Eliza Steinbock

Eliza 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.

Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change

Shimmering Images

Marianna Szczygielska

Anthony Clair Wagner

Tranimacies is a neologism that pushes and pulls together transness and animality so as to better germinate unruly, wily, perverse relationships between them, and their spawn. Through tranimacies the book aims at rethinking the linking of liberation struggles amongst former colonized peoples and lands, minoritized genders and sexualities, racially marked persons and non-human animals, and does so in a variety of geopolitical and temporal sites. This rich compendium includes original scholarship and dialogues as well as poetry, comix, bioart, and performance documentation. The composite term of tranimacies enmeshes several everyday and scholarly concepts: transgender, animal, animacy, intimacies. This edited volume’s bundle of theoretical and artistic works insists on the beating heart of embodied experiences and political pulses at the core of these concepts. The authors show that tranimacies are spread throughout what Mel Y. Chen describes as the "animacy hierarchies" that delimit zones of possibility and agency, confounding the vertical order with transversal movements. As an intervention into the burgeoning debates within and across trans, animal, critical race, and posthuman studies this publication seeks to destabilize the logic of "turns" in critical theory, and through sticky intimacies uncover how animality, race, and gender underscore the humanist production of meanings. By taking a decolonial approach (in the main, but not exclusively) the authors hope to shift debates in animal studies towards accounting for and delinking from colonial mentalities. Three poems interweave our selection of chapters, which together forge three lines of inquiry defined by a certain ethos: transhistories of the present, lessons from the bestiary, and #animatingephemera. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Intimate Links Between Animal and Trans* Studies

Tranimacies

In Shimmering Images Eliza Steinbock traces how cinema offers alternative ways to understand gender transitions through a specific aesthetics of change. Drawing on Barthes's idea of the “shimmer” and Foucault's notion of sex as a mirage, the author shows how sex and gender can appear mirage-like on film, an effect they label shimmering. Steinbock applies the concept of shimmering—which delineates change in its emergent form as well as the qualities of transforming bodies, images, and affects—to analyses of films that span time and genre. These include examinations of the fantastic and phantasmagorical shimmerings of sex change in Georges Méliès's nineteenth-century trick films and Lili Elbe's 1931 autobiographical writings and photomontage in Man into Woman. Steinbock also explores more recent documentaries, science fiction, and pornographic and experimental films. Presenting a cinematic philosophy of transgender embodiment that demonstrates how shimmering images mediate transitioning, Steinbock not only offers a corrective to the gender binary orientation of feminist film theory; they open up new means to understand trans ontologies and epistemologies as emergent, affective, and processual.

Marijke de Valck

Bram Ieven

This book examines how renewed forms of artistic activism were developed in the wake of the neoliberal repression since the 1980s. The volume shows the diverse ways in which artists have sought to confront systemic crises around the globe, searching for new and enduring forms of building communities and reimagining the political horizon. The authors engage in a dialogue with these artistic efforts and their histories – in particular the earlier artistic activism that was developed during the civil rights era in the 1960s and 70s – providing valuable historical insight and new conceptual reflection on the future of aesthetic resilience. This book will be of interest to scholars in contemporary art, history of art, film and literary studies, protest movements, and social movements.

Eliza Steinbock

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