Black Trans Artists in Cinema: Resisting Dominant Modes of Visualizing Trans

“The afterlife of slavery is not only a political and social problem but an aesthetic one as well” — Saidiya Hartman

I’m interested in black trans cinema and art as a means of ‘critical fabulation.’ Film, as a genre of the suture and the cut, dramatizes trans (gender) both within and beyond the scene of medical anthropology — of surgery and the linear and gender binary narrative of what it means to inhabit a body in transition. Trans as a medical genre and trans as a linear narrative of corporealization have been the dominant modes of visualizing trans within the mainstream media. Black trans cinema and visual art is a “loophole of retreat” and an “escapology” from this scene of capture. My paper investigates how black trans artists in cinema and visual arts theorize abolitionist aesthetics and create aesthetic sociality which is also always already an abolitionist sociality.