Description
Book SynopsisEliza Steinbock traces how cinema offers alternative ways to understand gender transitions through a specific aesthetics of change, thereby opening up new means to understand transgender ontologies and epistemologies.
Trade Review"The greatest achievement of
Shimmering Images is Steinbock’s contestation of the status of the 'visible,' and of the attendant concepts expressed in the hegemonic Enlightenment insistence that to see something is to know it: 'visuality,' 'recognition,' 'knowledge,' and 'objectivity.'. . . . Steinbock leaves the reader with new tools for examining trans embodiment with(in) cinema." -- Elizabeth Berman * Feral Feminisms *
"
Shimmering Images is often exquisitely poetic, evoking Roland Barthes's work as it describes the author's passionate investigation of media, mediation, and embodiment.… Steinbock's concept of shimmering images expresses how we thrill to certain mediated moments not in spite of, but because of, who we are and who we are becoming—in dialogue with the media that we encounter, that we seek out, and that shimmers in our lives." -- Nicole Morse * Critical Inquiry *
"Whether you are a cinephile, transgender studies scholar, or simply curious,
Shimmering Images comes highly recommended to readers from a wide array of backgrounds." -- Eva Theunissen * Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies *
“Shimmering Images contains a rich and topical cultural analysis extending across time and across genres that is underpinned by a commitment to interdisciplinary research that will undoubtedly be of value for scholars and students in film studies, transgender studies, feminist theory, cultural studies, and queer theory.”
-- Lieke Hettinga * Screen Bodies *
"Offering insight into how systemic cruelty is mediated by culturally determined epistemes,
Shimmering Images provides a practical framework for how we can interface with these systems, as trans people and trans-lovers, in potentially resistant or subversive ways." -- Isaac Preiss * TSQ *
Table of ContentsPreface. Call Me They vii
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction. Disjunction and Conjunction: Thinking Trans through the Cinematic 1
1. Shimmering Phantasmagoria: Trans/Cinema/Aesthetics in an Age of Technological Reproducibility 26
2. Shimmering Sex: Docu-Porn's Trans-Sexualities, Confession Culture, and Suturing Practices 61
3. Shimmering Multiplicity: Trans*Forms in
Dandy Dust and
I.K.U. from Dada to Data to D@D@ 107
Conclusion. An Ensemble of Shimmers 145
Notes 157
Bibliography 199
Index 219
