Critical Perspective: Film Analysis and Gender

            I want in this paper to focus on the two most important elements of my critical perspective on transgender representation in film: film analysis and gender.  While other elements including discourse, social identity and transgender studies may play important roles, I feel it is most important to clearly develop my positions on film and gender before moving on to other aspects of this project.

Classifying Transgender Characters in the Media

Julia Serano argues in Whipping Girl that the media presents transgender women in one of two ways: as either pathetic or devious.  For pathetic transgender women, Serano offers the example of John Lithgow as Roberta Muldoon in The World According to Garp (1982).  The character is pathetic because it is obvious to the audience and the other characters in the film that Roberta used to be a man.  Devious transgender women surprise the audience with knowledge that they used to be male.  The classic example, of course, is Dil from The Crying Game (1992), played by Jaye Davison, who shocked the audience as much as the characters in the film with the knowledge that she was born male (and was played by a man).  Serano argues that through these representations, the media is only concerned with the ability of transgender women to conform to conventional standards of feminine appearance.  The pathetic transgender is forever incapable of appearing as the women she claims to be while the devious transgender is pretending to be something she’s not and hiding the truth of her identity from the world.  This concern can also be seen in the interest in showing transgender women in the process of dressing and getting ready for the day in news reports, even if the report isn’t about the woman’s transgender identity but on her actions, activism for example.

While the pressure on transgender women to conform to traditional notions of feminine beauty is important, Some Like it Hot reveals another layer to the reception of transgender women by the audience.  Look at the following picture of the main characters from the film:

It might be difficult to classify them as devious transgender individuals but it also doesn’t seem quite fair to label them pathetic either.  The reason we would be inclined to label the characters pathetic is because we already know that they are played by male actors.  We know going in that the film features crossdressing and if we know that the characters are played by Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis, we may even be able to recognize them.  Most people believe that they would know that someone was transgender; they would be able to pick up on physical and behavioral cues that would reveal the true sex of the individual.  Even the labels “pathetic” and “devious” are based on the belief that we would recognize a transgender person if we saw her/him.  Pathetic transgender individuals can never hope to appear as the gender they feel they are so they are the objects of disgust and ridicule while devious transgender individuals are the objects of hatred and anger because they dared to deceive us for a short time before their true nature could be revealed.  J. Dan Rothwell terms this situation “hindsight bias.” the belief that you already knew something after the answer has been revealed; once you’ve been told that another person is transgender, it’s easy to claim that you always knew.  So film audiences can laugh at or be shocked by transgender characters because of the ability of the audience to recognize the character as transgender.  Marilyn Monroe even expressed this objection after being cast in the role of Sugar Kane.  “Monroe vehemently objected to playing a showgirl so stupid that ‘she can’t tell that the two women she is becoming friends within are men in drag’” (Phillips 213).  Not being able to tell wasn’t a testament to the skill of Lemmon and Curtis’ impersonation but an assault on Monroe’s intelligence.  Since she already knew the characters were being played by Lemmon and Curtis, she didn’t see how she could have ever not knew they were being played by men.

Serano’s argument about media portrayals of transgender individuals is apt but she throws a whole group of transgender women under the bus while making it.  While arguing against the portrayal of transgender women in the media, she states that not all transgender women fit the traditional feminine beauty standards (or would even want to).

That’s why it’s so frustrating that people often seem confused because, although I have transitioned to female and live as a woman, I rarely wear makeup or dress in an overly feminine manner. (34)

But she then goes on to attack those transgender women who do.

While there are certainly some trans women who buy into the mainstream dogma about beauty and femininity, others are outspoken feminists and activists fighting against all gender stereotypes. (34)

Because, of course, feminist and being feminine are mutually exclusive identities!  As a transgender woman who chooses to, and enjoys, wear makeup, dresses and high heels, I am bothered by the constant valorization of non-feminine women while attacking feminine women.  Serano commits the mistake she criticizes in other places in the book by arguing that more masculine ways of dressing and acting are better than feminine ways.  I will agree that being feminine is more than just the trappings of clothes and hairstyles but both feminist and transgender women need to stop attacking their sisters because they choose to wear skirts and heels.  We’re not all just being brainwashed by the dominant ideology.  If femininity really encompasses a wide range of actions and styles of dress, then we need to find a way to build up and support all the varied expressions of femininity without tearing down those women who choose to dress more traditionally feminine.

Works Cited

Phillips, Gene D. Some Like it Wilder: The Life and Controversial Films of Billy Wilder. Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2010.

Rothwell, J. Dan. In Mixed Company: Communicating in Small Groups and Teams. 4th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2010.   

Serano, Julia. Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2007.

Some Like it Hot in the Context of the 1950s

           What do you think of when you think of 1950s America?  Mom and apple pie.  Baseball.  Guys with greased-back hair and girls wearing poodle skirts.  Women wearing pearls while doing housework.  Men coming home from work to their houses in the suburbs where their wives wait with martini in hand.  Donna Reed.  June Cleaver.  Or maybe the atomic bomb.  Cold War.  Red Scare.  McCarthyism. 

            These elements and many others work together to create our nostalgic view of the 1950s.  When modern commentators call for a return to traditional American values, this is the period of time they are mostly referring to.  So a film like Some Like it Hot, released in 1959 (IMDB), that does not seem to fit in the narrative of the era, is seen as an anachronism, something that would have shocked audiences at the time.  But was it really that shocking? 

            An analysis of context will help reveal the place of Some Like it Hot in the social culture of the 1950s.  First, I will examine the realities of gender in comparison with the “perfect housewife” image that is popular in the media and nostalgic memory.  Second, I will place the film within a tradition of transgender performance.  Finally, I will end with an examination of the realities of transgender life during the 1950s.  This analysis will reveal that the film would not have been as shocking to a contemporary audience as common wisdom would perceive it to be.

Thoughts on Denotation and Connotation

The difficulty with denotation is that it is built on the assumption that there is a shared meaning or interpretation between individuals.  We all know what the word "car" means but I'm sure the mental image everyone reading that word had will be different.  So even after we've agreed on a definition, how we interpret that word, what we think of, will differ.  This is what Finnegan means when she talks about the "fiction of denotation" (119), the idea that there can be an agreed upon meaning for an image or text.

Denotation is even harder now because you can't assume that people are going to share similar experiences or exposure to particular texts.  McGee laments this change from a discourse of "totalizations," in which "all discourse within a particular language community was produced from the same resources" (284), to a more heterogeneous discourse, in which "there is no longer a homogeneous body of knowledge that constitutes the common education of everyone" (286).  Today you can no longer say "The Gettysburg Address," or "the Constitution" in the case of the Tea Party, and just assume that everyone is going to know what you are talking about.

While McGee laments this transition from a homogeneous to a heterogeneous discourse, I believe that it is a positive change that gives voice to a wider range of people, but it does make the job of the critic more difficult.  Because the critic can no longer assume that his/her audience shares knowledge of or an interpretation of a text, the critic must now make more use of description in his/her analysis.  This is why Ehrenhaus employs an extended description of Mellish's death in Saving Private Ryan; he cannot assume that his audience has even seen the film or that they would have interpreted the scene in the same way.  Pointing out the SS badge on the Nazi soldier's collar as evidence of his reading of the film as basing the moral justification for the war in the Holocaust is connotative; many other people could see the same scene and not read it in that way.  The description is essential to his argument because just saying "the scene of Mellish's death at the hands of an SS soldier illustrates my point about the Holocaust as justification for the war" would have assumed that the reader of the essay would have seen the film, would have remembered that scene in sufficient detail and/or would have interpreted the scene in the same way.  The level of description allows the reader to decide if he/she agrees with Ehrenhaus' argument.

Works Cited
Ehrenhaus, Peter. "Why We Fought: Holocaust Memory in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan." Critical Studies in Media Communication 18.3 (2001): 321-337.

Finnegan, Cara A. "What is This a Picture of?: Some Thoughts on Images and Archives." Rhetoric & Public Affairs 9.1 (2006): 116-123.

McGee, Michael C. "Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture." Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 275-289.

Fannie Lou Hamer's Testimony Before the DNC Credentials Committee

Fannie Lou Hamer spoke to the Credentials Committee of the DNC on August 22, 1964 in order to secure speaking rights at the convention for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.  Hamer makes two main arguments in her speech: (1) registering to vote is a sign of being a first-class citizen in America and (2) those in power, White Americans, use force to restrict Black Americans right to be first-class citizens.  She makes use of extended personal examples, being forced off the land she worked as a sharecropper and being arrested and beaten by police after attending a voter registration workshop, to demonstrate the extremes White Americans would go to in order to prevent Black Americans from being first-class citizens.  She also makes reference to other examples of violence against Blacks, two girls being shot in Ruleville, Mississippi, the murder of Medgar Evers, etc., to demonstrate that this is not just her personal hardship but the reality of life for Black Americans in the South.  All of these examples work to show how the voices of Black Americans have been silenced by force and connects this direct and violent use of force to the DNC not giving Black voters a voice at the convention.  "All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America."

Crossdressing Cinema

My final project for this course will be part of my larger dissertation project.  For this project, I am examining the representation of transgender people in film.  This project will consist of not only close textual analysis of relevant films but also an examination of film as part of the larger discourse that shapes how transgender individuals are perceived by society.

Since this project is too large to complete in one seminar, I will be focusing on the way transgender people are presented as farce.  Presenting transgender identity and performance as an object of ridicule or as a less than serious decision is one of the many ways transgender identity is deligitimized in film.  Representative films include Some Like it Hot, Tootsie and Mrs. Doubtfire.

Purpose of this Blog

The purpose of this blog is to allow me a space to try out and work through the concepts we will be exploring in this course and how they apply to my research interests.  I want to develop my own take on and understanding of, my "frame," the rhetorical criticism concepts in this course, moving beyond just a basic knowledge of the concepts to a more in depth understanding of how these concepts will be useful in my research in film and visual media.  The title of this blog also refers to my research interests, the "frame" of film and visual media.