs. (“Don’t Make Me Come Back There.” Orange Is the New Black. Netflix. Writ. Sara Hess. Dir. Uta Briesewitz. Netflix. Web.)

Despite the ostensibly protective motives behind this decision, solitary confinement is an inhumane punishment that is all too often integrated into the punitive system. Indeed, Dennis Childs speaks to the dehumanizing effects of this punishment. In Slaves of the State: Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary, he traces the evolution of the manifestations of slavery to prison. The prison-industrial complex has created what Childs calls neoslavery that exploits the “as yet uncalculated (nor completed) number of black people and other racially and criminally stigmatized groups” through “collectivized natal alienation, excremental internment, (un)productive forced labor, serialized corporeal rupture, legally unredessable sexual violence, coerced performance, and manifold forms of death” (2). Just as slavery was state-sanctioned before, its legacy can be found in the state-sanctioned form of the prison-industrial complex, which continues to dehumanize the people subjected to its systematic targeting and criminalization. Childs goes on to offer a redefinition of what it means to be alive based on the hegemonic structures that keep populations where they allegedly belong: Indeed, the prison-industrial complex turns “living, nominally rights-bearing, human beings into ‘slaves of the state’” who become “the living dead” and “legally disappeared bodies” (4). As a slave of the state, a person who is incarcerated gets exploited in unimaginable ways. One of these ways, as Childs discusses in his later chapter about the Angola Penitentiary, is through solitary confinement. He notes that penological advancement […] has translated into a system of ‘progressive dehumanization’ whereby the real measure of the facility’s ascension to ‘northern’ standards of mass human disappearance is the degree to which it has successfully exchanged putatively anachronistic brutalization techniques […] for more ‘humane’ ones […] and modernized punishment units. (101)

What Childs underscores here is that even modernized methods of punishment such as solitary confinement “and other forms of legally sanctioned torture” are still inhumane, despite the ways that they challenge anachronistic punishments (101). Yet, the social and cultural perception of these punishments condone them because the majority is still indoctrinated into the ideology that slavery is over and that these imprisoned populations must have done something to deserve incarceration. The protective argument that resulted in Sophia’s placement in solitary confinement, however, calls into question the role that gender (identity) and sexuality—or any other particularized facets of identity—play in being subjected to these types of state-sanctioned violence. As a result of these moments which produce a transgender look and the suturing effect that they have, Orange Is the New Black attempts to normalize transgender identity and render this form of embodiment and identification as culturally intelligible. Such a goal, however, must be cautious of what Peggy Phelan has called the “trap of visibility.” For Phelan, creating a higher level of visibility for minoritarian subjects creates unforeseen problems, for visibility “summons surveillance and the law; it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, the colonialist/imperial appetite for possession. Yet it retains a certain political appeal” (6). Phelan points out a seemingly unsolvable double bind: for minoritized communities to obtain increased visibility in the media, the ethical appeal of inclusivity and empowerment is achieved; yet, merely by achieving such visibility, the minoritized communities can become subjected to the scrutiny of the public gaze. Juxtaposing this “trap of visibility” with the “transgender look” creates a productive conversation, for the latter seems to be a possible solution for the former. Indeed, if audiences are sutured to the transgender character in a way that elicits identification and empathy, it follows that the transgender look de-fetishizes and renders intelligible the non-normative transgender body. Not unlike Phelan’s “trap of visibility,” Dean Spade identifies a similar concern for trans-inclusivity off-screen. He discusses the ways in which equality-based legislation such as anti-discrimination laws and hate crime laws are an effort to normalize transgender identity through inclusion. Spade asserts, however, “The persistence of wage gaps, illegal terminations, hostile work environments, hiring/firing disparities, and bias-motivated violence for groups whose struggles have supposedly been addressed by [such laws] invites caution when assuming the effectiveness of these measures” (40). In other words, because of the difficulty—indeed, the impossibility—of enforcing such legislation, the legislation itself is an ineffective strategy to incite cultural change. Indeed, the number of (reported) transgender suicides and murders continues to increase, and it seems as though there is a new story daily about housing or employment discrimination toward a transgender person. By juxtaposing Phelan’s “trap of visibility” and Spade’s “myth of inclusion,” I offer a means by which we can extend the textual visibility of transgender narratives in film and television into the realm of social reality. If Halberstam’s “transgender look” is a possible solution to the “trap of visibility” on-screen, Spade’s “critical trans politics” is a solution to the “myth of inclusion” off-screen: This idea “demands more than legal recognition and inclusion, seeking instead to transform current logics of state, civil society security, and social equality” (1). This call for radical transformation of the injustices that many minoritized populations face is premised on the myth of inclusion. By creating laws that incorporate transgender people into normativized society, he argues, we ignore the systemic violence already established and perpetuated by dominant culture. This violence is the larger issue and, as Spade would advocate, should therefore be our primary target. In line with Spade’s advocacy, Orange Is the New Black stimulates social consciousness regarding the prison-industrial complex and the ways in which it targets and exploits transgender women of color.

Even though I have demonstrated the importance of transgender congruity in Orange Is the New Black and its ramifications, it is important to emphasize that Sophia’s narrative in the series literally could not exist without the white, cisgender female protagonist. The series focuses upon the beautiful and privileged Piper Chapman’s journey through the prison-industrial complex. She magically and unrealistically networks with a myriad of racialized communities, represented by an ensemble cast in supporting roles. In an interview with National Public Radio (NPR), series creator Jenji Kohan explains how she perceives Piper’s role in the series: In a lot of ways Piper was my Trojan Horse. You’re not going to go into a network and sell a show on really fascinating tales of black women, and Latina women, and old women and criminals. But if you take this white girl, this sort of fish out of water, and you follow her in, you can then expand your world and tell all of those other stories. But it’s a hard sell to just go in and try to sell those stories initially. The girl next door, the cool blonde, is a very easy access point, and it’s relatable for a lot of audiences and a lot of networks looking for a certain demographic. It’s useful. (“‘Orange’ Creator”) On the surface, the show mines the productive ramifications of Piper’s incarceration: that an upper middle-class woman becomes humbled by interacting with minoritized communities, checks her privilege, and that the prison-industrial complex can be challenged. However, a deeper look at Kohan’s words reveal the ways in which these productive ramifications can only be achieved through a white savior narrative. In their book Screen Saviors: Hollywood Fictions of Whiteness, authors Hernán Vera and Andrew M. Gordon discuss the elements of such a narrative in film: “The messianic white self,” they assert, “is the redeemer of the weak, the great leader who saves blacks [sic] from slavery and oppression, rescues people of color from poverty and disease, or leads Indians [sic] in battle for their dignity and survival” (33). Indeed, Kohan notes that Piper’s status as a “Trojan Horse” lends itself well to audience identification with the minoritized communities within the series. By becoming sutured to Piper throughout the majority of the series, we see those communities through her eyes. Vera and Gordon go on to say the following about the “narcissistic fantasy” of the white savior narrative: “Often the white messiah is an alienated hero, a misfit within his own society, mocked and rejected until he becomes a leader of a minority group or of foreigners” (33-34). Outside the prison-industrial complex, Piper does not experience the alienation that Vera and Gordon mention: She is a white, cisgender woman living in the upper middle-class who enjoys the privileges that accompany her status. As a result of her incarceration, however, she begins to become the “alienated hero” and “misfit.” Since she is, as Kohan notes, a “fish out of water,” Piper automatically becomes the “alienated hero” that Vera and Gordon mention. Her whiteness and wealth stand in contrast to the communities of color within Litchfield Penitentiary. With Piper always already the chief figure of the series, her narrative inherently situates the narratives of these characters to the side; as a result, Sophia’s narrative becomes visible and justifiable because it is in relation to, and secondary to, the white cisgender female protagonist’s story. Not unlike the white savior narratives problematic justification of racialized narratives through a white protagonist, the cisgender savior narrative justifies transgender narratives through a cisgender protagonist. The periphery status that Sophia retains in the series, then, complicates the productivity of the transgender congruity of the casting despite the congruous nature of Laverne Cox as Sophia Burset.

The transgender mimicry in Hollywood casting practices, which in turn creates transface, is an example of cisgender saviorism. If, for example, transgender mimicry continues in casting practices, the transgender character becomes legible only through the cisgender actor portraying them. As long as transgender characters continue to be portrayed by cisgender actors, the dominant community justifies the visibility of the minoritized communities’ narratives. As a result, transgender identity becomes intelligible in the cultural imaginary, providing a process of normalization and visibility that opens the door for “transgender congruity” in casting practices. Herrera rightly points out that “the shift away from a casting regime in which white actors played most nonwhite roles […] was gradual, and these ostensibly counterpointed aesthetics of racial casting were both at work—at times simultaneously” (60). In the same way that “racial mimicry” and “racial congruity” in casting practices occurred at the same time, allowing for a slow transition toward congruous actor-to-character relationships, transgender mimicry and transgender congruity will surely occur simultaneously. In fact, such a notion is already true: at the same time that transgender congruity occurs in Orange Is the New Black through casting Laverne Cox as Sophia Burset, transgender mimicry occurs in Transparent through casting Jeffrey Tambor as Maura Pfefferman. Unlike Cox, Tambor is a cisgender-heterosexual male actor who portrays a transgender woman. In the next chapter, I provide a more in-depth analysis of the casting practices of Transparent, including the transgender actors in the show as periphery to the cisgender actor portraying the transgender protagonist as well as the issues of privilege that Orange Is the New Black does not make explicit. I argue that the transgender look is sustained, helping audiences identify with the transgender protagonist, but it is simultaneously complicated by Tambor’s cisgender identity. And yet, the series has actively sought transgender crew members, so perhaps such a practice successfully reclaims the transgender look despite the cisgender saviorism that occurs through casting Tambor.

Transparent, A Cautionary Tale of Privilege, Injustice, and History Repeating Itself

Present-day Los Angeles. A parent of three invites her children, all scattered across the city, to dinner so that she can finally, finally come out to them as transgender. Before mustering the courage to do so, however, the children hijack the conversation—believing their parent to be dying of cancer—and begin to bicker over who will inherit their childhood home. The argument escalates, the children pack up the food as leftovers, and they leave their “moppa” alone. The opportunity for the parent to come out transpires, and she feels disappointed in herself. Such is the ironic opening to the Amazon original series Transparent, which is anything but transparent. The series began airing through Amazon’s video streaming service, Prime Video, and released its second season in December 2015. The show follows white, upper-class and middle-aged Maura Pfefferman as she begins her transition from male to female, emphasizing the interconnectedness of her relationships not only with her family—including children, ex-wife, and transgender friends—but also her relationship with time. In the previous chapter, I discussed the problematic nature of transgender mimicry, transface, and the necessity for transgender congruity in Hollywood casting practices.11 Building on this argument, this chapter begins by arguing that casting cisgender actor Jeffrey Tambor as Maura Pfefferman fails to achieve the transgender congruity that my argument calls for; yet, series creator Jill Soloway prioritizes the employment of transgender people in her production crew and supporting cast, resulting in a different form of transgender congruity, one that is behind-the-scenes. Following this discussion, I proceed with an examination of the ways in which privilege operate within the series, emphasizing the show’s critique of the white savior narrative and the systemic injustices that the transgender community—particularly transgender women of color—face. From there, I utilize theories of queer temporality as posited by Jack Halberstam and Rebecca Schneider to analyze Transparent’s critique of the Weimar Republic as a parallel to today’s anti-transgender conservative political climate. Ultimately, this chapter argues that despite the problematic transgender mimicry that the series perpetuates in its casting choice for the protagonist, Transparent works to dismantle systemic employment injustices for the transgender community while simultaneously providing an on-screen message warning audiences not to let history repeat itself. Returning briefly to the argument set forth in my previous chapter, allow me to revisit a few key terms. In the same way that performance scholar Brian Eugenio Herrera calls for racial congruity in casting, my notion of transgender congruity requires transgender actors to be cast as transgender characters. Such congruity can be seen in Orange Is the New Black, which features transgender activist Laverne Cox portraying the incarcerated transgender woman of color Sophia Burset. While Cox is an innovative casting choice that Orange Is the New Black introduces, this is just one step in an otherwise slow process of change. Indeed, not unlike Herrera’s racial mimicry, transgender mimicry is the practice of casting cisgender actors as transgender characters, an ongoing casting regime that continues to saturate Hollywood and Broadway stages. Such a regime results in transface, which is not dissimilar from black-, brown-, yellow-, or redface in racial mimicry. Furthermore, Herrera rightly notes that racial congruity and racial

11 I established this argument by way of performance scholar Brian Eugenio Herrera’s discussion of racial mimicry, black/brown/yellow/redface, and racial congruity that previously ostracized Latina/o actors. For Herrera, racial congruity calls for Latina/o actors to play Latina/o characters, while racial mimicry is a practice whereby actors do not share the same intrinsic ethnic or racial identification as the characters they portray, resulting in black-, brown-, yellow-, or redface. (See Jones 20-22.) 26 mimicry occurred (and continue to occur) simultaneously, and I observe the same phenomenon with transgender congruity and transgender mimicry. For example, while I applaud Orange Is the New Black for its transgender congruity, Transparent, despite being a series contemporary to Orange Is the New Black, resorts to the problematic practice of transgender mimicry. Series creator Jill Soloway chose to cast cisgender male actor Jeffrey Tambor as the transgender woman protagonist, Maura Pfefferman; such a choice has resulted in the act of transface. I am, of course, not the only one to have noticed such a practice. As New York Times journalist Taffy Brodesser- Akner reports, “At an Outfest panel, after a screening of the pilot, an activist raised her hand and angrily confronted Soloway on her decision to cast Tambor instead of a transgender person. Taken aback by the aggressiveness of her tone, Soloway put her hand over her heart and said tearfully that she never wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings” (“Can Jill Soloway”). This passage underscores the need for transgender congruity in casting practices. For Soloway not to have “wanted to hurt anyone’s feelings” signals her blind spot in creating the show: Despite her own lesbian sexuality, positioning her as counterhegemonic in terms of sexual identity, she is situated within cisgender hegemony, which therefore makes it easier for her to look past the significance of casting transgender congruity. What could have been a huge step forward by casting a transgender actor as the protagonist of a transgender narrative falls short, however, of achieving transgender congruity. The effects of the transgender mimicry deployed within Transparent, then, position the series as a self-reflexive critique of Soloway’s cisgender male casting choice. Indeed, in the scenes I analyze here, the transgender look and the transgender gaze are both avoided. That is to say, we do not look with or as Maura. Instead, we become sutured to her family and friends.12 Such a choice in camerawork signals, perhaps unknowingly, an acknowledgment of Soloway’s miscasting of a cisgender actor as a transgender character. By suturing audiences to those with whom Maura shares filiation and affiliation, then, the series invites audiences to empathize not only with the transgender protagonist through what Kaja Silverman calls the “lure of narrative,” but also with those close with Maura, an empathy that caters to non-transgender viewers as well as transgender viewers who do not share the privilege that Maura possesses. My first example is the episode “Moppa” (1.4), which includes a bathroom scene where daughters Sarah and Ali take Maura with them to a public women’s restroom; a confrontation ensues between them and a cisgender mother with her two cisgender teenage daughters, and Maura is forced to use a different bathroom, eerily anticipating current dates about transgender bathroom rights. The scene begins with a tracking shot that follows Sarah, Ali, and Maura from a checkout counter at a mall, where they have just purchased makeup and skin care products, to the bathroom. As the camera comes to a stop, the three women continue walking toward the entrance of the bathroom, their backs to us. Above their heads, the word “WOMEN” is emblazoned across a bare white wall. The entrance to the bathroom is out of the frame, but Sarah points it out and walks off the screen and into the bathroom. Maura hesitates before walking off-screen; we see her in profile clutching her purse. With a deep breath, she says, “OK, I think I’m…” and trails off, insinuating that she will wait and use a different bathroom. While Ali watches Maura’s hesitation, Sarah encourages Maura to join them. She grabs Maura’s hand, and the two walk out of the frame, and into the bathroom, followed slowly by a very hesitant Ali. Once we are inside the bathroom and

12 As I discussed in the introductory chapter, I borrow the term suture from Kaja Silverman. She draws upon Lacanian psychoanalysis of the mirror stage to outline the ways in which camerawork within film sutures audiences to characters to create identification with them. audiences identify with filmic characters through camerawork. (See Jones 14.) 27 waiting for stalls to become available, a shot captures two teenage whispering about Maura as they primp their makeup. They hear Sarah call her “Dad,” and they capture their mother’s attention. The series of shots that follow compile the confrontation the mother has with Sarah and Maura. In a compelling move, the camera sutures us to Sarah rather than to Maura, catering to a cisgender audience that advises that they advocate for transgender-identified people. Indeed, the camera captures over-the-shoulder shots from Sarah’s perspective but remains behind the confrontational mother, displaying her in medium shots from behind. Such a cinematographic choice helps the audience to identify with Sarah in this moment, particularly to enhance the feeling of protectiveness over a transgender-identified family member. Furthermore, since the camera is positioned further away from the unnamed mother serving as the antagonist of this scene than it is to Sarah, the series clearly wants us to empathize with Sarah and, by extension, with Maura. Indeed, a few shots later, after the trio has left the mall, the camera presents us with a close-up of Maura’s face, filtered in blue. The emotive sadness that such coloration connotes intensifies as we see Maura’s expression. Her eyes look downward and away from the camera. She takes a deep breath, and the camera cuts back to the scene surrounding her: she is in a construction zone using a portable toilet, the blue filter created by the plastic stall. Although these two shots last no longer than twelve seconds, they create empathy with Maura.

Figure 6: The camera swivels as Maura and her daughters walk by, heading toward the women's restroom. ("Moppa." Transparent. Amazon. Writ. Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster. Dir. Nisha Ganatra. Amazon Prime Video. Web.)

Figure 7: The camera becomes sutured to Sarah as she confronts the woman who demands that Maura leaves the women's restroom. ("Moppa." Transparent. Amazon. Writ. Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster. Dir. Nisha Ganatra. Amazon Prime Video. Web.) Because this scene invites us to empathize with Maura’s struggle as a transgender woman, it creates two vital criticisms: first, the exclusionary laws against the transgender community, specifically with regards to bathroom rights; and second, the requirement that transgender women need to be able to pass as cisgender women in order to be perceived as normal. As I mentioned above, the confrontation between Sarah and the unnamed mother in the bathroom scene highlights the ongoing debate in current political discourse surrounding the use of bathrooms that correspond to gender identity rather than to biological sex. Indeed, one of the most prominent examples of the “bathroom bill” legislation is that of North Carolina’s Public Facilities Privacy & Security Act, commonly referred to as HB2.13 This bill and the others like it mandate that people use public restrooms that correspond to their assigned sex rather than to their gender identity. Such legislation excludes transgender people from using public facilities through the force of biopower, which purposefully polices sex and gender identity in order to establish a universalized human ideal as white, heterosexual, cisgender, wealthy, able-bodied, and male.14 Yet, because of the cinematographic distance between the audience and the mother who embodies these legislative demands, Transparent asks its viewers to stand with Sarah and Maura, and against such rhetoric and demand inclusivity even in these most private of spaces. Such a stance, however, fails to heed legal scholar and trans activist Dean Spade’s call for a “critical trans politics,” which “demands more than legal recognition and inclusion, seeking instead to transform current logics of state, civil society security, and social equality” (1). Indeed, Spade discusses in detail the equality-based legislation that grants rights to the transgender community, particularly how it “creates the false impression that the previously excluded or

13 Politifact.com, a website run by the Tampa Bay Times, provides further details about North Carolina HB2. Although this site has been accused of both liberal and conservative bias, I think they do a relatively good job of putting the bill in layman’s terms. A full-text version of the bill, however, can be found here: http://www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2015E2/Bills/House/PDF/H2v4.pdf 14 I discuss the ways in which Foucault’s notion of biopower affects the transgender community in my previous chapter. (See Jones 24-25.) 29 marginalized group is now equal, that fairness has been imposed, and the legitimacy of the distribution of life chances restored” (43). And yet, this “false impression” renders the systemic violence and injustice faced by the transgender community swept under the rug because abolishing such legislation is perceived as the ultimate win. Transparent includes this scene, then, as an attempt to incite empathy for the transgender community by suturing its viewers to a family member who possesses this same empathy for her transgender parent. As a result, it encourages the normalization of transgender lives into mainstream media, but such normalization relies upon the perpetuation of equality-based legislation. Such legislation, though, falls short of the systemic restructuring that Spade demands in order to adequately improve the lives of the transgender community. The public restroom scene addresses a much more significant issue: the legibility of Maura’s transgender body. Although Sarah’s calling Maura “Dad” is the trigger that catches the daughters’ attention, Maura herself does not adhere to the conventional codes of femininity. While in this scene she wears a long floral dress and carries a purse with her long hair pulled back, Maura has not yet begun any surgical procedures to feminize her body. The maleness of her body seeps through this performance, read by those around her—particularly the mother and her daughters—as a perversion, a threat to their well-being. In other words, Maura is not able to pass as a cisgender woman to whom the women’s restroom supposedly belongs. In the collection of essays Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion, editor and contributor Linda Schlossberg discusses the relationship between passing (in all of its manifestations, including race, religion, and sexuality) and its effects on visibility and classification, rightly asserting that passing “disrupts the logics and conceits around which identity categories are established and maintained” (1). Indeed, this blurring of identity categories allows a minoritized group access to the privileges of the hegemonic community. Yet, Schlossberg goes on to note, “because an accurate reading of a queer body can, in many social and political contexts, result in obviously terrible consequences (even unto death), passing becomes a form of passive resistance” (3). For someone to be able to successfully pass as a member of the dominant community, then, their ability to do so results in a resistance of the codes by which the dominant community lives. However, it is important to recognize that “although [passing] may often represent social progress for an individual, it general holds larger social hierarchies firmly in place” (Schlossberg 3). For example, in order to successfully pass as a cisgender female woman, a transgender woman must adhere to traditional codes of femininity. Since Maura does not, she fails at passing and is ultimately booted out of the women’s public restroom, just as she will from the Idyllwild Wimmin’s Festival, which I discuss later in this chapter. While the act of passing does, as Schlossberg observes, create resistance by obeying conventional expectations, transgender author and activist Kate Bornstein complicates such formations. In the chapter “Gender Trouble, Gender Rage” from her 1995 book Gender Outlaw: Men, Women, and the Rest of Us Bornstein uses the terms “gender outlaws” and “gender defenders” to describe the two opposing forces that try to either dismantle or reify the gender binary. Indeed, she says that the “mere presence [of gender outlaws] is often enough to make people sick,” while a gender defender “is someone who actively, or by knowing inaction, defends the status quo of the existing gender system […] The gender defender, or gender terrorist, is someone for whom gender forms a cornerstone of their view of the world” (237). In other words, corporeality is always already gendered for those who work to substantiate the gender binary. Identifying as a gender outlaw, Bornstein advocates for the rupture of the gender

30 binary: “The correct target for any successful transsexual rebellion would be the gender system. But transsexuals won’t attack that gender system until they themselves are free of the need to participate in it” (242). What she observes here is that the gender system has both the will and the power to oppress; it is backed by dominant populations within society and enforced by culturally mandated codes of normativity. Yet, since so many transgender people undergo an arduous process of normativizing their bodies so as to pass as a “real” man or a “real” woman, they are rendered unable to attack this hegemonic discourse.15 Because both Maura the character and the actor portraying her have male bodies, the legibility of Maura’s femaleness and femininity is called into question. She is unable to pass as a cisgender woman, partly because she maintains her male body in the show but also because of the transgender mimicry being perpetuated through Tambor’s maleness, and such an inability to pass subjects her to invasive scrutiny. And yet, while Transparent falls into the trap of transgender mimicry in terms of cisgender Tambor portraying the transgender woman protagonist, the show incorporates transgender congruity in casting secondary characters with transgender actors and has begun to incorporate transgender congruity behind-the-scenes. Indeed, Brodesser-Akner goes on to point out the “transfirmative action plan” that Soloway has integrated into the production of the series, prioritizing the employment of transgender people over people who are not transgender: “As of this writing,” Brodesser-Akner asserts in her August 2014 article, “20 trans people had been hired in the cast and crew, and more than 60 had been employed as extras” (“Can Jill Soloway…”). Among these cast and crew are transgender actress and model Hari Nef as Maura’s aunt Tante Gittel, a transgender woman whose narrative in the show occurs through flashbacks to the Weimar Republic era; Our Lady J, the show’s first transgender writer; and Silas Howard, the show’s first transgender director, who, notably, also directed the indie feature By Hook or By Crook that Jack Halberstam notes as the first feature film to sustain the transgender look. Such onboarding of more transgender talent both on- and off-screen create transgender congruity in more ways than one. Soloway herself says it best: At the Television Critics Association summer press tour, she declared, “Having trans writers and directors is important. […] Trans people want to tell their own stories” (Smith, “Silas Howard…”). Furthermore, hiring more transgender talent offsets the employment imbalance and discrimination that many within the transgender community face. In Transgender History, transgender author and professor Susan Stryker outlines in detail the ways in which the transgender community has continued to fight for non-discrimination in employment practices. She asserts, “Housing and employment discrimination against transgender people are still legal in most places in the United States, and this discrimination was even more common in the past than it is now” (66). She goes on to describe how this discrimination created an “involuntary containment zone” for transgender people because the housing discrimination resulted in transgender communities being forced into lower socioeconomic statuses and resorting to sex work to survive (67). It was not until 1994, Stryker observes, that formal legislation was created to outlaw employment discrimination with the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), but this act has resulted in increased employment opportunities only for lesbian and gay communities because the language within the bill is trans-exclusive and supports non-discrimination based on sexual orientation and not gender identity (150-152). Despite the transgender mimicry that Soloway has enacted in

15 Significantly, Bornstein troubles the terms “real” man and “real” woman in her later book, My Gender Workbook: how to become a real man, a real woman, the real you, or something else entirely (1998), which I discuss in detail in the forthcoming chapter vis-à-vis Caitlyn Jenner. 31

Transparent, then, her “transfirmative action plan” has admirably created a fissure in the formal legislation that continues to exclude the transgender community. What little transgender congruity occurs on-screen within Transparent is productive, for it includes a transgender woman of color, someone from a community that is rendered most vulnerable by multiple systems of oppression. This woman, Davina, is a Latina transgender woman who becomes Maura’s first and closest friend within the transgender community, meeting her through a transgender support group. Even though Maura befriends Davina early in the series, it is not until midway through the second season that Davina finally checks Maura’s privilege. This conversation occurs as a follow-up to an interaction between Maura, Davina’s live-in friend, and Sal, Davina’s live-in lover. One evening while the trio watches television together, Sal comes out as trans-amorous, or that he is sexually attracted to transgender women. The next day, he intrusively advises Maura on what bodily modifications she ought to undergo in order to be seen as an attractive woman. In other words, his suggestions point out what she should do in order to pass as cisgender. Maura confronts Davina the following day in the hopes of persuading Davina that she “can do better than” Sal, but the conversation turns into one in which Davina points out Maura’s privilege. The scene opens with a long shot of Davina’s front stoop. She tends to yard work in the right side of the frame, and Maura appears in the doorway behind her, carrying two glasses of iced tea. The camera cuts to a medium shot as she passes one of the beverages to Davina, asking if Sal is home, and to a reaction shot of Davina, confused, asking, “No… what’s up?” The next cut takes us to the first over-the-shoulder shot, which, interestingly, is from Davina’s perspective and not Maura’s. What this shot establishes is cinematic suture, a transgender look that looks with Davina, a secondary character, rather than with Maura, the protagonist. In fact, the camera avoids any over-the-shoulder shots from Maura’s point of view until she delivers her line telling Davina that she “can do better than” Sal, which comes after not one over-the-shoulder shot from Davina’s point of view, but two (the other occurs when Maura rehashes the verbal violation from Sal to Davina). And yet, even though we look with Maura as she tells Davina that she deserves someone better, we have been positioned to empathize more with Davina as a result of the already established suturing to her. She reacts forcefully and negatively. “Who do you think you’re talking to?” she asks. The camera captures Maura’s reaction shot: Her mouth agape and her eyebrows lifted, she clearly expresses shock by eliciting such a reaction from Davina. As she dives into her speech about being a former sex worker, being HIV-positive, and being a woman “with a dick,” the camera cuts several times as it looks both with Davina, determined to make Maura see from her perspective with a furrowed brow, as well as with Maura, ashamed with downcast eyes. Almost as if she is incapable of understanding the racial and socioeconomic privilege with which she experiences her transgender identity, Maura refuses to make eye contact with Davina. Davina continues, “We don’t all have your family, and we don’t all have your money.” Davina highlights the multiple systems of power at work that oppress not only transgender people for the perceived deviance through gender identity, but also transgender people of color from lower socioeconomic statuses for their perceived gender identity, racial, and socioeconomic deviance. As a transgender woman of color who used to be a sex worker, Davina falls into each of these categories, which Maura seems to ignore. Ultimately, this scene critiques Maura’s privilege. For this information to come from a character who is directly affected by these systems of oppression, the message carries more significant weight. Furthermore, the actress playing Davina (Alexandra Billings) is also a transgender woman, so the message she delivers here, to a cisgender man in transface no less, is

32 to take what she says seriously. Too often, decisions are made for minoritized communities without a thorough understanding of the various forms of oppression these communities face. As Dean Spade notes in his concerns about the rising model of nonprofit organizations, “Inside those organizations, white elites determine the fates of the vulnerable and get paid to make decisions about their lives while people directly impacted are kept out of leadership” (99). Without directly naming the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) in this specific critique, Spade calls attention to the growing concerns of this particular organization and others like it for their dichotomous nature that situates the needs of wealthy, formally educated, white gay men before the needs of communities facing multiple systems of oppression through their perceived deviance from the human ideal of whiteness, wealth, cisgender identity, able-bodiedness, etc. Although his point relates directly to nonprofit organizations such as the HRC, it is applicable to the relationship between Maura and Davina in this scene. Maura uses her position of whiteness and wealth as a means to justify her advice to Davina, trying to determine what is best for Davina without understanding Davina’s history. Davina rejects such an interaction, going so far as to ask Maura to move out and find alternative housing. Superficially, this scene seems to create empathy for Maura, for as the protagonist of the show, our identification might most easily rest with her. Yet, through the over-the-shoulder shots that suture audiences to Davina instead of to Maura, the series invites audiences to empathize instead with Davina’s narrative and positionality. The creation of such an identification not only critiques the privilege with which whiteness and wealth supposedly justify the decision-making for populations with the most vulnerability, but it also calls attention to the accompanying white savior narrative to which such a relationship alludes. To return momentarily to the white savior narrative that I discussed near the end of my previous chapter, I draw once again from Hernán Vera and Andrew M. Gordon. They note, “The messianic white self is the redeemer of the weak, the great leader who saves blacks [sic] from slavery and oppression, rescues people of color from poverty and disease, or leads Indians [sic] in battle for their dignity and survival” (33). Furthermore, they assert, “Often the white messiah is an alienated hero, a misfit within his own society, mocked and rejected until he becomes a leader of a minority group or of foreigners” (33-34). In my previous discussion of Piper as the white savior in Orange Is the New Black, I observed that her incarceration is the only means by which she becomes alienated from hegemonic power structures since her white, upper middle-class, and cisgender privileges protect her from being at risk of being a “misfit” who is “mocked and rejected” outside the prison-industrial complex.16 On the other hand, Maura’s transgender identity positions her as a “misfit” who is “mocked and rejected” from normative society. Nevertheless, Maura’s advice, despite it coming “from the bottom of [her] heart,” displays the power that comes with her whiteness and wealth. (Significantly, Maura is Jewish, which complicates her whiteness and the white savior narrative, which I discuss below.) Because of such power, Maura feels able to tell Davina what is and what is not the best situation for her. Davina’s disavowal of such power signals the series’ critique of the privilege that accompanies the white savior narrative, thereby encouraging audiences to do the same. Significantly, the series sustains this critique through Maura’s relationship with Davina. In the following episode, “Oscillate” (2.8), Maura tries to repair her friendship with Davina despite Davina’s request that she find alternative housing. The scene opens with a brief shot of the Los Angeles LGBT Center and cuts to Maura having a conversation with a white man who is affiliated with the center. As she converses with this unnamed character, the camera provides us

16 (See Jones 31.) 33 with over-the-shoulder shots from Maura’s perspective as well as neutral shots. Since the only over-the-shoulder shots that occur in this conversation are from Maura’s perspective, the camera sutures us to her. Her desire to become more involved in the LGBT community certainly feels heartfelt and sincere, the suturing to her during this scene confirming our empathy for and identification with Maura. As the man describes options for Maura to become more involved, the camera captures an out-of-focus yoga class in the background, the students’ bodies shifting from Adho Mukha Svanasana (downward-facing dog) to Natarajasana (lord of the dance). Maura chooses to become a volunteer for the Trevor Project, an LGBT crisis intervention and suicide prevention hotline. As the man leaves the frame to retrieve an application for Maura, the camera blurs for a moment and refocuses on one of the yoga students, Davina. A quick shot from a neutral camera position catches Maura’s gaze as she recognizes Davina, and the next shot shows Maura grabbing Davina’s attention. Interestingly, this time it is Davina who looks away from Maura. Maura begins to acknowledge her privilege and tells Davina that she “is trying to change” and that she’s going to start volunteering. Unimpressed, Davina says, “Volunteering twice a week doesn’t make you Mother Teresa” and walks out of the yoga room, leaving Maura there alone. The sequence of over-the-shoulder shots, still from Maura’s perspective, that occur throughout this half of the scene complicate the identification with Davina that the previous scene suggests. Instead, audiences are now sutured to Maura, realigning their identification with her instead of with Davina. Such an identification may ostensibly render Maura a victim of her privilege and of Davina’s attack on said privilege, but I contend that Davina’s dismissiveness toward Maura perpetuates the show’s critique of the white savior narrative. Maura has begun to reevaluate her privileges, meaning that she received Davina’s message. Even though Maura’s involvement with the Trevor Project is a step in the right direction, she will never be able to fully understand the position from which Davina comes because her privilege continues to blind her. Although there is an obvious level of privilege that accompanies Maura’s white skin, thus providing some legitimacy to her white saviorism and the show’s critique of that narrative, we must recognize that Maura’s Jewish identity complicates her whiteness. Indeed, as many historians and scholars have documented at length, people who are Jewish have experienced racism and genocide because of the minority status of their religious doctrine. 17 Rabbi Gil Steinlauf, for example, outlines the ways in which Jewish-identified people were not seen as white despite their white skin. In his contribution to The Washington Post, he notes the following: America is unique in Jewish history because the social construct of power and oppression in this society came to be based more on skin color than on religion or ethnic identity. Because of that, along with the best of American values and our own hard work, we now find ourselves as another privileged white ethnicity. Despite our only good intentions, we are—all of us—full participants and beneficiaries of the American evil known as racism. (“Jews in America…”) He notes the minoritarian status of Jewish-Americans, who are marginalized based on “religious or ethnic identity,” but recognizes that because many Jewish-Americans retain their white skin, they also retain white privilege. The intersections of race and religious affiliation create an interesting relationship to the white savior narrative. On the one hand, as a member of a

17 Indeed, one need only do a simple Google search to learn about the Holocaust during WWII and the anti- Semitism that permeated American culture well into the 20th century. 34 minoritized community, Maura’s Jewishness—which, notably, is enacted and portrayed in detail throughout Transparent—could potentially help her recognize the privilege that accompanies her whiteness. On the other, as Rabbi Steinlauf notes above, Maura’s class privilege mirrors the success story of many Jewish-Americans, thus assimilating her into hegemonic whiteness, which effaces her recognition of such privilege. The series critiques the condemnation of both Jewish and queer identities and shows how they are intertwined through its inclusion of the Nazi book-burning scene from the episode “Man on the Land” (2.9). This scene ultimately suggests a cautionary advisory that warns viewers to disallow history from repeating itself. Throughout the episode, we follow Ali, Sarah, and Maura as they visit Idyllwild Wimmin’s Festival, a women’s-only weekend retreat modeled on the famous Michigan Music Festival. During the episode, they discover that the festival is a celebration of women who were born with female genitalia— “women born women” as they put it. Once Maura discovers this policy, she seeks out her daughters so that they can leave, a move to avoid any confrontation or threats. She discovers Ali sitting with a group of self-identified “women born women” at a bonfire. After a heated discussion about the complicated intersections between male privilege and female identification, Maura gets up to leave, followed by Ali, who tries to follow her but loses her in the forest. As the camera captures Ali walking through the woods, it watches as she comes across Yetta, a character we know from the flashbacks to the Weimar Republic that have been interspersed throughout the season. This shot is the first to explicitly overlap the past with the present in a nod toward the framework of queer temporality, which I discuss below. As Yetta breaks eye contact with Ali and scurries deeper into the forest, the camera swivels back to Ali as she watches Yetta do so. This overlap is momentarily ruptured, though, as the camera cuts to a flashback where young Rose, Maura’s mother, is visiting her sister Gittel at the Hirschfeld Institute.18 A series of quick and shaky shots show us the institute under siege from the Nazi regime; they invade the institute and arrest its occupants, seizing their books as “degenerate.” In these shots, the camera is objective, watching as these actions occur and swiveling between the flashbacks and the drama unfolding at Idyllwild. As a result, the camera refuses to suture us to any character because it is that which tethers the past to the present. The audience watches with the camera as it cinematographically links the parallels between the Weimar Republic and Idyllwild. As the pandemonium of the arrests at the Hirschfeld Institute comes to a close, the camera returns to Ali walking up to a fire; the fire, it turns out, is the book-burning as the Nazis destroy Hirschfeld’s research, symbolically condemning the expression of identities that do not conform to hegemonic standards. As Ali approaches the fire, the camera cuts to Gittel, Rose’s transgender sister who sought refuge at the Hirschfeld Institute. She watches the flames consume the books that legitimize her identity, and the camera cuts once again. We are behind a nearly silhouetted Gittel as she watches the book- burning, with Ali on the opposite side of the fire. This moment signifies a shift in the character to whom we are sutured. We become sutured to Gittel rather than to Ali. Ali gazes upon Gittel watching the fire, once again securing the overlap between past and present. Although this suture to Gittel is momentarily interrupted when the camera sees Ali recognize young Rose and take her

18 An article from Vulture lays out the importance of this institute. Magnus Hirschfeld, writer Lisa Liebman tells us after her interview with Robert Beachy (author of Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity), was a German sexologist who created this institute as a safe and inclusive space for people of all sorts of various gender and sexual identities. The institute was created during the Weimar Republic, where “an explosion of high and low culture” allowed Hirschfeld the opportunity to scientifically and sociologically explore sexuality and gender identity without legal ramifications. Source: Liebman, Lisa. “Transparent’s 1930s Berlin Flashbacks, Explained.” Vulture: Devouring Culture. New York Media, LLC: 16 Dec., 2015. Web. 35 hand in solace, it is reestablished when the camera, after Ali takes Rose’s hand, cuts to an over- the-shoulder shot of Gittel as she makes eye contact with Ali and Rose together. The scene closes with Nazis apprehending Gittel, their red, swastika-clad armbands vivid in the light of the fire. Ali and Rose, hand-in-hand, look on as Gittel fades out of the light provided by the fire and into the darkness beyond. Before the episode comes concludes, the screen fades to black and opens once more with Maura walking out of Idyllwild, a shot that juxtaposes Gittel’s presumably deadly fate with Maura’s desolation for not being recognized as a woman born woman.

Figure 8: As Ali searches for Maura, she stumbles across Yetta in a cross-temporal moment that connects the past with the present. ("Man on the Land." Transparent. Amazon. Writ. Jill Soloway and Ali Liebegott. Dir. Jill Soloway. Amazon Prime Video. Web.)

Figure 9: Ali holds the hand of young Rose, who will become Maura's mother, while the camera sutures us to Gittel in an over- the-shoulder shot. ("Man on the Land." Transparent. Amazon. Writ. Jill Soloway and Ali Liebegott. Dir. Jill Soloway. Amazon Prime Video. Web.) Indeed, this scene provides a stunning manifestation of queer temporality, a framework that I invoke from scholars such as queer theorist Jack Halberstam and performance theorist Rebecca Schneider. Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, for example, posits the idea of queer temporality as one that revises dominant ideologies about the linearity of time: “Queer uses of time and space develop, at least in part, in opposition to institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.” (1). In other words, our relationship to time is to be understood through hegemonic structures like cisgender identity, heteronormativity, and patriarchy. Those who do not embody or adhere to these power structures are likely to have a different, or a queer, relationship with time. Indeed, Halberstam identifies the AIDS epidemic among gay men in the late twentieth century as the impetus for reevaluating temporality, for the death-sentence nature of the diagnosis forced this subcultural community to question notions of hegemonic, linear temporality, particularly in terms of futurity. Consequently, filmmakers can utilize queer time as an aesthetic and ideological choice when portraying queer communities on-screen, as the book-burning scene above so eloquently does. Furthermore, performance studies scholar Rebecca Schneider identifies the ways in which temporality affects reenactment. In the introduction to her book Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment, Schneider discusses the “slip and slide” of temporality as texts are performed and re-performed: “Identicality is already undone in all of these words,” she asserts, “as they are all words for the side-step operation by which one thing stands in for another thing, either as the same or as almost the same but not quite. There is something, too, of queerness in this slip and slide” (18). Schneider’s point here is that identicality is lost as performances are reenacted, thus queering the temporalities in which the performances occur. Although Schneider is specifically interested in the operations of temporality vis-à-vis American Civil War reenactments, she certainly identifies a queer aspect of re-performance. To expand on Schneider’s point here, I contend that the series juxtaposes the Weimar Republic with the present-day Idyllwild Wimmin’s Festival to call attention to the ways in which transgender embodiment and performance continues to be condemned. While Gittel’s transgender identity results in her arrest, Maura is also marginalized by the female-bodied women through their perception of her as a threat to their womanhood. Furthermore, by placing Gittel’s narrative adjacent to Maura’s through the cinematographic choices that Soloway employs, the series creates moments of the transgender look that allow us to see with Gittel and Maura; the political and social censure of their ideologies create empathy for them. It is this empathy that, in turn, sustains Transparent’s message: Don’t let history repeat itself. There was no mistake in utilizing Ali’s character to tether the show’s critique of the rise of fascism in the Weimar Republic with its critique of present-day discourse intolerant of transgender identity. The parallels drawn between these two temporalities come together by overlaying the past with the present because it is Ali who stumbles upon the Nazi book-burning. Interestingly, the same actress cast as a young Rose (Ali’s grandmother and Maura’s mother) plays a young Ali in a season one flashback. This double-casting creates a literal embodiment of identicality, which secures the moment of crossover and the queering of temporality therein. More significantly, Ali has also become perhaps the most explicit character to exhibit a gender fluid identity. Gender, as we know from Judith Butler’s famous essay, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” is “an identity

37 instituted through a stylized repetition of acts” (519). It is, in other words, something that we do rather than something that we are. Interested in the ways in which our performative acts constitute a social construction of gender, Butler outlines the ways in which historical and hegemonic manifestations of man and woman have defined and continue to define current manifestations of man and woman. Ali, on the other hand, dismantles this notion of binarized gender performativity. Throughout the series, for example, she has fluctuated from feminine gender performance to masculine gender performance to anywhere in-between. Furthermore, she has engaged in sexual relationships of various forms as well, ranging from heterosexual attempted-polyamory to a relationship with a transgender man to her most recent lesbian relationships. Such acts reject the binarized theory of gender and position her gender as fluid, perhaps as genderqueer (though, to be fair, she has not yet proclaimed any gendered sense of self-identification on the series). Importantly, Ali is in the midst of applying to a gender studies graduate program but wants to study the connections between constructions of gender and Jewishness, which, I hope, will continue to explicate for audiences some of the nuanced gender play happening within the series. While I am curious to see what role formal education will play as the next season of Transparent is produced, this form of epistemology is certainly not the only one portrayed in the series. Indeed, lived experience as epistemology has created a stunning series in Transparent as well as in other series within the growing transgender archive. Caitlyn Jenner’s documentary series I Am Cait, for example, draws many of the same conclusions as Transparent about privilege, but it does so in the “real-world” setting of reality television. Moving away from fictionalized narratives of transgender identity, my next and final chapter addresses both Caitlyn Jenner as a transgender activist as well as her series’ role in normalizing transgender identity. Positioning the show within the makeover genre, I Am Cait sustains the transgender congruity that Orange Is the New Black features. Jenner surrounds herself with transgender friends who help her to identify and acknowledge her privilege as well as to reevaluate her priorities as a transgender celebrity with the platform to speak out about the systemic violence and injustices that the transgender community faces. And yet, Jenner as a transgender activist has a long way to go: she continues to challenge the experiences of everyday transgender communities, closing herself off from the radical structural transformation that they advocate and reifying the essentiality of the gender binary so as to pass as cisgender. Yet, while her ideologies are oftentimes problematic, she promotes the integration of transgender communities into normalized culture through tolerance, acceptance, and inclusion. Her show, moreover, shifts the makeover genre from a focus on the embodied physical transformation of the subject toward the social ramifications of the transformation that come afterward.

Cait’s Makeover: “Jenner Trouble” in I Am Cait’s Transgender Activism

On April 24, 2015, ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer sat down with former Olympian Caitlyn (then identified as Bruce) Jenner, who in 1976 was hailed as the world’s greatest athlete and who, for many, embodied the epitome of masculinity. During the interview, Jenner, sitting across from Sawyer, took out her ponytail in what Sawyer called a “symbolic moment after 65 years” and came out before the world as transgender: “For all intensive purposes,” she tearfully declared, “I am a woman.” Since the interview, Jenner has been subjected to intense public scrutiny, as each move in her transition has been meticulously analyzed and critiqued. Furthermore, she has created a documentary series I Am Cait, one of the first television series to shift from fictional to nonfictional transgender narratives. Indeed, while the increased visibility of transgender figures in television has increased, many of these figures are merely fictional characters. Sophia Burset in Orange Is the New Black, for example, is a transgender woman of color who resorts to credit card fraud in order to fund her transition. Meanwhile, Maura Pfefferman in Transparent is a middle-aged, Jewish executive who possesses the financial resources to begin her transition. Some transgender audiences may share the experiences of Sophia and Maura, certainly, but many others’ lived realities are not captured by these characters or shows. Furthermore, the fictionalized nature of these narratives resist “real-world” examples of manifestations of transgender identity. This is where Caitlyn Jenner and I Am Cait enter the conversation. At first glance, this show provides a groundbreaking look at a supposedly “authentic” account of male-to-female, man-to-woman transition. Yet, a closer look reveals that race and class privilege allows Jenner to more easily transition, thus effacing the complex realities that most transgender people face. As a white celebrity, in other words, Jenner has access to the necessary resources to experience what Judith Butler calls a “livable life.”19 Jenner’s version of this “livable life” is in stark contrast to the lives of other transgender people with whom she interacts, people who do not have the same access that she does. In this final chapter, I contend that I Am Cait brings visibility to the systemic injustices challenging the transgender community, but the show’s productiveness is complicated by both Jenner’s role as one of the executive producers of the series, which positions her as looking out for her own image, as well as by the neoliberal agenda within the series, which focuses on inclusion and integration rather than dismantling systemic inequities. I start this chapter with a brief outline of Brenda R. Weber’s work on the television makeover genre, identifying the ways in which I Am Cait subscribes to the following steps that Weber observes: the humiliation that non-normative subjects face, the panel of experts that coach them to embrace normativity, and the reveal of the subject’s new physicality that adheres to normative codes of embodiment. Utilizing queer scholarship by Judith Butler and Kate Bornstein, I locate the ways in which transgender subjects face humiliation—even violence—for their non-normativity. From there, I examine, by way of Richard T. Rodríguez’s notion of the chosen family, the panel of “experts” that the series deploys to aid Jenner in her makeover. Tellingly, I Am Cait begins with the physical reveal, thus disrupting the narrative of makeover television shows, focusing less on the corporeal makeover and more on an ideological makeover. The chapter ends with a discussion about the ways in which this series, and indeed the others examined throughout this thesis, contribute to a transgender archive that prioritizes narratives that revolve around white, wealthy transgender-

19 In her book Undoing Gender, Butler notes, “Sometimes a normative conception of gender can undo one’s personhood, undermining the capacity to persevere in a livable life” (1). 39 identified people rather than cultivating a diverse representation of the multiplicitous nature of transgender identity. Marketed as reality television, the E! network’s documentary series I Am Cait purports to be an authentic glimpse at a male-to-female transition, a narrative that resembles a makeover show that attempts to normativize a non-normative sense of selfhood. Indeed, as Brenda R. Weber suggests in Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity, “On these shows, selfhood links to social locations and practices marked as normative, frequently designated through images that connote upward mobility, heterosexuality, consumer-oriented, conventional attractiveness, ethnic anonymity, and confidence” (5). Weber’s work traces the ways in which people on these shows subject themselves to an arduous process of corporeal modification and normalization. Her analysis includes makeover shows such as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, a series that utilizes gay male subjects as “style experts” so as to improve a heterosexual man’s sense of fashion, thereby making queerness acceptable to straight audiences; and Extreme Makeover, a show that re-beautifies people by using plastic surgery, weight loss surgery, and life coaching to reinscribe traditional gender expression and body normativity. These shows, as Weber has written, “depict stories of failed or imperiled selfhood, the locus of identity stalled or stagnated” (5). This genre focuses on people who do not quite fit into normative expressions of personhood but who desire them. Too often, they fall outside the parameters of traditional physical desirability, whether that is in terms of weight, fashion, or hair color. It boils down to appearance: anyone who does not conform to what has been socially constructed as normatively attractive is featured. The narrative of normalization that these shows track, as Weber sees it, is a three-step process. First, makeover subjects are humiliated by their non-normativity and “become eager proponents of the beliefs espoused by the shows;” then a panel of experts “point out flaws in a combined gesture of humiliation and care;” and finally, at the end of the episode, there is a “mandatory big reveal” (29-30). I Am Cait both adheres to and resists this narrative. As a transgender-identified person, Caitlyn Jenner’s sense of self is imperiled because of her non- normative gender identity. Her roles as both executive producer and protagonist of the show situate Jenner as someone who has a vested interest in the “beliefs espoused by the show,” which primarily include, as Jenner says in a promotional video for the show, transforming transgender identity into “the new normal” (E! Entertainment). In order to achieve this normalization, as Weber would predict, a panel of transgender “experts” is deployed to help Jenner recognize her race and class privilege that grants her access to resources many transgender people will never be able to access. In the end, Jenner does indeed participate in the “mandatory big reveal,” though the reveal in I Am Cait is less concerned with her physical transition than it is with her ideological one. As Weber outlines, the subject of the makeover show must have an imperiled sense of selfhood, which Jenner embodies through her non-normative gender identity. Since I Am Cait focuses on the normalization of transgender identity through increased visibility with the goal of more inclusion and acceptance, the sense of selfhood that is under attack stems from transgender identity itself. Within cisheteronormative culture, transgender identity jeopardizes one’s sense of self because gender is regulated through a binarized dichotomy in which one must be male or female, in which gender and sex are collapsed into interchangeable terms. In her book Undoing Gender, Judith Butler uses her theory of gender performativity to create a distinction between what makes a regulation and what makes a norm. Drawing her analysis from the Foucauldian notion of power and discipline, Butler asserts, “A regulation is that which make regular, but it is also […] a mode of discipline and surveillance within late modern forms of power” (55).

Meanwhile, a norm “governs intelligibility, allows for certain kinds of practices and action to become recognizable as such, imposing a grid of legibility on the social and defining the parameters of what will and will not appear within the domain of the social” (Butler 42). In other words, the norm is the result of socially constructed values placed upon particular facets of identity, and regulation is the enforcement of these norms, creating normalization and hierarchization of particular points of identification over others. Those outside the ideal are, consequently, rendered illegible and unrecognizable. It follows, then, that transgender-identified individuals fall outside of normalization but not outside regulation, for their facets of identity are culturally coded as deviant, resulting in social and legal punishment. They are prevented from achieving Butler’s “livable life” because they do not embody normative gender standards. Building on Butler’s theory of gender performativity and the regulatory mechanisms instated to surveil sexuality, transgender author and activist Kate Bornstein challenges normative notions of what constitutes a “real” man or a “real” woman. As I discussed in the previous chapter, her book chapter “Gender Trouble, Gender Rage” points out the ways in which individuals are performatively constructed and are forced to subscribe to conventional binarized gender codes through a process of socialization.20 That is to say, the cultural forces creating gender compel Jenner to perform an intensified version of femininity so as to be able to pass as a cisgender woman. Bornstein’s later work more explicitly confronts these norms constituting “real” manliness or womanliness: My Gender Workbook: How to Become a Real Man, a Real Woman, the Real You, or Something Else Entirely, for example, features what Bornstein calls a “Gender Aptitude” test that encourages readers to role play as test-takers to determine the “realness” (or unrealness) of their gender. Bornstein notes, “So by trial and error we learn the reality of our real manhood or real womanhood. We build our own definitions for these, and we’re very pleased to know people who agree with our definitions. When enough people agree with us, we begin to assume it’s natural” (3). Because of the social and cultural codification of gender norms, the norms that are brought about through repetition and performance, then, the traditional definitions of masculinity and femininity come to be perceived as natural and normal. Those who resist such performance, such as transgender-identified individuals, are challenged; normatively embodied and normatively performed hegemony questions their “real” manliness or “real” womanliness, and they are ultimately cast as substandard, facing rejection, humiliation, and—as Butler so powerfully describes in my first chapter—violence. Within the logic of the show, Jenner’s coming-out as a transgender woman necessarily provides the impetus for expanding her circle of relationships, which results not only in a chosen family with whom she develops affinity, but also a panel of “experts” that Weber maintains is essential to a makeover show. In “Making Queer Familia,” Richard T. Rodríguez lays the groundwork for a queer person’s restructuring of kinship of both biological and chosen families. Drawing from Cherríe Moraga’s work on the chosen family as a non-biological structure of kinship wherein a sense of family is created through shared lived experiences rather than through blood relations, Rodríguez applies this framework primarily to Chicano gay and lesbian communities. Nevertheless, the idea of the chosen family can be translated to the transgender community as well. An important aspect of this restructuring, he notes, is that “reconfigured kinship arrangements need not be established in mutual exclusivity from biological relations” (324-325). According to Rodríguez, then, the kinship with the chosen family does not undermine kinship with the biological family. Since Jenner does not have any (out) transgender people in her biological family, she must seek the kinship of other transgender women in order to find a

20 (See Jones 37-38.) 41 sense of community. Indeed, Rodríguez observes that “gay identity formation depend[s] upon a split from the families to which these gay men once belonged” (326). If a separation from the biological family is a necessary step in order to create a gay identity, then it stands to reason that the same is true for transgender identity, especially if there are no other transgender-identified people in the biological family. The ensuing choice to affiliate with other queer bodies, then, helps the subject form their own sense of queerness. Thus, while Jenner’s biological family was, for the most part, supportive of her transition, other transgender women appear within I Am Cait (including actress Candis Cayne, writer Jen Richards, professor Jennifer Boylan, and health educator Chandi Moore).21 These figures become the chosen family that Rodríguez identifies, and they serve as the panel of “experts” that challenge Jenner to reevaluate her privilege by exposing her to emotionally upsetting narratives of “everyday” transgender people. Dubbed “The Road Trip, Part 1” and “The Road Trip, Part 2,” the second and third episodes of the series feature a symbolic pilgrimage to the mecca of west-coast LGBT activism located in San Francisco. In the chronology that Susan Stryker provides in Transgender History, she discusses San Francisco’s significance to the LGBT movement. She observes, for example, how the 1966 Compton’s Cafeteria Riot incited “for the first time, […] direct action in the streets by having transgender people [that] resulted in lasting institutional change” (64). Having occurred not just in San Francisco, but more specifically in its Tenderloin district, Stryker continues, the riot carried importance because “the neighborhood’s resident population tended to be those who could least afford to live elsewhere, or who were prevented from doing so” (66). What she alludes to here are the ways in which biopower creates an ideological and geographic marginalization of subjects who do not adhere to the universalized human ideal.22 Since San Francisco holds such a rich history in terms of activism for the transgender community, it is an essential location for LGBT-identified people to visit and learn more about the community. Although I Am Cait does not comment on San Francisco as a hub of LGBT activism, it nevertheless implicitly—and, perhaps, even unknowingly—cites this history, creating an overlap of past and present temporalities. I discussed the idea of queer temporality by way of Jack Halberstam and Rebecca Schneider in the previous chapter, but allow me to briefly return to their theoretical frameworks. Halberstam notes that “queer temporality disrupts the normative narratives of time that form the base of nearly every definition of the human in almost all of our modes of understanding” (152). Meanwhile, Schneider identifies the temporal “slip and slide” that occurs in performance and re-performance. This “slip and slide” creates a reciprocal relationship between the past and the present: the performance of cultural narratives from the past always can simultaneously invoke future iterations; this futurity likewise reconstitutes the ways in which we perceive and understand the past. When Jenner and her comrades visit the HRC office in San Francisco, they engage with a “slippage” that allows the past to become superimposed upon the present. Past iterations of transgender identity haunt the interactions that Jenner has with current members of the transgender community. As Susan Stryker and Dean

21 “Meeting Cait” (1.1) is the pilot episode of the series, which explores these ties to biological family. It follows Jenner as she introduces herself for the first time as Caitlyn to various members of her biological family. Just as Jenner hopes, her family reacts positively: Her daughter, Kylie, calls her “pretty” during a FaceTime call, and her sisters, Pam and Lisa, emphatically note how “gorgeous” Jenner looks, commenting on how glad they are that she retained the same personality despite her new appearance. The only resistance Jenner experiences from members of her biological family is from her mother, Esther, who continually comments on how difficult it will be to “get used to” Caitlyn. 22 I discuss Foucault’s notion of biopower and its effects on the transgender community, particularly in terms of criminalization, in more detail in my first chapter. (See Jones 24-25.) 42

Spade have compellingly documented, transgender-identified people have diligently worked to remove the systemic barriers that prevent them from achieving Butler’s “livable life.” These demands cannot be ignored even when a transgender-identified person of much privilege, such as Jenner, could potentially challenge them. Furthermore, Jenner’s own political and social conservatism displays a resistance to many necessary programs that provide aid to transgender- identified people, causing potential damage to previous iterations of transgender identity. For example, during their time en route to San Francisco, Jenner asserts that social welfare programs create dependency. Immediately after she makes this comment, the camera cuts to shots of the other transgender women lifting their eyebrows in shock or shaking their heads in disappointment. A voiceover of Jennifer Boylan critiques Jenner’s comment: She observes, “Caitlyn has every right to be just as conservative as she chooses, but many transgender men and women need social programs to survive, and that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Living in the bubble is an impediment to understanding other people. If Cait’s going to be a spokesperson for our community, this is something she’s going to have to understand.” Boylan points out the privilege that accompanies Jenner, which has tainted her perspective and rendered her the poster child of neoliberalism, a paradigm that opposes the needs of the transgender community. Indeed, Jenner is eager to utilize her celebrity platform to bring more visibility to the transgender community, though she does not yet realize the various struggles within this community that she must address in order to be an effective advocate for it. For example, the pilot episode opens with a medium close-up of Jenner, wearing a bathrobe in bed, saying, “What a responsibility I have to this community. Am I going to do everything right? Am I going to say the right things? Am I going to project the right image?” The urge to use her platform to “project the right image” combined with the series being positioned as normalizing transgender identity certainly feels like an attempt at social activism. The activism that Jenner advocates, however, is wrapped up in the neoliberal paradigm that universalizes a singular manifestation of personhood. In other words, it fails to take into consideration intersectionality, or the ways in which multiple facets of identity subject someone to various systems of oppression. To understand this idea further, I turn to legal scholar and trans activist Dean Spade. In Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of the Law, Spade discusses and critiques the ways in which neoliberalism institutionalizes the universalized sense of personhood in state administrative organizations such as the government departments, the criminal punishment system, and legal documents. Furthermore, he notes that the “affective registers of neoliberalism are attuned to notions of ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ that obscure systemic inequalities and turn social movements toward goals of inclusion and incorporation and away from demands for redistribution and structural transformation” (21). Spade’s call for radical structural transformation of the injustices that transgender-identified people, particularly transgender women of color, face is premised on the myth of inclusion. By creating laws that incorporate transgender people into normativized society, we ignore the systemic violence already generated by hegemonic culture. Jenner’s attempt at activism through bringing the transgender community into the mainstream only perpetuates the myth of inclusion. Her show focuses on the integration of non-normative bodies into normative society, yet it fails to address the larger issues. They are swept under the rug under the guise that inclusion will solve the problem. Significantly, the destination of the road trip is the San Francisco Human Rights Campaign (HRC) office, a nonprofit organization that serves as a prime example of neoliberalism. Despite its exclusion of the transgender community for much of its existence, the HRC has now shifted its ideologies about the community. However, its demands fall within the myth of inclusion, calling for anti-

43 discrimination laws and hate crime laws that continue to avoid the redistribution of resources to create equitability as well as the removal of systemic barriers that reduce the life chances of the transgender community (Spade 39). Spade’s notion of “critical trans politics” yet again falls through the cracks as a result of Jenner’s use of mainstream media to only highlight the ways in which exclusion is supposedly the root of the social ostracization of the transgender community.23 The panel of trans-experts accompany Jenner on this road trip leading to the San Francisco HRC office so that she can speak with members of the transgender community who do not share her privilege. Such an objective illustrates the show’s attempt to legitimate Jenner by having her connect with the community; the goal of the meeting, to be sure, is for Jenner to learn about the everyday experiences of a transgender woman so that she can better become the voice of the transgender community. Once the group arrives at the HRC office with Jenner, they are introduced to a few transgender people, none of whom share the same privilege that Jenner possesses. The camera follows Jenner and her entourage as they enter the HRC office; it cuts to a shot of the doorway from the inside, awaiting the emergence of Jenner and her friends. The first to enter is writer Jen Richards, followed closely by Jenner herself. Dressed in all white, symbolic not only of her racial status but also of her naïveté regarding the transgender community’s struggles, Jenner is captured in a medium shot, and the camera follows her as she enthusiastically greets the small group of transgender women and HRC members. These figures include Angelica Ross, CEO of Transtech Social Enterprises; HRC Director of Research and Public Education Jay Brown; HRC Senior Legislative Council Alison Gill; Laya Monarez, artist and HRC Coordinator; and student HRC Volunteer Blossom C. Brown. After the animated meet-and-greet, the camera cuts to a shot of Jenner taking a seat on a sofa with Jennifer Boylan and Blossom Brown. The discussion opens with Jay Brown and Alison Gill debunking the myths about the supposed legal protections that transgender-identified people are believed to have. As they speak, the camera provides a medium shot of Jenner listening intently, her arm propped against the side of the sofa and her head resting against her hand. The conversation quickly shifts to discuss the reality that many transgender women have to resort to sex work: Angelica Ross, for example, notes how sex work was not a choice for her but rather a means for survival. The discussion soon escalates to a critique of Jenner’s privilege and her ineffective use of her celebrity status as a platform to create visibility for the transgender community and its needs. Despite Jenner’s eager attempt to affiliate herself with those who are more susceptible to systemic violence, they are quick to turn against her; the affinity that Jenner seeks falters. During this confrontation, the camera cuts several times to many members of the small council, who nod in agreement about Jenner’s ineffectiveness as a representative of the community. It finally cuts for the last time to Jenner, who sits back with an expressionless face. The screen quickly fades to black and displays the words “TO BE CONTINUED…” across the screen, relying on a cliffhanger trope that creates a dramatic effect to invite a sense of yearning for reconciliation from the audience. These cinematographic choices cultivate a tension between Jenner and the transgender women who surround her, positioning Jenner as a victim not only of her privilege, but also of the makeshift “intervention” by transgender women of color who challenge (and “police”) that privilege.24

23 Spade defines “critical trans politics” as “a trans politics that demands more than legal recognition and inclusion, seeking instead to transform current logics of state, civil society security, and social equality” (1). 24 The passion with which the privilege check is delivered is reminiscent of the idea of tone policing. Comic designer Robot Hugs has recently posted a web comic about tone policing. According to this web comic, tone policing is a “silencing tactic” that “works by derailing a discussion by critiquing the emotionality of the message 44

Given the structure of the scene and the cinematography within it, then, the series asks us to empathize with Jenner, rather than with the other transgender women from whom Jenner has been disconnected. The second part of this narrative, however, achieves the reconciliation between Jenner and this chosen family. The following episode, “The Road Trip, Part 2” provides the much-anticipated uplifting feeling of reconciliation and allows Jenner to reclaim her heroine status within the transgender community. Such an arc, furthermore, follows classic Aristotelian dramaturgy that positions Jenner as a tragic hero who learns from and reverses her mistakes. As the episode opens, we return to the HRC office and continue to hear more horrific stories of dehumanization: Laya Monarez, for example, builds upon Angelica Ross’s earlier discussion of sex work, a result of the system’s refusal to provide her with a job; she goes on to tell Jenner about a male client who, upon learning about her transgender identity, stabbed her and tried to run over her with his car. As she delivers this story, the camera cuts to other transgender women in the room wiping tears from their eyes as they empathize with Monarez. Finally, the camera cuts to a lingering shot of Jenner with her jaw dangling open and her eyebrows raised. This look of shock with which she reacts to such an all-too-common hate crime within the transgender community reveals her ignorance—a stand-in, I argue, for the anticipated mainstream spectator. Indeed, if Jenner’s goal with the series as executive producer is to normalize transgender identity, then she must be catering to an audience that is unfamiliar with the community. Jenner’s introduction to these struggles parallels that of a mainstream audience (E!’s audience), and ultimately Jenner begins to acknowledge her privilege with the hope that others do as well. After these stories have been shared and Jenner’s privilege checked, the camera cuts to a close-up shot of Jenner’s face in a post HRC interview. Although classic interview-style camerawork would necessitate that Jenner look at someone out of the frame, she disrupts such a mandate by looking down into her lap. “I’ve lived a great life,” she says, “and it’s shocking to me to see all the struggles out there.” Her body language and words here suggest that she has begun to internalize the critique of her privilege: her only worry is that a paparazzi will snap a photo of her and sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars, while the everyday struggles of the vast majority of transgender-identified people mean a literal fight for their lives. By acknowledging her privilege, Jenner opens herself up to the realities that most transgender people must face. In doing so, she becomes overcome with emotion and admits that she “ha[s] a lot to learn.” The narrative delivered over the course of these two episodes displays the Aristotelian dramaturgy that allows Jenner to reclaim her heroine role for the transgender community by demonstrating change through discovery.25 She began the narrative as an ignorant transgender person and has completed this episode enlightened, affected to the point of becoming emotional on-screen. Notably, her role as executive producer for the series allows her to redeem herself and legitimizes her own role as a spokesperson for the transgender community. This development provides the foundation for the makeover that I Am Cait promotes. Similar to Aristotle’s arc for the tragic hero, which ends in a significant change (albeit often rather than the message itself.” As a result, Jenner becomes a victim in this scene because of the vehemence with which these transgender women of color discuss her privilege. (Source: Hugs, Robot. “No, We Won’t Calm Down – Tone Policing Is Just Another Way to Protect Privilege.” Everyday Feminism. Everyday Feminism, 7 Dec. 2015. Web.) 25 In the Poetics, Aristotle provides a detailed analysis of tragedy, noting that it must revolve one particular issue of great “magnitude” that is dramatized and achieves reconciliation through the hero’s recognition, internalization, and reversal of their mistakes. (Source: Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Samuel Henry Butcher. Dover Thrift Edition. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1997. Print.) 45 before death), Weber’s notion of the “mandatory big reveal” within the makeover genre also offers significant changes for the protagonist. Weber observes that these reveals “are directed at achieving congruence between gender and sex: female bodies can be carved into more feminine shapes and male bodies made to emit masculine signs” (31-32). In other words, the makeover’s objective traditionally has been to reshape the subject to become hyper-gendered; female bodies become even more so, and male bodies exude an intensified sense of traditional masculinity. With I Am Cait, coming out as transgender is a similar process by which the subject usually tries to “achiev[e] congruence” with their inward sense of self and their outward corporeality; undergoing the makeover process is the methodology by which such congruence is achieved and performed. Furthermore, makeover shows typically demonstrate little interest in the life of the post-makeover subject. As Weber notes, “Even when the makeover offers ‘where are they now’ updates, the imagined zone of reality TV does not allow for the messiness of real lives. […] [T]he transformative self-making properties offered by the makeover are depicted as ever- present and final” (22). What Weber highlights here is the rarity with which makeover subjects are depicted regressing to the lives they lived prior to the makeover itself. The makeover narrative does not leave room for subjects who do not maintain the superficiality and artificiality of the physical and symbolic body created through the makeover. The cultural imaginary created, then, is one whereby the reveal is the final step to achieving new and improved personhood. In line with the narrative of the makeover genre, Jenner participates in a “big reveal.” Jenner’s own transformation tellingly occurred outside, and before, her television show. It moreover came in two parts: first her interview with Diane Sawyer in April 2015, a quote form which begins this chapter, and then the Vanity Fair article in July 2015. This coming-out provided the stimulus to transition itself, which is a reflection of the makeover process. By transforming her male body into not only a female body but one exhibiting hyper-femininity, Jenner succeeds in creating the harmony between gender (identity) and sex that Weber emphasizes. Except she does so as a transgender-identified person. This coherence is abundantly clear not only in I Am Cait but also in Jenner’s post-reveal public appearances. Her interview for Vanity Fair, for example, is interspersed with photos by Annie Leibovitz that accentuate her female body and feminine gender expression.26 The first photo, which online readers must view before they even begin the article, portrays Jenner in a shimmery gold dress overlooking her in- ground pool and a nearly imperceptible city scene in the backdrop. Jenner stands with one hand on her hip, a curve that underscores her female body, striking a pose like a Hollywood glam icon. Moreover, her dark hair falls down her shoulders in yet another expression of traditional femininity. Importantly, Jenner has her back turned toward us, resisting a voyeuristic gaze. Indeed, next to Jenner is a telescope, telling also turned away from the viewer, looking outward as does Jenner. The neutrally-colored and minimalist surroundings focus the audience’s gaze on Jenner’s body, the curvature of which is nearly silhouetted against the gray-blue background. These surroundings, furthermore, convey Jenner’s class privilege. Leibovitz not only captures a small portion of Jenner’s immaculate Malibu mansion, but also positions Jenner so that she also physically towers over the city. The fogginess that nearly hides the city below her mansion is distinctly contrasted with Jenner being the prime focus of the frame. Furthermore, the final photo of the celebrity in the Vanity spread continues to highlight the construction of femininity as performance. The same curvature of the female body that Jenner displays in the gold dress is

26 Leibovitz’s photos of Jenner can be viewed online at the web version of the Vanity Fair article. Although there is a series of several photos, my analysis refers only to the first and last photos in the article. See: http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/06/caitlyn-jenner-bruce-cover-annie-leibovitz 46 more visible in this photo. Much more scantily clad, Jenner wears a black lace bustier and black heels. With more skin revealed and her breasts accentuated by her attire, Jenner performs a much more sexualized femininity. Her posture speaks to the sultry side of femininity: she leans back, draping her shoulder across the back of the chair in which she is seated, one foot on the floor and the other propped up and resting on her vanity. With her eyes closed and chin raised, she positions herself in a much more vulnerable pose, allowing the heterosexual male gaze to look upon her. She connotes what Laura Mulvey would call a “to-be-looked-at-ness.”27 Her body is further sexualized by the lighting of this photo. In contrast to the sharp lines of the first image, the lighting here is extremely soft and romantic, further accentuating the intimacy and vulnerability in which Jenner allows viewers to participate. This vulnerability is intensified by the location of the photo, for Jenner is no longer in her living space but rather in her boudoir, a much more intimate setting. Surrounded by make-up compacts, white wine, and pastel pink roses, this dressing room not only epitomizes Jenner’s performance of femininity but also the artifice of femininity itself. As shown in these photographs, as well as throughout Leibovitz’s entire series accompanying the Vanity Fair article, the the celebrity’s hyper-femininity continues to be emphasized. It is important to note, however, that this physical transformation was only featured in the premiere of I Am Cait.

Figure 10: In this screenshot, writer Jen Richards makes eye contact with health educator Chandi Moore and professor Jennifer Boylan after Jenner makes a comment that highlights her social conservatism regarding people who allegedly take advantage of welfare systems. (Source: “The Road Trip, Part 1.” I Am Cait. E! Entertainment Television, 2015. Prod. Ryan Herbert, Josh Herring, Karen Kennedy, Andrea Metz, Natalie Shabtai. Hulu. Web .)

27 Indeed, in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975), Mulvey asserts, “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote a to-be-looked-at-ness” (62). 47

Figure 11: Jenner reacts with shock as she hears Laya Monarez discuss the violence she endured when her transgender identity was discovered by one of her clients. (Source: “The Road Trip, Part 2.” I Am Cait. E! Entertainment Television, 2015. Prod. Melissa Bidwell, Brenda Erazo, Ryan Herbert, Karen Kennedy, Andrea Metz, Natalie Shabtai. Hulu. Web.)

Rather than following Weber’s outline, wherein the physical transformation becomes the “big reveal,” I Am Cait, in a quite unusual move, begins with the reveal of the new corporeal body and uses the rest of the series to work toward Jenner’s ideological makeover. As such, the series demonstrates less concern with the physical makeover, or the transition or passing narratives that so deeply permeate transgender media.28 Rather than situating Jenner’s physical transition as the focal point of the show, I Am Cait instead extends the makeover genre into the social and the repercussive, resulting in an ideological makeover within the show as opposed to a physical one. Indeed, if Jenner’s significant change per Aristotelian dramaturgical guidelines is the reversal of her ignorance, then her demonstration of that ideological reversal becomes the big reveal of her series. An ideological transformation resists the narrative of transgender identity that relies on a narrative of physical transformation and the ability to pass. This ideological makeover contains an ongoing nature to it, further resisting Weber’s “big reveal” that occurs in one fell swoop. For example, in addition to the privilege check that Jenner experiences throughout the first season of the show, and perhaps because of it, she begins to shift her ideologies about gender performance (though, significantly, not without prompting). In a recent interview with Time magazine, for example, she discusses her own hyper-feminine performance: When asked what a good image looks like, she says, “I think it’s much easier for a trans woman or a trans man who authentically kind of looks and plays the role. […] If you’re out there and, to

28 Indeed, Boys Don’t Cry (1999), which has now become practically canonized within the queer archive, and The Danish Girl (2015), which recounts the transition of Lili Elbe, one of the first documented transgender women to undergo sex-reassignment surgery, both position the conflict around the subject’s physical transition and (in)ability to pass as cisgender. 48 be honest with you, if you look like a man in a dress, it makes people uncomfortable” (Steinmetz, “Caitlyn Jenner…”). This comment received much backlash for the harm it does to people who perform non-conventional gender, prompting Jenner to write an apologetic op-ed for WhoSay, a social media site for celebrities and their fans, a few days later: “What I was trying to say really is that our world is still a binary one,” she writes, “and that people who look ‘visibly transgender’ sometimes can struggle for acceptance and may be treated poorly by others. And while this may be true, it’s also something that needs to change” (Jenner, “Still So Much to Learn”). From these two passages, though, it becomes clear that Jenner’s ideologies are beginning to shift. In order for her to “get it right,” as she claims to desperately want to do, she has begun to listen to the transgender communities who do not share her privilege. Jenner as a transgender activist as well as I Am Cait as part of a transgender archive exhibit a higher level of interest in an ideological makeover wherein Jenner reevaluates her own privilege and tries to do some good for the transgender community. As the title of her op-ed piece divulges, though, there is still a lot for her to learn in order to be an effective transgender advocate and activist. Series such as I Am Cait and other media that bring visibility to the transgender community with the objective of normalization ultimately contribute to the growing transgender archive that tends to prioritize narratives of transgender-identified people who are white and wealthy. Since these figures possess both the racial and socioeconomic privilege to effectively transition, a multitude of transgender experiences are erased and excluded from this archive. Building from the discussion of the queer archive that I discussed in the introduction, I shift now to a critique of specifically the archive of transgender identity. As many scholars have written in detail, the deeply politicized power that the archive retains depends upon the inclusion and exclusion of certain representations of a cultural phenomenon. In her call for a more dynamic relationship between the archive and the repertoire, for example, performance studies scholar Diana Taylor debunks the myth that “the archive of supposedly enduring materials” is unmediated: “What makes an object archival is the process whereby it is selected, classified, and presented for analysis” (19). Taylor alludes here to the mediation that occurs in officially archiving the textual documentation of cultural phenomena. Because canonization typically stems from a mediation process in which those in power create and constitute the archive, texts by other authors and producers are ostracized because of their textual incomprehensibility.29 Similarly, while the transgender archive deviates from the universalized human ideal in terms of gender identity, the texts that have contributed to it still retain facets of this ideal such as race and socioeconomic status. And yet, as Taylor goes on to observe, “Another myth is that the archive resists change, corruptibility, and political manipulation” (19). While the archive has traditionally been created and sustained by hegemonic forces of racism, classism, colonialism, heterosexism, etc., it is not impossible to destabilize it. As the transgender community gains more representations in literature and media, and as it strengthens in determination and resolution toward achieving systemic change, it is more important than ever to provide a diverse representation of transgender identity. Certainly, we must laud the historical moment that allows the series examined throughout my analysis (Orange Is the New Black, Transparent, and I Am Cait) and the archive to which they now belong to exist. For Jenner to be able to publicly declare

29 As feminist literary critic Annette Kolodny points out, “[M]ale readers who find themselves outside of and unfamiliar with the symbolic systems that constitute female experience in women’s writings, will necessarily dismiss those systems as undecipherable, meaningless, or trivial” (5-6). (Source: Kolodny, Annette. “Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism.” Feminist Studies 6.1 (1980): 1-25. JSTOR. Web.) 49 her transgender identity, and for shows like Orange Is the New Black (2013—present) and Transparent (2014—present) to be as popular as they are, signifies the progress that we have made in terms of visibility and understanding of non-normative identities and forms of embodiment. Despite the white and wealthy transgender narrative that I Am Cait includes, such a narrative is complicated, albeit in a minor way, by her attempt at social activism that addresses the systemic violence enacted against transgender-identified people who do not adhere to this embodiment. Transparent, furthermore, complicates whiteness by portraying the narrative through a Jewish-American transgender woman. Orange Is the New Black not only leaves the narrative of a white transgender woman behind altogether, but also includes a critique of the criminalization and incarceration of transgender women of color while simultaneously providing transgender congruity, a trend that has been implemented in new media like the film Tangerine (2015) and the Netflix original series Sense8 (2015—present). Such visibility creates diversification in the transgender archive, a directive and demand that dismantles the politicized archives that document only transgender experiences of whiteness and wealth. I can only hope that future media explores not only the various other forms of transgender embodiment and performance but also challenges the hegemonic structures of cisheteropatriarchy and capitalist neoliberalism that permeate political and social discourse about transgender identity. Indeed, it’s not just about bathrooms.

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