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Chapter 11 - Queer and Trans Studies in Pop Culture

Transgender Tripping Points in the Carceral State

from Part III - Representation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2020

By
Erica Rand
Edited by
Siobhan B. Somerville
Siobhan B. Somerville
Affiliation:
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
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Summary

This chapter presents queer and trans popular culture studies through a 2015 plotline on the US soap opera The Bold and the Beautiful, in which Maya Avant, a character introduced several years previously, is revealed to be a trans woman. I consider Maya’s story within both the specific context of the soap genre and the supposed phenomenon known as the “transgender tipping point” toward visibility and civil rights. Aiming to denaturalize argumentation as the goal of academic essays, I offer instead an analysis of Maya’s story in the service of a common fan cultural production: a new scenario dreamed up for the characters. Soap conventions normalize hidden pasts and bodily transformations, and B and B writers well used those conventions to de-scandalize trans genders. But they also evacuated and depoliticized Maya’s backstory. Maya first appeared on the show as a black woman newly released from unjust incarceration, separated from her child in the process, and struggling to survive in the heteropatriarchal, racist carceral state. I want B and B to revisit Maya’s history, dramatizing the role of mass incarceration in the lives of trans people, and particularly trans people of color.

Keywords

The Bold and the BeautifulMaya Avantsoap operastransgender tipping pointtransgender characterstransgender revealtransfeminism
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies , pp. 172 - 184
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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References

Further Reading

Bad Object-Choices, ed. How Do I Look: Queer Film and Video. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1991.Google Scholar
Brennan, Niall, and Gudelunas, David, eds. RuPaul’s Drag Race and the Shifting Visibility of Drag Culture. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Creekmur, Corey K., and Doty, Alexander, eds. Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Poplar Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Doty, Alexander. Making Things Perfectly Queer: Interpreting Mass Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.Google Scholar
Fawaz, Ramzi. The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics. New York: New York University Press, 2016.Google Scholar
Gray, Mary L. Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America. New York: New York University Press, 2009.Google Scholar
Keegan, Cáel M. “Revisitation: A Trans Phenomenology of the Media Image.” MedieKultur 32, no. 61 (2016): 26–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Samantha. “Virtually Normal: Mark Bingham, the War on Terror, and The Sexual Politics of Sport.” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 33, no. 1 (February 2009): 5–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muñoz, José Esteban. “Pedro Zamora’s Real World of Counterpublicity: Performing an Ethics of the Self.” In Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, 143–60. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Peele, Thomas. Queer Popular Culture: Literature, Media, Film, and Television. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Samer, Roxanne, ed. “Transgender Media.” Special Issue, Spectator, 37, no. 2 (Fall 2017): 1–88.Google Scholar
Tongson, Karen. “Karaoke, Queer Theory, Queer Performance: Dedicated to José Esteban Muñoz.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Queerness, edited by Maus, Fred Everett and Whiteley, Sheila. Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Essay published online March 2018. www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199793525.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199793525-e-72.Google Scholar

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