Trans/Super/Natural: Passing and the Spectre of Trans Monstrosity
Caoimhe A. Harlock

At its core, passing as a trans person is an intersection of naturalness and intelligibility; of rendering one’s body, mannerisms, speech, and sexuality intelligible to others in order to be understood as a natural manifestation of one’s gender. One way we might understand passing, then, is as “a successful passing, rather than failing, of the social standards for inclusion in the category of the natural.” But failure, as all trans people likely know, is often a generative place to find oneself.

With this definition in mind, I look at the trans experience of passing, naturalness, and intelligibility through one of the dominant organizing metaphors of our field: trans monstrosity. At stake here is an underexamined question: when trans people fail to pass into the category of the natural, why are we so often shunted not only into the opposing realm of the unnatural, but also into the supernatural? Why does monstrosity and unnaturalness appear so often as a central tenet of the trans imaginary, and how can it reveal for us additional layers of meaning in our ongoing discussions of passing?

To explore these questions, I’ll be looking at the use of monstrosity in foundational texts of trans studies such as Susan Stryker’s “My Words to Victor Frankenstein…” as well as in cultural representation of trans people as monsters: Buffalo Bill from Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), King Paimon from Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018), and others. This analysis invokes other vital questions: in what ways might a commitment to “naturalness” or “intelligibility” serve as a constraint on articulating the realities of trans experience? What might trans people (and by extension trans studies) gain from unnatural identifications that empower us to more accurately contend with our lived realities? And, what unexplored interplays of power embedded in the concept of passing might be revealed in the tension between trans people self-identifying with monstrous metaphors and mainstream media depicting us as monsters?

Bio: Caoimhe A. Harlock is a doctoral candidate in English at Duke University, with a certificate concentration in Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies. She studies 20th-century and contemporary American fiction – especially fiction by women and queer authors – as well as America’s long history of supernatural reckonings with gender as staged by writers, artists, and feminist and queer political movements. Her critical training sits at the intersection of cultural criticism and feminist/queer/trans studies, and she has taught seminars on manifesto writing as well as genre fiction and the monstrous feminine. As an openly transgender woman in academia, she also works to translate research into praxis through ongoing engagement with LGBTQ+ organizations in her local community.

Impossible passings: fatties in the art world
Marilia Kaisar

Fatness is a visible signifier of disobedience. Once one is fat, it is impossible to pass as not fat because fatness is on the surface of the skin, on the field of visuality. How are fat bodies entering the space of the gallery/museum/black box to disrupt the canonical realms of representation? The focus of this paper lies on fat artists with artistic agency who create representations and performances that disrupt and redefine canonical patterns. Using the work of Jose Esteban Munoz on disidentification and Judith Butler's notion of performativity, this paper explores how fat bodies take up space in the art world and challenge dualities of good and bad. The works explored here reiterate dominant aesthetic regimes and representations of fatness to challenge those patterns and demonstrate other ways of being. Can art become a medium for activism and engagement with different embodied experiences? This paper explores three approaches of how fat bodies can be enacted in art through the mediums of performance, photography, self-portrait, and video performance. This paper aims to read through the works of the artists Iiu Susiraja, Shoog McDaniel, and the Greek activist group Political Fatties as performative acts of disidentification. Through the appropriation, disidentification, and reiteration of both Western art aesthetics, popular mainstream culture, narratives, and representations of fatness as a monstrosity, those artists deconstruct normative patters and create new forms of fat embodiment. This enactment and reiteration of the hurtful and disturbing ideas allow those performances to demonstrate the breaking point of the neoliberal structure. From this crack, through the excess, new utopias new futures and further embodiments can emerge. Fat bodies can be visible, independently, not as examples to avoid but as subjects that matter.

Bio: Marilia Kaisar is an artist and a Ph.D. student in the Department of Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz. She holds an M.A in Media Studies (2018) from Pratt Institute ( New York), for which she was awarded the Award of Excellence in Academic Achievement and the Graduate Student Engagement Fund. She also holds a Diploma in Architecture Engineering (2015) from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her experimental practice is working in the intersection of space, media, art, film, sexuality, and interactivity. Her work has been published in Mark Magazine, Taste of Cinema, Film Noir, and Greek Architects.

‘So, is Hermione black-passing now?’ Harry Potter and the Cursed Child: passing for canon
Octagon Norman

In 2016, Noma Dumezweni was announced as the first black woman to play Hermione Granger. Although there have been many instances of recasting in the Potter franchise (largely when minor characters played by people of colour were recast as white), Dumezweni’s casting in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child caused the most public furore. Learning from work by Rukmini Pande, Megan Justine Fowler, andré m. carrington and Abigail de Kosnik among others, this paper will investigate the phenomenon of ‘Black Hermione’ through the lens of fan studies. It will compare the critical fan practice of ‘racebending’ in fanfiction/art with JK Rowling’s practice of retconning Hermione’s whiteness so that a new, black-passing Hermione can be co-opted into the structures of oppression that Harry Potter replicates.

The crux of this paper is in establishing why racebending (the portrayal of a character in fanfic/art as a different race) is generally applauded in fan communities, yet Rowling’s casting of Dumezweni was not met with not only confusion, but violence. I argue that there are three main reasons for the backlash against ‘Black Hermione.’ The privileging of canon in fandom ultimately leads to the preservation and replication of hegemonies found in the original work. The world of Harry Potter equates Britishness to whiteness - a structure to which ‘Black Hermione’ poses a ‘threat’. Unlike theatre audiences, who are accustomed to seeing their favourite roles played by  different actors, canon-centric Potter fans are more likely to feel confronted by a ‘displacement’ of their favourite (white) character. This confrontation, unlike when fans watch films, is not mediated by a screen: in the theatre, ‘Black Hermione’ takes up live, co-present space in front of fans. A black-passing Hermione furthers the neoliberal economy of Harry Potter: it provides a  performative moment for JKR to exhibit her “inclusivity”; it consolidates Rowling’s existing fanbase of (white) liberals; and crucially, it alienates critical (POC) members of her audienceship. 

Bio: Octagon Norman (they/them) is a UK-based performance artist, a fan, and an independent scholar. Their practice sits between Performance, Gender and Fan Studies. Octagon’s next published work will be in the University of Iowa’s ‘Fan Cultures’, a chapter in the book Theatre Fandom titled ‘Fantheatre and the Emancipated Spectator in A Very Potter Musical’. They have made fanworks for Ditchling Museum (East Sussex, UK), Cafe Oto (London, UK), INKONST (Malmö, Sweden), SPILL Festival of Performance (Ipswich, UK), Vierte Welt (Berlin, Germany) and Critical Interruptions at Steakhouse Live 2018 (London, UK), and DISKURS, (Gießen, Germany).  Octagon has written creative, critical and academic texts for performative lectures at venues and symposiums across London and Europe, including The Barbican,The Roundhouse, Bristol University, Royal Holloway, The University of Geißen, The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, Runnymede International Literary Festival, and Café Oto.

Passing in and out of Sex Work: Stratagem, Fraudulence and the Dialectics of Authenticity
Beau Larsen

Hima B.’s documentary Straight for the Money: Interviews with Queer Sex Workers (1994) brings to the screen eight lesbian and bisexual women who perform heterosexuality for pay, reviving a long history of lesbian sex workers who have exchanged sex with men to provide for themselves and their loved ones chronicled most famously in Joan Nestle’s “Lesbians and Prostitutes: A Historical Sisterhood.” The documentary elucidates the various ways in which sex workers must navigate the dialectics of authenticity and “pass” into particular scripts of womanhood based on racial and class positionality. This presentation seeks to examine the phenomena of being “straight for the money” and how it can problematize theories regarding passing, authenticity and relationality. In opposition to queer and trans scholarship that calls to defend and expand the realm of the “authentic” as the exclusive site of liberative relationality, the lives of lesbian, bisexual and transgender sex workers who pass in and out of heterosexuality for pay I argue calls for a return to fraudulence and the potentiality of intimacy within ruse. By foregrounding fraudulent relationships towards the visual and performative practices of heterosexuality, queer sex workers build informal proximities on the underside of passing. Thinking through the violence that accrues to that which is suspected of fraudulence and simultaneously the intimacies that can emerge in, and as a result of queer sex worker stratagem, I hope to investigate what C. Riley Snorton describes the “contradictory social spaces some trans people inhabit at the edges of legibility.” How can fabrication of narrative and purposeful retreat into signifiers of normativity unravel the paradigms of truth and falsehood that underlie the legibility of racial, classed and gendered distinctions? Can passing necessitate distance from deviance and yet at the same time, open up possibilities for deviant life?

Bio: Beau Larsen is a graduate student in communication studies and rhetoric and a debate coach at Wake Forest University. They have a B.A. in Gender and Sexuality Studies from the University of Southern California.

Passing Time(s): Phenomenology, Genealogy, Sociogeny
Lake Elrod

Drawing from both black and trans legacies of anti-passing critique, Janet Mock describes the rhetorical implications of “passing” as a negation of being at the level of gender (2014). Echoing Sandy Stone’s theorization of the “posttranssexual” (1991), Mock rejects a common association between passing and deception by advocating for a material-semantic practice of being a woman despite the (non-)recognition conferred by cisnormative regimes of intelligibility. Following Sandra Harvey’s (2017) insight that passing originates as a performative accusation, this essay develops passing as an onto-epistemological problematic. How can the accusation of passing performatively negate the state of affairs that it purports to describe? Reading heterogeneous examples of anglophone passing discourse in the long wake of the middle passage, “Passing Time(s)” locates the paradox of the signification of passing at the intersection of the phenomenological encounter, the genealogical episteme, and the sociogenic lifetime. By relating these temporal frames, I suggest that the power to distinguish the essence from the appearance of identities may be a historical effect of passing discourse. While “passing” remains implicated in the reproduction of essentialist fantasies, I attempt to queer the figure of the passer by redeploying it as a haunting potential through which any act of identification may fail to apprehend its object.

Bio: Lake Elrod is a History of Consciousness PhD student at UC Santa Cruz. Their research traces the cultural politics of race and gender passing in the United States.

Passing Time in Dansou Cafes: The Potentials and Limitations of 2.5D
Layla Hazemi

My paper looks at the Japanese phenomenon of dansou cafes, venues where AFAB people dressed as an anime-inflected, princely interpretation of the masculine wait on customers. These venues allow for crossings-over and transgressions of social hegemony, while being formally circumscribed by capitalist infrastructure. This paper sits with the uncomfortable ambivalence between these two poles, asking what it means, and what one can and cannot perform, by passing time at these cafes.

The dansou cafe serves, firstly, as a convergence point for many sometimes intersecting subsets of pathologized groups: otaku (anime fans); girls’ youth culture, also called shoujo or kawaii culture; and gender-nonconforming, queer, and trans people. Following Patrick Galbraith’s reading of maid cafes, these venues allow for queer formations of affective bonds not defined by or leading to the heternormative structure of the family. At the same time, the business model relies on an uneven system of relations between the usually older, upper-middle-class, male customers and the younger, more economically precarious dansou . The bonds of the affective circle may move across the line of the counter, but they do not do so evenly.

Dansou supposedly inhabit the so-called “2.5D” space between the 2D world of drawn characters in anime and manga and the 3D world of flesh-and-blood people with interiority, subjectivity, and entanglements with material realities. Thus, dansou need not (and largely do not) “pass” as cis men. But 2.5D is not just a midpoint between dimensions; it also serves as a midpoint between cis and trans identity off the clock, the place where the usually cis, part-time dansou at cafes and the often trans and nonbinary dansou who work the “after dark” shifts meet. Under-examined as a phenomenon, dansou cafes offer unique spaces of intersection, connection, and creation, alongside questions of whether such possibilities can be celebrated wholly without reservation.

Bio: Layla Hazemi is a PhD student in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research centers on the all-female Takarazuka Revue in Japan, with a focus on imperial and post-imperial constructions of race and gender, politics and popular theater, and questions of transnationality and the Broadway musical. She has attendant interests in queer and trans theory, gender and cultural studies, critical theory, modernism and modernity, postcolonial theory, and performance studies.

Passing as Human – Or, Why Artificial Intelligence is Trans*

For an artificial intelligence to succeed at being labelled “intelligent,” it must also “pass” as human. It is perhaps not coincidental that the first test of artificial intelligence, the Turing Test, was developed by Alan Turing, a neurodivergent gay man who certainly must have had to become adept in passing in 1950s Britain. However, in similar ways to trans “passing,” success for an artificial intelligence necessarily entails an affirmative reinforcement of norms related to human intelligence and, also, the erasure of differences that define the “passing” intelligence.

The test of artificial intelligence is therefore related to issues explored by trans studies. For AI, there is a form of institutional testing, which an entity must pass or fail to be marked as intelligent within a given system of knowledge. Success here necessitates the successful hiding of characteristics of difference, rather than the celebration of these differences and the productive potential they bring.

In order to pursue this further, I will analyze passing and the erasure of difference in the 1995 Japanese film Ghost in the Shell / Kōkaku kidōtai, which features an artificial intelligence that passes as different human genders, and the 2016 Japanese video game Yūwaku rabo kiken na koi no hōteishiki, which features an artificial intelligence being taught to pass as an ideal boyfriend. In the former example, success or failure in passing is dependent upon the successful suppression of functionality to form connections with others in ways unique to artificial intelligence. In the latter example, success at passing is dependent upon the suppression of possible mechanistic forms of desire and the emulation of gendered, anthropocentric desire structures. Although artificial intelligence studies often centers around the question of the successful emulation of human features, little has been done on the intersections this process has with fields like trans studies.

Detecting Blackness: Biometric Facial Recognition as Neo-Minstrelsy Form
Camille Crichlow

In a moment where blackface has resurfaced in popular media and politics as a dark testament to the contemporary condition of race relations in the 21st century, the resurgence of the iconographic symbol of American racism stands at a stark, and somewhat ironic impasse with the biases of biometric data collection, which has altogether rendered the black face undetectable. Like most machine learning systems, facial recognition technologies rely on libraries of data which train model-based vision algorithms to recognize and detect faces in images cluttered with illumination and noise. Here, race becomes encoded—as it has been in older analogical systems—as a measure of detectability, where whiteness is positioned as the normative prototype of recognition. In an age where race can now be quantified at the scan of a microchip, what does it mean to “pass”, or go undetected, and how does this challenge us to rethink the critical distance between visibility, “passing” and erasure?

By comparing contemporary and historical depictions of blackface to new technological quantifications of race, in consideration of the controversial optic of the “transracial”, this paper will examine shifting boundaries of race in a historical moment in which we continually disavow the significance of biology in race and gender identity, while simultaneously digitizing, or quantifying their use as categories of social difference through media technologies. If passing is passé, my paper will both consider how technologic readings of race might challenge the ability to “to read oneself aloud” (Stone 232), and, simultaneously, how the misrecognition inherent in the biases of facial recognition technology might serve “as a context for the emergence of selfhood” (Snorton 82). As racism and inequality are increasingly rendered through the algorithm, I build upon Browne’s analysis (2015) to situate the unsettling of new “truths” of racialization produced by biometric technologies. Camille Crichlow is a London-based researcher and writer. She recently completed an MA in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London focusing on visual typographies of race, and the schematization of blackness in visual imaging practices and technologies. Her research interrogates the construction of the normative, and non-normative contours of the body as they relate to themes of legibility and recognition in today's surveillance culture.

Bio: Camille Crichlow is a London-based researcher and writer. She recently completed an MA in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London focusing on visual typographies of race, and the schematization of blackness in visual imaging practices and technologies. Her research interrogates the construction of the normative, and non-normative contours of the body as they relate to themes of legibility and recognition in today's surveillance culture.

Glitch/Grain/Sync: Towards a Minor Language of Technological Reproduction
Madeleine Collier

The project of becoming-minoritarian, a progressive endeavor facilitated by the application of minor languages, literatures, and sciences, continues to be among the most generative frameworks to have emerged from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s fruitful partnership. Despite the breadth and rigor of their investigation (which incorporates examples of speech acts, written language, cinema, and musical expression), Deleuze and Guattari never disentangle the moment of enunciation from that of mediation/distribution in the circulation of minor languages. The question remains: how are the processes of technological reproduction and mediation folded into the fabrication of major languages, and conversely, how are these processes appropriated by the authors of minor languages and literature? To put it in the terms of A Thousand Plateaus, how and where do we see techniques of technological mediation “set[ting] the major language racing”?

Today, a prevalent trend of digital media sees subjects are disassembled and reassembled at the rupture of voice and body–both in pornography-born deepfake technologies and in less sophisticated manifestations disseminated across popular apps like Tiktok, facestealer, and dubsmash. The fracturing and sublimation/projection of the digitally mediated self is one of the central spaces of play in online culture; these apps combine elements of the self with elements of the other: celebrities, friends, animals, and animated characters become synthesized with the user in a recombined whole. My questions are the following: What can we learn from the history of chimerical representation (most notably, film dubbing) to understand the stakes of evident fragmentation vs. seamlessness in contemporary media representation? More crucially, what can we learn from minor languages of technological mediation/reproduction as we approach the project of becoming-minoritarian in the age of digitally mediated enunciation?

Thinking alongside feminist, posthumanist theorists including Jenny Sundén, Legacy Russell, and Alexander Weheliye, I aim to consider how multi-subject assemblages have been deployed in posthuman techniques of control, and, contrarily, how foregrounding technological mediation via grain, glitch, scratch, delay, and modification may be productively deployed as a minor language. Patching together a framework of Sundén’s work on “high-fidelity gender,” Russell’s concept of “glitch feminism” and Weheliye’s “sonic Afro-modernity,” it may be possible to begin deriving a minority praxis; we may be able to garner a few insights into the tactical leverage necessary to break open the cracks in the multi-subject entities “passing” for organic wholes.

Bio: Madeleine Collier is a New York-based researcher, filmmaker, and translator currently pursuing an MA in Film and Media Studies at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in AfterImage Journal, Film Quarterly, Sound Studies Journal, and Film Comment. Research interests include: aesthetics of labor and commodity, feminist science and technology studies, and new materialism.

Over the Eyre-waves: Mutability and Racialized Timbre in Qiu Yuefeng's Mr. Rochester
Yvonne Lin

My project examines voice as the mediation of dislocated traces of the foreign in the Chinese-dubbed version of Jane Eyre (1970, dir. Delbert Mann). Mr. Rochester was played by Qiu Yuefeng (1922-1980), whose racialized voice fueled his stardom in the People's Republic of China. While it was commonly known that Qiu had a Han Chinese father and Russian mother, his face was seldom seen; regardless, fans attribute his allure to his “foreign” timbre. The popularity of this film flared as the PRC transitioned from exclusively importing media from socialist allies to circulating dubbed films, or yizhipian, from capitalist nations in the 1970s.

I argue that vocal passing in Qiu’s performance in Jane Eyre figures mutability during a paradigm shift. Not only does mutability find expression in the 1847 novel’s narrative and rich adaptation history, but it also underlies the process of ventriloquism in dubbed foreign films.

Weaving together theories of racialized timbre and literary scholarship on empire and evolution, I ask: How does the evocation of marginality, critical to the gothic romance, that inscribes gender, race, and empire in 19th-century Britain “gain in translation” during the latter half of the Cultural Revolution? How might dubbing practices and fan culture surrounding Qiu illuminate the ways in which the visual regimes governing social and biological forms manifest in sonic traces? I engage these questions by situating close analysis of the text in a discussion of reception history of Jane Eyre in the PRC and sonic technology and culture in the 1970s, building on scholarship by, inter alia, Nicole Huang, Weijia Du, and Jie Li.

While existing research considers yìzhìpiàn vis-à-vis state ideology, I aim to elucidate the discursive production of a historicized concept of global participation. Broadly, this project contributes an examination of whiteness as a sonic gesture in the Chinese context.

Bio: Yvonne Lin is a PhD student in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research examines the ways in which aesthetic manifestations of material degradation problematize notions of temporality, archive, and narrative during bursts of capitalist acceleration in postsocialist China and Cold War Taiwan. She has attendant interests in Frankfurt School critical theory, translation studies, media archaeology, modernism/modernity, transnational literature, and science and technology studies.

The Futurities of Networked (Re)memory: Passing as/on Y2k Pop Stardom in the Trans*Media World-Building of p1nkstar
Paxton Haven

As a technology of U.S. music industry hegemony during the early turn of the century transition to digital music commodities, the promotional celebrity framework of the early aughts popstar evokes a certain marketable whiteness and essentialist conception of cisgender heteronormative desire aimed at broad global appeal. Austin, TX based transmedia performance artist p1nkstar, who was born and raised in Tampico, Mexico, uses her performance and video work to disrupt the early aughts popstar as cultural script of assumed femaleness and whiteness through her specific transfeminine and Latina disidentifications (Muñoz 1999). In a world where saccharine beats meets hot pink ball gags, passing as a Y2k-era bubblegum popstar creates a theoretical space and aesthetic language of queer and trans* possibility, but also critically engages with the ways in which histories of heterosexist and transphobic exclusions are passed down through dominant cultural memories of particular periods in popular music history (Bennett and Rogers 2016).

Through a resignification of this hyper-commercialized symbol of U.S. global music market dominance within a specifically networked DIY approach to virtual and physical community building, p1nkstar’s ability to pass as a popstar cleverly juggles critiques of previous queer and trans exclusions that, through a collective affect I call (re)memory, also presents a celebration of the discursive potentialities of contemporary pop music as a space of transnational queer collaboration. Accordingly, this paper draws from existing scholarship on queer musical world-making (Taylor 2012), transmedia storytelling (Jenkins 2011), and contemporary technologies of racial gendering (Chen 2019) to explore how p1nkstar’s strategic negotiations of passing as/on Y2k pop stardom creates a shared language of music scene participation through trans* world-building. In tracing the branding, activist, and performance logics of p1nkstar’s transmedia storytelling through textual analysis of her experimental video and live performance work, this paper situates p1nkstar’s bubblegum pop ambivalence as tactical misrecognition with previous industry, scholarly, and cultural exclusions to further assert the contemporary imaginations and embodiments of trans* futures within a specific queer scene of electropop musicians.

Bio: Paxton Haven is a PhD candidate at The University of Texas at Austin’s Radio-Television-Film department. Paxton holds a BA in Political Science from The George Washington University and a MA in Media Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include digital networks of contemporary music scenes, legacies of queer disruptions and reformations of mainstream popular music culture, and streaming platforms’ transformation of music industries.

A Trans History of the Castrato and Soprano Voices: from (In)Voluntary Castration to Gender Affirmation
Penrose M. Allphin

Originally, castrati were ‘created’ and often, but probably not always, nonconsensually thrust into a queered role in society and music. Now, their modern day counterpart, countertenors and those who sing pants roles, intentionally assume this vocally queer role, often to musically affirm a queer or transed role they already hold in non-musical society. Although there are certainly many more examples of cisgender gay countertenors, this discussion will trace the threads of gender ambiguity from castrati to contemporary transgender countertenors and sopranos. Some questions that arise when considering trans sopranos and trans countertenors include: What does it mean to voluntarily queer one’s voice? Sometimes does this manifest as queering the body instead? Combining musicology, medical accounts, and scholarship by contemporary gender theorists, this conversation examines parallels and divergences between castrati and transgender people, both musically and in everyday life. In addition to the surgical element of the castrato, and the queered role they often held in society as a result, the connection to modern day trans people extends to the hyperfixation of the public and the medical establishment on their bodies, particularly genitals, and their sex lives. Furthermore, voices and their bodies are expected to be congruous to the cisgender gaze, and both castrati and many modern day trans singers disrupt this idea of consistency in their vocal performances. In both castrati and trans singers, voices often serve as a source of ‘clocking’ and mark individuals as nonpassing in relation to the gendered expectations of their bodies, presentations, or behaviors.

Bio: Penrose M. Allphin is a second-year master’s student in music theory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Their research interests include trans voices, queer musicology, and music cognition. In their spare time they enjoy composing, baking, and cross-stitching.

PASSPORT
Pilar Castillo

Designed as a ‘hyper-real’ counterfeit, PASSPORT mimics the book structure and subverts the content of the official document. This counterfeit travel document aims to confront the institutional narrative, question its authority, and serve as a record of protest and indignation. This work is centered within the context of ‘decolonizing design,’ as a practice in redefining how we interpret government narratives, and to consider the formats in which land is claimed and people discarded. The standard issued U.S. passport is an institution that upholds the nostalgia of colonial identity.

‘Passing’ as it relates to borders is a tangible system, one that is held together with ink on paper, embedded with security features and international agreements. A ‘pass’ to cross international borders requires proof of authenticity, without which you are illegal, unaccounted for, and without rights. Therefore, it is not enough to be human, you have to be a subject of the state, and were it not for the official document itself your entire personhood is in violation.

PASSPORT revisits the political systems imposed by the U.S. government to exploit immigrants based on denying them citizenship and basic human rights. This counter narrative recollects a history of exploitation against Black, Indigenous, and people of color, from cotton plantations to boarding schools and internment camps, to the current humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border.

Bio: Pilar Castillo is a Belizean-born artist based in Los Angeles, and proudly represents the Caribbean diaspora. She has dedicated twenty-years as an art practitioner and professional in the L.A. art community with a focus on Public Art. As painter and illustrator, she applies handmade processes to design work ranging from publication to product design. Pilar holds an M.F.A. from Otis College of Art and Design, a B.A. in World Arts and Cultures from UCLA’s School of Art & Architecture, and has completed field studies in Amsterdam, Belgium and Cuba.

Transnationalism as Assemblage: The Settler Colonial Politics of Trans Passing in the U.S.
Jamey Jesperson

In “Homonationalism as Assemblage,” Jasbir Puar re-reads her theory of homonationalism within the context of Palestine, arguing how sexuality operates as “a crucial formation in the articulation of proper citizens.” As an extension to her earlier theorization in Terrorist Assemblages, Puar clarifies how the queers seen as ‘proper’ by the settler nation-state are not ‘gender queer.’ Explicitly, “trans and gender nonconforming queers are not welcome” in homonationalism. While Puar’s dissection of trans people from homonationalism is justified, the exclusion of trans people from a critique of ‘exceptionalism’ calls for further interrogation in 2020. This paper argues that certain trans bodies can be granted conditional acceptance—or, are able to pass—into the dominant US body politic by means of exceptional gender, specifically as it intersects with race, ideology, and intelligibility.

A trans reading of Puar’s canonical theory from 2013 that articulates the nuances of what could be called transnationalism is overdue. Not only have we witnessed a drastic shift in visibility post-Trans Tipping Point, but the concomitant rise of global fascism and, more domestically, the election of Donald Trump, has brought uglier sides of the trans community to light. From the televised transition of long-time Republican Caitlyn Jenner, to the unrelenting vitriol of conservative trans YouTube, a growing presence of trans subjectivity rooted in nationalism and exclusion has gained dangerous traction. In the way homonationalism functions as a “regulatory script [of] racial and national norms,” transnationalism has resulted in a reciprocal regulation of those who cannot or wish not to pass—trans and nonbinary people alike. As Sandy Stone warned in the early 90s, “authentic experience is replaced by a particular kind of story, one that supports the old constructed positions.” While the politics of passing have developed more nuance over the years, a critical conversation on political assimilation—both conservative and liberal—reveals a growing vested interest in the U.S. settler state as an arbiter of “freedom” that ultimately vacates possibility for linkage between trans liberation and anti-racism and decolonization.

Bio: Jamey Jesperson is a white non-binary trans femme historian currently based in London. Following graduation from The New School in 2016, Jamey worked as a Research Assistant with the Trans Identity Formation Study (TIFS) at New York University, and then as an Education Associate with GLSEN—a national nonprofit supporting LGBTQ+ youth in schools. In 2019, Jamey packed their bags and moved to London to pursue a Masters in Queer History at Goldsmiths University. They are currently completing a dissertation on the imperial history of the gender binary, specifically the Spanish settlement of “California” throughout the long nineteenth century

Performing Passing: Feminist Documentary in Israel/Palestine
Yarden Stern

This paper illustrates and compares different approaches that have emerged in contemporary documentary made by women in Israel/Palestine, which highlight passing as both a cinematic technique and as documentary content. In Ines Moldavsky’s “The Men Behind the Wall” (2018) the filmmaker passes through military checkpoints in the West Bank to engage in explicit sexual dialogues with Palestinian men, configuring the gendered power relations of the occupation by juxtaposing her own movement with the restricted mobility of Palestinians. In “Unsettled” (2018) Iris Zak, a self-proclaimed left-wing Jew, moves into the Jewish settlement Tekoa to engage with its residents in humanizing conversations. Zak refutes the possibility of passing as settler, positioning herself as a cinematic spectacle and necessitating that residents to engage in conversation as they pass her by. Rana Abu-Fraiha’s “In Her Footsteps” (2018), in contrast, doesn’t performatively stage an impasse, but rather traces the passing aspirations imparted upon her by her parents. Abu-Fraiha interrogates their sudden decision move from their native Bedouin village of Tel-Sheva to the Jewish town of Omer, while coming to terms with her mother’s inevitable passing due to terminal cancer.

This paper addresses how three filmmakers address the temporal, spatial, gendered and racial valences of passing’s performativity. The documentaries present an opportunity to analyze the internal political relationality at work in Israel/Palestine, a highly mediatized conflict zone, through an understanding of passing as a privileged psychical and physical action available only to some. These recent instantiations of passing are best understood as indispensable matters of their documentary’s form and truth effects—which can be examined through both the reflexive positioning of the documentary makers, as well as through an analysis of recurring imagery of scenes of passing.  

Bio: Yarden Stern is a Phd candidate at New York University’s Department of Performance Studies, where he completed his MA. He received his BA from Goldsmith's University in Media & Sociology. His dissertation research is focused on the issues of borders, queerness and disruption in Israel/Palestine. He is a member of the editorial collective for Women & Performance, A Journal of Feminist Theory as well as the collective’s Public Programs Coordinator. 

Intergenerational Responsibility and Archival Embodiment in Patrick Staff's "The Foundation”
Christian Whitworth

Patrick Staff’s 2015 video installation, The Foundation, restages the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles as a site of intergenerational responsibility for the curation of queer identity and history. The foundation was established in 1983 by artist Tuoko Laaksonen (1920-1991); it has since operated as a home for an overtly masculine identity of an older generation of gay men. Yet the organization, grappling with the evolving politics of queer identity, faces the challenge of its own historical re-narration: how can it serve as a home to a wider range of queer, trans, and feminine identities while still exhibiting the sketched image of masculinity with which it was built? And how might alternative forms of mediation—video and performance—allow such “outsider” identities to envision new ways of living with history?

To get at these questions, Staff (they/them) includes themselves within this videographic investigation which brings together scenes of idle observation, archival reconstruction, and experimental dance. To reconcile a trans-feminine identity with the foundation’s more masculine comportment, the artist choreographs awkward experimental dance sequences within a fabricated set drawn from the home’s architecture and memorabilia. Their synchronized movements with an older, bearded gay man mark the boundaries of their stage, which serves as an arena for the negotiation of difference; both bodies become porous transhistorical veils of archival experiences, transitional screens between queer subcultures historically successive and contingent yet politically distinct. This pas de deux between Staff and their other begins to manifest a new mode of queer passing, a difference marked neither by reverence nor irreverence but rather an attraction over and beyond the paradigmatic structures distinguishing generations. The Foundation too envisions Staff’s self-conceptualization as a historiographical critique of queer and subcultural studies since the 1980s; they reflect upon and critiques processes of categorization, testing themes of ownership, appropriation, responsibility, and desire at the heart of any historical effort.

Bio: Christian Whitworth is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art & Art History at Stanford University. He specializes in modern and contemporary art with a focus on experimental film and media studies. He is currently writing a dissertation on postwar French experimental filmmaking and the neo-avant-garde’s aesthetic of aphasia. Prior to his arrival at Stanford, he received a MA in art history from Tufts University and held positions at a variety of art institutions including David Zwirner Gallery, Magnum Photos, and the Cleveland Museum of Art. His writing and criticism have been printed in publications like Millennium Film Journal and Afterimage: The Journal of Media Art and Cultural Criticism.

Passed on as straight: the disappearance of queer women in postwar experimental cinema
Iris Pintiuta

Film criticism has repeatedly passed over the queer women whose artistic and organisational work sustained the New York Underground. From the early works of Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney to the more recent Postwar Queer Underground Cinema, 1950-1968 Yale conference, the history of (queer) American Underground Cinema has been passed onto us as an overwhelmingly cis, white, male practice. While Yale’s queer symposium did acknowledge the “queer aesthetic” of certain women, particularly Barbara Rubin and Marie Menken, it also passed them off as “mostly heterosexual but resolutely anti-heteronormative”, an oversimplification of a confusing and complicated past.

By contrast, this paper examines in detail the queer loves, lives and works of Menken and Rubin, as well as the different modalities of ‘passing’ involved in their marginalisation. Through an analysis of the varied critical responses to Menken and Willard Maas’ relationship, and Rubin and Allen Ginsberg’s, this paper reveals how the queer and feminist strands of criticism still get separated, with many queer scholars passing up on the opportunity to engage with the Underground’s female queerness. Through an exploration of women filmmakers as “curiosities” (Marie Menken’s term), this paper puts forward a more expansive articulation of queerness that challenges the framework that has passed over them in theory, history, and queer canonicity. Using biographical analysis, theoretical works from Jack Halberstam, and existing criticism on Rubin and Menken, this paper points towards a different queer affective register to the one passed down as the Underground canon. Instead of camp, ironic distance, and boredom, it searches for queer rage, intensity, overinvestment, care and disappointment.

In doing so, this paper reveals the problems inherent in queer revisionist projects; advances our understanding of the post-war queer woman; opens up questions about which archives are worth studying; and works towards moving the history of the avant-garde away from its existing (queer) canon.

Bio: Iris Pintiuță obtained her BA in English and Film Studies and MA in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory from King’s College London, specialising in postwar American studies. She is currently writing a monograph on the cultural valences of the word “IT”, from the 1920s IT-Girl to Nike’s Just do IT. Her wider research focuses on queer experimental spaces and practices, especially queer film and video made by women and non-binary folk. She lives in East London where she runs a queer film club.

"Passing (the) Time: On Repetition and Trauma in Black Culture”
Stephen Woo

This paper is inspired by the classic essay “On Repetition in Black Culture” by James Snead. It will reflect upon the visual frequency of black life through issues of trauma , repetitio n, and anticipation. Each of these terms clearly overlap in theoretical formation and representational practice, yet for me they all concern, moreover, what it means for racialized subjects to pass (the) time—to endure it, document it, repeat it, revel in it, and think beyond its tenses—as a function of visual frequency. The goal of this paper is to elaborate the differences and possible applications of each word, specifically as they pertain to cinematic representations of black life. More explicitly, I will organize their distinctions in the following manner: as trauma beyond repetition, repetition beyond trauma, and, finally, anticipation as a praxis that moves or passes beyond repetition and trauma both. The films Lime Kiln Field Day (Biograph, 1913), Ten Minutes to Live (Oscar Micheaux, 1932), America (Garrett Bradley, 2019) will guide my thought process. Revisiting the first two works in their respective periods and juxtaposing them with the contemporary project of Bradley will prompt us to think about what it means for black subjectivity to pass within American (film) history. The collective focus on black intramural life will also allow us to consider what it means for racialized subjects in a climate of antiblackness to pass the time as an exercise of leisure, in the colloquial sense, and as a practice of refusal and subjunctive temporality that employs cinematic repetition to anticipate new futures.

Bio: Stephen Woo is a second year PhD student in the department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He focuses on the intersections and divergences between theories of film, trauma, and performance. He is broadly interested in how conceptions of these fields stake varying claims to notions of history, historicity, and liveness.