What I remember most vividly about my first semester as an Assistant Professor at Baruch College, City University of New York was the time the dean interviewed me in a “closet” as a part of his pet media project—a video podcast with college faculty. After multiple attempts on my part to dodge requests from the dean’s office to schedule the interview, I finally relented, taking a rush-hour train from Queens into Manhattan on a crisp fall morning.

Inside the college building on Lexington Avenue, I signed the image release form, which conspicuously misgendered my name, and then followed the dean down an unfamiliar hall into an even more unfamiliar room. The door locked behind us. Suddenly I was alone with the dean in a utility-cum-video recording room—in one corner janitorial supplies, in the other a desk with a computer, a microphone, and two chairs. The dean began the filmed interview with questions about my research in Asian/American media and popular culture; this continued for roughly twenty minutes when he abruptly pivoted to questions about trans representational issues, an area in which I also teach and do research. Repeatedly conflating gender with sexuality, he then unexpectedly shared a curious anecdote about a recent visit he had made to CIA headquarters, where, in 2017, a trans woman promoted to a senior position within the agency addressed her trans identity publicly. What progress! What did I think about that? the dean inquired. With that, the podcast became a scene of interrogation—one in which my existence as a trans woman employed by the college was sutured to the college’s neoliberal diversity and equity agenda.

A few weeks later, after some investigating of my own, I learned that the college had entered into a memorandum of understanding with the CIA that turned the student body, one of the most racially and linguistically diverse anywhere in the U.S., into a hunting ground for CIA recruitment and training. Buried in the language of the MOU, which outlined the “Signature Program,” was a line about the desire to increase diversity, inclusion, and representation in the agency, both for “underrepresented” racial groups and gender and sexual minorities.

For me, my interview with the dean as a new Assistant Professor serves as a stark reminder of how I cannot separate my lived experience as a trans person from the everyday violence of institutional life and subjection. In a moment when trans media—media by and/or about trans people—is au courant and institutional “trans-friendly” virtue signaling is peaking, my experience of the dean’s video interrogation underscores the frequently troubling nature of trans media representation. That is, control over my own trans body and image, valuable to the college as a way to tout diversity and draw students to the classroom, was wrested away from me by my employer. To what ends, I ask, are images of trans people, and those most intersectionally precarious, being used by academic and other powerful institutions?

Consciously or not, anyone who uses trans media in the classroom engages a struggle over trans representation. As colleges and universities offer more courses in trans studies, and media instructors seize upon the trendiness of trans discourse (see, for instance, the recent documentaries Disclosure [Sam Feder, 2020] and Visible: Out on Television [Ryan White, 2020]), it is crucial to remember that trans bodies, especially those of BIPOC trans people, are subjected to near constant epistemic, interpersonal, and state violence. In my teaching practice, I am clear about the relationship between state violence and the possibilities for trans survival, informed by my own understanding of how much my existence as a trans woman of color is indebted to Black, Indigenous, and other racialized people—transcestors—who have long been engaged in struggles against the state. Regardless of an instructor’s own social position or gender identity, how then can an instructor develop a trans media pedagogy that is not only anti-racist but also rooted in decolonial and anti-imperialist struggles against the very institutions that have excluded us and destroyed our communities but that are now increasingly eager to claim us? In what follows, I first describe my conceptual framework for teaching trans media and then focus on the trans media texts I assign to facilitate discussion about trans lives and struggles across U.S. empire.

My general approach to teaching with trans media has been to adopt a place-based pedagogy that both examines trans media texts in relation to local BIPOC trans history and attempts to bridge trans freedom struggles across geographical locations. This approach decenters trans media as primarily emanating from “above,” in Hollywood film and TV, and instead situates trans media history in relation to students’ and the institution’s local communities and geographies. In terms of course design and classroom discussion, I aim to build toward a “thick” media discourse that both explores the tensions between trans representation and self-representation and traverses media cultures and markets, from independently-produced media to popular film and television. I ground my trans media pedagogy in comparative ethnic studies scholarship on radical relationality, in particular the concept of conquest.[1] Black, Indigenous, and other racialized trans people, all highly oppressed subjects within the U.S. colonial order, would appear, as they are portrayed in U.S. media, to have little to do with one another, a reflection of what Tiffany Lethabo King describes in her work as “colonial unknowing.”[2] Given how media structures social relations and thus “unknowing,” I deploy attention to conquest as an underlying pedagogical method to demonstrate how media is part of the “conquest in everyday life.”[3]

One of the first courses I taught as an Assistant Professor was an upper-division course that centered queer and trans criticism and media largely by and about BIPOC queer and trans writers and cultural producers. In the first week of class, we screened Jennie Livingston’s Paris is Burning (1993), a queer/trans media classic that I invited my students to engage with as an archive of NYC queer and trans history.[4] Utilizing critical scholarship on the film by critics like bell hooks, I led discussion by asking whether the film’s subjects appear to valorize the capitalist system that excludes and exploits them, thereby engaging students in a rich discussion about survival strategies for BIPOC queer and trans people.[5] I began with Paris is Burning largely as a primer for discussions I hoped would follow later in the semester about BIPOC queer and trans people surviving in the shadows of U.S. empire. After Paris is Burning, I screened Major! (Annalise Ophelian, 2015), a powerful documentary about Miss Major Griffin, founder of the TGIJP (Transgender Gender-Variant Intersex Justice Program).[6] In both texts, the films’ resilient trans subjects, clearly discarded by the capitalist state and oppressed by race, gender, and sexuality, dare to take up space and assert “We’re still here!”—testimony underscoring the afterlife of slavery and conquest.

Next, I assigned Janet Mock’s coming-of-age trans memoir Redefining Realness: My Path To Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, which details Mock’s life as a young person growing up between the U.S. and Hawaiʻi.[7] Whereas Paris is Burning records trans history of the ballrooms in Harlem and streets of NYC at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis, Redefining Realness introduced my students to the realities of working-class Honolulu. In the memoir, Mock, who along with Laverne Cox is a leading transgender advocate and Black trans media producer, explores what it means, in C. Riley Snorton’s terms, to be “black on both sides,” that is “attempt[ing] to find a vocabulary for black and trans life.”[8] During discussion, I challenged my students to account for Mock as both Black and Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian), to understand not only the memoir’s exploration of mixed-race identity but also how it makes apparent the structuring force of anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity across U.S. empire. In Redefining Realness, Mock addresses colonialism in Hawaiʻi and glosses the illegal overthrow of the once-sovereign Hawaiian kingdom by American capitalists in the nineteenth century.[9] To give my students even greater context and introduce them to Kanaka decolonial activism, I assigned widely available video clips of Haunani-Kay Trask discussing the ongoing trauma of U.S. militarism, environmental degradation, tourism, and settler colonialism in the islands that has led to staggering rates of homelessness, substance abuse, mental health issues, and incarceration of Native Hawaiians.[10]

Janet Mock, author of Redefining Realness, reads from her book at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in D.C., 2014
Janet Mock, author of Redefining Realness, reads from her book at the Martin Luther King Jr. Library in D.C., 2014

The relationship between U.S. imperialism and anti-trans violence became clearer when I later screened what I colloquially refer to as māhū media—independent Hawaiʻi-based media about māhū, the Native Hawaiian conception of queer/trans embodiment. I used the documentary films Kumu Hina (Dean Hamer and Joe Wilson, 2014) and Ke Kūlana He Māhū: Remembering a Sense of Place (Brent Anbe and Kathryn Xian, 2001), both of which highlight colonial trauma in Hawaiʻi and the Kanaka gender-variant paradigms that predate the arrival of Western colonizers to the islands. Kumu Hina presents a snapshot of Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, a māhū wahine (trans woman) Kanaka cultural practitioner and leading community figure fighting for the rights and dignity of Native Hawaiians in Hawaiʻi.[11] My students found Hina fierce and inspiring for the ways she “lives her truth” and so forcefully articulates a vision for Hawaiian cultural sovereignty and the undoing of U.S. imperialist legacies in Hawaiʻi. Meanwhile, Ke Kūlana He Māhū demonstrates the profound ways that U.S. colonialism and the violence of Western Judeo-Christian gender and sexual norms have alienated māhū in contemporary Hawaiʻi.[12] In response to these trans media texts, I asked my students to think about the ways that race and racism function as necessary “conditions” for U.S. colonialism and imperialism, as well as for the racialized nature of the gender binary, a construct at the heart of the U.S. colonial project. The students’ spirited responses to the māhū media we screened immediately demonstrated an increased awareness of the relationship between racialized compulsory gender norms and U.S. colonialism. For their final research papers, my students drew upon all of the BIPOC trans media texts in the course as a way to understand communities in struggle against the state and to bridge the “internal colonies” on the U.S. continent with U.S. overseas colonies like Hawaiʻi.

Kumu Hina performs a hula at a TEDxMaui event in 2014
Kumu Hina performs a hula at a TEDxMaui event in 2014

Over the years, I have adapted my trans media pedagogy to suit various teaching contexts and courses, yet each time with the goal of demonstrating that media is both part of the “conquest of everyday life” and a powerful tool that connects trans freedom struggles. When I taught an introductory composition course emphasizing writing grounded in community struggle, I had my students read Mock’s memoir and then dedicated multiple class sessions to Mock’s infamous two-part interview-interrogation on CNN’s Piers Morgan Live (2011-2014), in which Morgan—a white, cis man—insisted on contradicting and dictating the terms of Mock’s story of trans becoming.[13] The segment, ripe for critical media analysis of corporate news rhetoric, clearly demonstrates the epistemic violence that regularly greets trans women, especially trans women of color, and more generally the struggle for BIPOC women to “author” themselves. After my students wrote their own personal essays about identity and community, we screened the first few episodes of Pose (FX, 2018–2021), a fictionalized TV version of Paris is Burning co-executive produced by Janet Mock.[14] When written, produced, and performed by trans women, popular depictions of trans bodies oppressed by and struggling against the state can be revolutionary, educating audiences about trans history while also entertaining them.[15]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, which has been particularly devastating for Black and Indigenous people, including Indigenous Pacific Islanders, I have returned to Oʻahu to teach at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. When I next teach Black trans media, it will be within a framework of a decolonizing Pacific that grapples with and theorizes anti-blackness in the Hawaiian kingdom.[16] In the future, I also plan to incorporate anti-imperialist and decolonial trans media from other locations in the shadows of U.S. empire such as Call Her Ganda (PJ Raval, 2018).[17] Ultimately, I want my students to grasp both the U.S. media’s role in the “conquest of everyday life” as well the possibilities for trans media in which BIPOC trans people are not fighting for mere inclusion or “better” representation within inherently violent institutions, such as the CIA, U.S. military, and Wall Street, but rather liberation from all institutions and forms of oppression that sustain U.S. empire.

Author Bio

Danielle Seid is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she teaches a range of courses in film and media studies. Her teaching interests include queer and trans media, race and American cinema, U.S. television history, and East Asian cinema.

Endnotes

    1. Tiffany Lethabo King, “New World Grammars: The ‘Unthought’ Black Discourses of Conquest,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016), muse.jhu.edu/article/633275. ↑

    2. King, “New World.” ↑

    3. King, “New World.” ↑

    4. Paris is Burning, directed by Jennie Livingston (1990; New York: Criterion Collection, 2020), DVD. ↑

    5. bell hooks, “Is Paris Burning?” Black Looks (New York: Routledge, 2015), 157–168. ↑

    6. Annalise Ophelian, Major! (2015; Annalise Ophelian Production), https://www.amazon.com/Major-Miss-Griffin-Gracy/dp/B079H7TSVN. ↑

    7. Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More (New York: Atria Books, 2014). ↑

    8. C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017). ↑

    9. Mock, Redefining, 88. ↑

    10. Noʻeau Woo-OʻBrien, “HKT on the origins of the Kanaka Māoli,” YouTube Video, 4:40, December 7, 2019, https://youtu.be/xT_0WkV9ONI. ↑

    11. Joe Wilson and Dean Hamer, Kumu Hina. (2014; Independent Lens, 2015), https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/documentaries/kumu-hina/. ↑

    12. Kathryn Xian and Brent Anbe, Ke Kūlana He Māhū: Remembering a Sense of Place (2001; Zang Pictures), https://kathrynxian.gumroad.com/l/kekulana. ↑

    13. “Janet Mock rejoins Piers Morgan,” YouTube Video, 16:27, February 5, 2014, https://youtu.be/0F8WiuxYoE4. ↑

    14. Pose, season 1, episode 1, “Pilot,” directed by Ryan Murphy, written by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuck and Steven Canals, aired June 3, 2018, on FX. ↑

    15. Danielle Seid, “Television is Burning: Revolutionary Queer and Trans Representation on TV,” Flow 26, no. 1 (September 2019), http://www.flowjournal.org/tag/trans-representation/. ↑

    16. Joy Enomoto, “Where will you be? Why Black Lives Matter in the Hawaiian Kingdom,” Ke Kaupu He Hehiale (blog), February 1, 2017, https://hehiale.com/2017/02/01/where-will-you-be-why-black-lives-matter-in-the-hawaiian-kingdom/. ↑

    17. PJ Raval, Call Her Ganda (2018; Unraval Pictures), https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/detail/B07JFGMVJ8/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r. ↑