Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Cultural Crossovers
- 2 LGBTQ Film Festivals and their Audiences
- 3 LGBQ Themes and Responses
- 4 Trans Issues
- 5 Audiences and Critics: Dialogue and Disagreement
- Conclusion
- Appendix I: Standard Questions for Respondents
- Appendix II: Project Web Page
- Filmography
- References
- Index
4 - Trans Issues
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Cultural Crossovers
- 2 LGBTQ Film Festivals and their Audiences
- 3 LGBQ Themes and Responses
- 4 Trans Issues
- 5 Audiences and Critics: Dialogue and Disagreement
- Conclusion
- Appendix I: Standard Questions for Respondents
- Appendix II: Project Web Page
- Filmography
- References
- Index
Summary
C'est une forme de militantisme féministe, anticapitaliste qui remet en cause le genre et, euh, j'ai l'impression que c'est des choses qu'on peut voir ici aussi à Lyon (.) … J'ai pas trouvé ça exotique en fait. (it's a kind of feminist, anti-capitalist militancy that questions gender and, um, I feel that these are the kinds of things we can see here in Lyon (.) I didn't find it exotic in fact.) (Alex, thirty-seven-year-old white French genderqueer project manager, during group discussion about Guerriller@s)
[És] important coneixer la nostra història.
(It's important to know our history.) (Oriol a twenty-six-year-old trans male in questionnaire responses to Bambi at FIRE!! 2013)
‘No me siento chico, pues, no puedo empatisar en grado sumo con él, porque no he sentido eso, pero entiendo que tiene que ser una solución muy complicada, porque no parece que tienes que ser siempre lo que te marca ya de nacimiento. (I don't feel as if I'm a boy, so I cannot empathise at the highest level with him, because I've not experienced it, but I understand that it must be a very complicated solution, because it seems that you have to always be what you were defined as at birth.) (Marta Isabel, twenty-four-year-old Spanish white European female lesbian undergraduate student during group discussion about Tomboy)
These comments illustrate the range of reactions among our participants to the corpus films about transsexual, transgender and intersex identities. Their modes of engagement vary from affirmations of identification to expressions of sympathy and non-specialist understanding, via empathy and recognition, that transmit a sense of shared values around gender and, in the first case, class-based politics. Each position depends, of course, on the identity and lived experience of the individual respondent and is formed, as always, within the knowledge that they are participating in academic research. Beyond Oriol's comment, which provides further evidence of how people who consider themselves to be affected by a film's subject transmit a sense of community affiliation, Alex demonstrates how those from outside that community draw on themes that have salience for them, that coincide with their own understanding of their social identities and self-positioning with regards to ideas of bourgeois and heteronormative culture and the ‘mainstream’, while Marta Isabel adopts a more distanced stance.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- French and Spanish Queer FilmAudiences, Communities and Cultural Exchange, pp. 102 - 136Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2016