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Laura Horak: Welcome everyone, and thank you for coming.

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I'm Laura Horak an Associate Professor of Film Studies at Carleton University, and director of the Transgender Media Lab, and the Transgender Media Portal.

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Film Studies at Carleton and the Transgender Media Lab are so thrilled that we're able to host a live virtual talk with Cáel Keegan.

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And I also want to let the Carleton folks here know about another Cáel Keegan event happening. Let me put the link in the chat.

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We're going to have, I think Carleton's first live in-person film screening of the documentary Disclosure, and that will include some commentary by Cáel and me and the film's director Sam Feder.

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And it is my pleasure to introduce one of the members of the Transgender Media, Lab Kit Chokly, who will give a land acknowledgments explain our anti-harassment policy and introduce Dr. Keegan. Kit take it away!

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Thank you so much, Laura and Hi everyone, as Laura said, my name is Kit Chokly, I'm a Master's student in Communication here at Carleton, a member of the Transgender Media Lab, and a research assistant and user interface designer for the Transgender Media Portal and like Laura, I want to thank you all so much for being here. And I do want to start us off by recognizing my own location, as well as the location of the Transgender Media Lab, and Carleton University on the traditional unceded territories

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of the Algonquin Anishanaabeg Nation.

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And while this land is where I'm physically located, I'm also thinking about the infrastructure that  enables us all to be here today, together, virtually.

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The internet is a bit more than a series of tubes, but it does have a material and environmental impact on the indigenous land that it spans in the form of cables and data centers.

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So speaking as a white settler working in an institutional space, our presence here upholds colonialism and it reproduces violence against indigenous people, and a land acknowledgement doesn't remedy this dispossession and violence.

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But I do hope that it can serve as a commitment to learning about and working towards upholding the conditions, the treaties that govern this land. So if you're a settler, I also encourage you to learn a little bit more about the land that you occupy,

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and one resource that I found really helpful to get started is nativeland.ca, which is the first link that I've added to the chat.

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And next, I want to underline the Transgender Media Labs commitment to providing a harassment free online experience for people who attend our events.

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And so, due to the size of this event. We've opted to turn off the chat during Dr. Keegan’s talk, and we'll open it back up for question period afterwards.

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You'll see that you can still contact the host through the chats private messaging feature.

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If you're being harassed, if you notice that someone else is been harassed or you have any other concerns during this event, please do contact myself or Laura, using the chat, and we will do our best to address the issue.

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More information on our anti-harassment policy can be found in the second link that I add to the chat.

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You'll also see the option to view live transcript in the zoom toolbar, please do feel free to use this feature to turn on and off auto generated captions and a full transcript.

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Okay. Now on to the main event. So Cáel M. Keegan is a Fulbright Canada Distinguished Research Chair of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton University, and he is also the Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Grand Valley State

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University in Michigan.

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His research analyzes queer and transgender media representation, aesthetic figuration, and cultural production.

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And I first came across Cáel’s work last summer and it was a game changer for me, and my own research on trans media, so it was my absolute delight, when Laura told me that Cáel would be coming Ottawa a a 2021-22 Fulbright Research Chair at Carleton. And Cáel

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has also been working with us at the Transgender Media Lab this year and I'm confident in speaking for the rest of the team, by saying that he's not only offered significant contributions to the work that we do.

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but he's also just a joy to be around.

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And none of this should come as any surprise. If you've had the pleasure of working with Cáel or reading any of his prolific work. And when I do say prolific, I'm not exaggerating.

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In addition to this fantastic book on the Wachowski sisters, Cáel has co-edited Somatechnics 8.1, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies in Focus Dossier, titled Transing Cinema and Media Studies.

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His writing has appeared in Genders, Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Media Kultur, The Journal of Homosexuality, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film Quarterly and Flow.

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He also serves as a special editor for arts and culture at Transgender Studies Quarterly.

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And in this work Cáel has developed formative concepts of trans media studies like trans phenomenology, sensing transgender, and as we will see, questioning the notion of good and bad trans representation.

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Cáel has also written a series of essays on the overlaps and differences between Transgender Studies and Queer Studies, that have been incredibly formative for me as a junior scholar entering the field.

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And to top it all off, Cáel’s book, Lana and Lily Wachowski: Sensing Transgender is the first academic analysis of the Wachowski the sisters as the world's most influential transgender media producers.

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Susan Stryker, founding editor of Transgender Studies Quarterly has described it as a significant contribution to both fields of Cinema Studies and Trans Studies. And Jack Halberstam, author of Trans: A Quick and Quirky Guide to Gender Variability, calls

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the book a revelation, and to quote Halberstam, “Keegan gives a masterful account of the Wachowski’s world, and drops his readers down a rabbit hole trans altered reality.

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Bon voyage.”

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And it's with these well wishes that I leave us in Cáel’s brilliant hands as he takes us on a journey through bad trans objects.  Over to you Cáel.

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Wow, thank you for that introduction Laura and Kit. And let me say it's been an absolute pleasure working with you, the Transgender Media Lab this semester and year, and I want to thank everyone for attending this event tonight.

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I'm actually currently visiting my partner in Michigan, so I'm actually currently on the unceded territorial lands of the Three Fires Council tonight.

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So I just thought I'd mentioned that.

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So I'm going to do that thing where I say “I'm going to share my screen, Can you see my screen? And I'm going to ask if you can.” If I can get some thumbs up from some folks, that you can see my slides.

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Perfect. Thank you.

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Yeah. Thanks so much to the Transgender Media Lab as well as Carleton University Film Studies for inviting me to share some of my work that I've been conducting during this Research Chair period.

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The title of my talk tonight is named after my new book project, which is called Bad Trans Objects.

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This work expands on some of the questions raised by my first book on the cinema of the Wachowski sisters, which Kit just mentioned. In that project I offered new non-representational methods for analyzing trans aesthetics

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in popular cinema while investigating the relationship between digital cinematic processes and trans identities.

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And this new project, Bad Trans Objects, builds on this past work by assessing the current state of representational trans media, while also intervening in the assimilative direction of transgender identity politics.

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So, what I hope to do tonight is begin my talk explaining some of my motivations for this research.

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I'll give a sort of second act where I present some of it for you that's drafted, and then toward the end I'd be very excited to hear thoughts and questions or just chat with you folks about your ideas.

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So the first thing I wanted to do is introduce kind of the overarching issues that are driving this project, as I've been working through kind of the historical and political changes that we're seeing in the US where I'm based as a scholar, but also, you

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know globally.

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I've noticed a couple of things that seem troubling.

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The first of which is that ,as our understanding of gender has expanded to, at least nominally, include transgender identities.

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There's been a sort of recalcitrant movement to recodify and actually further solidify the sex binary through medical and legal processes. So, you can see this, a couple of examples would be the Trump memo that leaked in 2017 proposing that the

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concept of gender be gotten rid of and replaced with genetic testing on people's documents. Quebec’s Bill 2 that would add sex designations onto ID, even though people can change their gender marker they'd get a secondary sex marker anyway. As well as

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recent laws in the US and Europe, that we're seeing, that are seeking to ban medical access to transition for youth particularly.

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So this is bad for trans politics and trans justice movements, but it's also bad for lots of different groups (women, racialized populations, indigenous peoples, intersex people, people with disabilities).

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It's really concerning to see this effort to kind of re-codify an unscientific sex binary in law, as a response to the loosening of gender.

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So that's one thing I'm thinking about. Secondarily,

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We also see that there's this proliferation of what we might call “good” transgender representation in the media.

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If you look at GLAAD’s numbers, the number of representations of trans identities and scripted television and film has more than quadrupled since 2015.

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However, um, we don't see necessarily that turning into a ton of cultural and social support for trans people. What we actually see as kind of a backlash to that in a lot of ways.

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Generally speaking, we assume that more and better representation means improved social treatment for lots of . That does not seem to be the case for trans people, at least for all trans people.

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And this sort of seems like a paradox and I'm curious whether the recent wave of trans representation you're seeing is actually a driver of trans antagonism, and if so, what role emerging norms for trans media representation might play in the

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backlash. Like is it just about the quantity of representation, or is it about the aesthetic presentation of transgender in those images that is maybe related to the social changes worsening.

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Um, so these two problems for me,

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are lived through the experience of feeling bad as a trans person and I have to give a nod to recent book by Hil Malatino on this issue as well.

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Our cultural landscape makes me feel bad about myself about my body as an object and about our likely political future.

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The limited scope and aesthetics of the media texts that are supposed to make me feel better through “good” transgender representation, often cannot even address the forces that make me feel this way or the bad feelings I carry around.

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Since I feel bad and nothing seems to be getting better.

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I got curious about how to live with my badness. I wanted to understand what the state of badness, actually is, what it means to be a bad trans object.

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And when I reach an impasse like this, I often look to etymology to parse that confusion. And so I simply went to the Oxford English Dictionary and looked up the word “bad.”

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And if you it's a very old word on, if you look at the history.

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I'm concerned about the adjectival form particularly of this word which works through negation, right, so in English speaking contexts “bad” is just what is it whatever isn't considered “good”, right.

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Um, but if we look at the roots of the word.

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It has a proposed etymology linking to the word bǣddel which means hermaphroditic.

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So you can imagine my, you know, confirmed suspicions about badness when I found this and was like, “oh so when we're talking about badness, we're talking about sex and gender in some kind of very fundamental way right?” about objects that don't fit within

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sort of modern sex and gender systems possibly.

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So, this potential, etymological history for the term “bad” forced me to reconsider badness as a source of value, a way to indicate the presence of something outside of or unclassifiable within the established categories we use to make meaning. If

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“good” objects fit neatly within sex and gender binaries then “bad” objects do not.

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Instead, bad objects gesture at the existence of possibilities, beyond deterministic binary categorization.

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This new understanding prompted me to wonder if badness is actually a trans property, a way of demonstrating how to cross seemingly uncrossable boundaries.

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In that case being bad would actually be useful to trans liberation, while being “good” would limit the scope of our politics.

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And so, I developed this project to rediscover and revalue trans badness.

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As an interdisciplinary scholar I look to the relationship between identity and media to understand how trans goodness and badness are being constructed.

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My title for this project, Bad Trans Objects, therefore has two simultaneous meetings

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‘Bad Trans Objects’ names how under our current assimilation is politics, it is the “bad” trans killjoy who objects to the limits of trans inclusion and insists on more deconstructive frameworks.

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In this case, the “bad” trans person behaves “badly” by rejecting the shallowness of inclusion discourses and asserting the need for a more radical abolitionist politics.

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“Bad Trans Objects” also points toward an archive of lost, forgotten, or cancelled “bad” media texts that might be reclaimed to inspire and build this politics.

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The second reading of the title asks us to think critically about how and why objects are labeled as “bad” re-examining social and institutional practices that have pushed a range of more challenging confrontational trans media objects out of use.

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And so, in place of popular discourses that increasingly demand “good” trans identities and representations. This project suggests a turn toward the idea of bad trans objects as a source of transformative energy through which we might build and enact a

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politics beyond the sex binary. In this talk, I will introduce you to some of this project by offering an initial case study in trans badness, explaining my intervention into “good” versus “bad” trans media representations, and then demonstrating how that intervention

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works to revalue a “bad” trans object.

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And as I moved from the first section to the last. I'll be implementing what Eve Sedgewick called a “beside” method common in queer studies, in which seemingly unlike objects are pushed up against one another to reveal unanticipated meaning.

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So I'll begin with the first section and I just want to give a brief content warning for a mention of self-harm coming up in about two minutes.

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At the 1973, Christopher Street Liberation Day march commemorating the third anniversary of the Stonewall Rebellion. Sylvia Rivera, (who had been a principal instigator of the riots), found herself fighting to get on stage.

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She had been designated a scheduled time to speak during the event, but her participation was objected to by a group of lesbian activists who felt that the drag queens in attendance were mocking women. Rivera, vociferously insisted on speaking, physically

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pushing her way past emcee Vito Russo onto the stage.

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Once there, she delivered what has come to be known as “Y'all better quiet down” a four-and-a-half-minute long manifesto, in which she described the work her activist group, STAR, was doing for the homeless, and incarcerated trans populations in New York

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City.

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In the speech Rivera drew sharp contrast between STAR’s focus on direct action, and the passivity of the largely white, middle-class, gay, and lesbian crowd, many of which proceeded to loudly boo her. Rivera ended the speech by desperately screaming “Revolution 

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now! Gay power!” and dropping the mic off the apron of the stage.

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Later that night, Marsha P. Johnson would find her in a pool of her own blood after slicing open her arm and STAR would disband later that year.

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We know about Rivera’s speech, because it was anonymously filmed as part of a much longer set of reels capturing the 1973 event. At least two physical film recordings of the speech exist, one in the Vito Russo collection of the New York Public Library, and

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one in the LoveTapes collection at the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

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While various portions of these films have appeared in earlier gay history documentaries and TV programs. It was not until 2012 - when trans filmmaker and activists Tourmaline posted a digitized version of the Lesbian Herstory Archives copy on Vimeo-

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that Rivera’s speech was rehistoricized in the context of transgender politics. What had been framed in prior media as an example of the historical debate over drag was signified by transgender internet users as a critique of the trans exclusionary

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politics of the early gay rights movement. Over a five-year period between 2012 and 2017, the video, became a viral key reference point in the core distinctions emerging between transgender politics and the increasingly cisnormative focus of gay and

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lesbian rights, particularly in this period around, sort of the drive toward marriage equality in the US context.

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Then, suddenly in April 2017, the digital file was removed from Vimeo due to “copyright issues.”

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Toumaline tweeted publicly about the deletion prompting a complex discussion of authorship rights and the inaccessibility of archival materials to transgender people, especially trans people of color, whose historical images are often controlled by

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white and cisgender institutions. And, you know, I clipped out a few of the responses to tourmaline’s tweet here just to give you a sense of the, the sort of structure of the argument, or kind of debate over whether this was a good thing or a bad thing

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for this video to be taken down.

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We can see trans of color activists and scholars like micha cárdenas and Che Gossett, kind of really questioning whether this material should be privatized.

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And then we see a well-known white cisgender filmmaker David France kind of saying, artists should be able to control what they produce, right? And then I kind of love Sarah Schulman at the bottom playing the investigative journalists like,

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“So who did this? Can we find out?”

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And we still, kind of don't know who did this, I'm not sure, at least it is not widely known who actually owns the rights to this video.

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And preparing this talk. Oh wait, I'm sorry, -  By 2019 right.

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The video had actually reappeared on the LoveTapes Collective Vimeo page, complete with a watermark, and a statement that all use of our video work needs to be licensed.

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And in preparing this talk, I realized that the watermark clip that now exists online, cannot even be embedded in a Keynote or PowerPoint file so when you try to do that this is what happens.

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And I was going to try to play a little of the clip for you tonight, but instead I thought this image actually does more pedagogical work for me in terms of the points and trying to make about the inaccessibility of certain types of transgender images.

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So I begin with a short history of where they're a clip, because for me it operates as a case study and how media, representing the most challenging demands of trans politics are often recontained by forces that pull them out of available use.

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While the clip received a brief period of circulation outside the institutional context of gay and lesbian history,

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the most transformative resources or what in this project I am calling the badness - presented by Rivera’s speech have not yet been adequately extracted.

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“Y'all Better Quiet Down” is most certainly oppression critique of what has become known as homonormativity, the gender conforming white middle-class consumer politics of modern gay and lesbian citizenship.

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But beneath this periodized reading, their runs an even deeper argument. In the speech Rivera belabours differences between STAR’s efforts to help the most marginalized LGBTQ people, and the larger movement’s emerging fragmentation into groups for only

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“men and women.” Her speech, therefore, directly points at how no movement relying on binary sex categorization can ever be universally liberatory.  This clip, then, is an instance where the two potential interpretations of my projects title - “bad trans objeects” - 

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dovetail.

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The “bad” trans subject objects to the terms of her intensifying exclusion from sex-based organizing. An exclusion that is reinforced by media practices, operating to push the resources offered by resistantly “bad” media text, out of immediate reach through


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containment, forgetting or active cancellation.

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I also began with the instance of this clip, because of the simple truth that it makes me feel bad.

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The treatment of Rivera by the organizers as she pushes toward the mic, the vote they stage to see if the overwhelmingly white and cisgender crowd will allow her to speak, the audience booing as she offers her activism as a model, all make me feel bad. The

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watermark imposed between myself and her image makes me feel bad. The monetization of the clip, so that only the most resourced, i.e .white and cisgender media creators, can use it makes me feel bad.

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And this feeling makes me want, like Rivera, to push my way onto the stage, to grab the mic, to point out the unjust exclusion enacted by the frameworks in front of me. To object.

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In other words, to give up being a “good” well-behaved trans subject and become the bad kind of trans.

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So in this project I work from my own desire to be bad. In order to imagine a different media archive for Rivera’s speech, one that recuperates both trans badness and bad trans objects to map and exit from the imposed sex binary toward a different future.

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So the immediate question that comes up for me is how to define the parameters of such an archive, particularly because badness is negatively defined as “not good” right? So how do you define your objects, or collect them up?

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So, because badness is not good. I really have to begin my analysis with an investigation of the good trans object itself.

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And I'll begin this section with a quote from Aren Aizura from the article “Unrecognizable: On Trans Recognition in 2017” which reads, “what are the stakes of familiarity, when familiarity breeds contempt?”


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There is a moment in Disclosure, a recent documentary on the history of transgender media representation, when transformed director, Yance Ford offers the core claim of the work, quote, “We cannot be a better society, until we see that better society” unquote,

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the sentiment restates the prevailing attitude that positive images of minority groups will lead to better political and social treatment for those groups in reality. At its end Disclosure explicitly calls for a proliferation of new, and better transgender

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media objects that would dilute the toxicity of the past archive. This thesis reflects how validating media representation has become a primary pedagogical model for the social treatment of trans people.

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For example, when Time magazine announced the arrival of the transgender “tipping point” in 2014, it did so by overtly displaying an image of authentic transness on its cover.

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Laverne Cox became the first transgender person to ever appear on the front of the magazine. In print, next to her photographed image, the Time cover proclaimed transgender issues to be the quote “next civil rights frontier.”

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And yet, despite newly affirming images of trans people proliferating across visual media, there has been a concomitant rise in anti transgender attitudes, transphobic legislation, and trans antagonistic violence.

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The thesis articulated in Disclosure that more, and better, images of transgender people are key to achieving trans equality, if not liberation, strains under the weight of this emerging contradiction.

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Our transgender “tipping point” period has demonstrated that “good” representation does not necessarily mean reduced social or political antagonism for trans people. Even Disclosure director Sam Feder, in conversation with media scholar and activist, Alex Juhasz

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admits “I've learned that visibility does not equal progress” 

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In fact, media visibility, in the case of trans people may ensure further persecution as the wider public becomes more familiar with, and more hostile toward transgender identities

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as public knowledge about transgender embodiments has increased, and as anti-transgender attitudes have strengthened, the pathways for viable trans media representation also appear to have tightened around new standards of positivity and respectability.
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The emergence of the “May Test” - a transgender variant of the Bechdel Test for women's media representation - reflects this narrowing of what journalists and activists, cis, and trans alike considered to be “good” trans media.

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According to the test a transgender character must be portrayed by a trans actor, depicted as “safe, stable, and secure,” “happy,” “in love,” not be “a sex worker, dealer, or thief.” Trans identity cannot be used to produce humor, or generate a plot twist, and gender

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transition should not be the focus of the story.

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In an article outlining these requirements, test creator Kylie May explains that these qualities are intended as a corrective to the last 30 years of transphobic and tokenistic media images, which often feature negative stereotypes of trans people

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or cisgender actors dressing as the “opposite” gender in order to mock trans identities.

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Yet, even as the “good” transgender representation that the May Test demands, has exponentially multiplied, there remains in trans culture a sense of dissatisfaction with the results of our increased cultural visibility, which has not led to improve social

00:28:46.000 --> 00:28:50.000
or political status for most transgender people.

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Viewing Disclosure, one senses a collective desire for some other mode of representation to emerge. But which? And how? The underlying paradox is that such “good” transgender media objects might not be very good for trans politics at all.

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What aesthetic qualities typify a “good” trans media object? In our current “tipping point” era,

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good trans media objects function as “good” when they successfully fold transness into the visual economy of existing cisnormative media.

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They have become profitable “goods” by effectively assimilating transness into the dominant models of gender and sex, upon which realist mediated worlds rely. Good trans media objects function as “good” precisely because they allow audiences to access transgender

00:29:45.000 --> 00:29:50.000
representations, without giving up the economy of sexual difference itself.

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These strategies mirror recent bureaucratic efforts to incorporate trans and intersex people through new legalistic categories, such as adding an X option on us passports, while also continuing to operate as if the sex binary remains scientifically viable

00:30:06.000 --> 00:30:20.000
I mean the question that comes up for me is, if we're adding Xs why not just stop tracking sex cat categorization at all? But that's not what we're doing, instead we're, we're creating more legalistic categories for the tracking of these things.

00:30:20.000 --> 00:30:34.000
“Good” trans media objects mediate for the same effect, covering over the tension between the reality of transgender embodiment and the desire to retain normative organizations of sex and gender. In the tipping point era, this is often achieved not by erasing


00:30:34.000 --> 00:30:46.000
transness, but by foregrounding the transgender figure, to the extent that the underlying cisnormative sex binary recedes from our awareness.

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This new mode of transgender media optics presses the trans figure toward the viewer out into a foreground, that offers out the authentic transgender body as an icon of progress.

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As noted by trans media scholar Eliza Steinbok, this style of “stamped-out” trans visualization relies on an implicitly cisnormative backdrop that forms the basis by which the trans foreground can appear as a site at all.

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The strategy typifies an ascendant mode of trans visuality, produced for cisgender audiences that now saturates the mass media of the Global North.

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Trans activists, creators, and scholars have pointed out that this new style of “good” (ie not stigmatizing) representation offers transgender people, a paradox: What seems like a “door” into recognition and acceptance also enacts a “trap of the visual,” by which

00:31:40.000 --> 00:31:56.000
trans bodies are simultaneously objectified, both against and under an implicitly cisgender gaze. Even as these media aesthetics have made it possible for specific trans people to achieve a relative amount of celebrity, the requirement to appear in

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the foreground as an object for consumption can also reactivate the interlocking racist and misogynistic structures of looking - an “anti-trans optics” that is also at work in the state’s criminalization of actual transgender lives.

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Because they are created for mainstream audiences, “good” trans images also tend to reproduce the “hierarchy of verisimilitude” to quote Malatino that enforces gendered standards of beauty and comportment for trans people.

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Despite the demand for greater diversity and representation, the majority of transgender media images are thin able bodied and conventionally attractive.

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The social elevation of this new “good” form of transgender representation, as a corrective to prior, “bad” media objects, often causes viewers and critics to disregard text reflecting transgender identity’s more complicated representational history.

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There was also a resulting need for caution regarding the emerging political imperative to become a “good” trans object oneself, rather than to recognize how goodness has been constructed to serve capitalist white supremacist settler colonial, and patriarchal

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ends.

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As this project argues the proliferation of “good” trans media objects illustrates how the most politically challenging aspects of transgender embodiment are increasingly forced outside the horizon of representability.

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It's a tongue-in-cheek canard in online trans culture that the word “bad” may derived from the Old English bæddel meaning “hermaphrodite” or “effeminate man.”

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This possible etymology of “bad” reflects a history, through which intersex. trans and gender non-conforming people were squeezed out of social and legal roles as the theory of a single universal human sex was gradually split into legal and medical binary.

00:34:00.000 --> 00:34:10.000
From the 17th through the early 20th centuries, what had been a range of available, social and legal roles for trans and intersex people was slowly restricted

00:34:10.000 --> 00:34:14.000
until there were only two sex categories: “male” and “female.”

00:34:14.000 --> 00:34:28.000
This binary failed to capture the actual biological diversity of the human species, but was a convenient enforcement mechanism for the new hierarchies of racial and class dominance, developing through European colonization.

00:34:28.000 --> 00:34:40.000
Whatever could not be sorted into the emergent white bourgeois categories of male and female became increasingly understood as “bad” and marked for medical and carceral “correction.”

00:34:40.000 --> 00:34:56.000
And I'm showing you this image of Herculin Barbin to kind of historically contextualize what happened right? um If you know this work, you know that this is the actual Diary of a french intersex woman who lived through the period, under which 

00:34:56.000 --> 00:35:14.000
sex became controlled by the state. And she was forcibly transitioned to live as a man, over the course of her lifetime. So her life really illustrates kind of the more draconian shift toward enforcing legal categories for sex and forcing people into

00:35:14.000 --> 00:35:22.000
based on, kind of, whatever the state decided sex was that day.

00:35:22.000 --> 00:35:40.000
Um, so, Foucault, when he found this diary, and he published it in the 1980s began his introduction asking do me truly need a true sex, and he basically talks about how the modern era is really distinguished by its insistence that yes, all bodies must

00:35:40.000 --> 00:35:50.000
have one of two sexes only, pretty much, and that the category of intersex was almost medicalized out of existence.

00:35:50.000 --> 00:36:07.000
So objects labeled as “bad” within this context, right, like the things that fall out of the system, therefore have specific utility in that they gesture at what is forced outside of available meaning by discourse, representation, culture or politics.

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Bad objects make us feel bad because they point at how the available categories for meaning, do not capture the actual possibilities.

00:36:16.000 --> 00:36:34.000
They displace, or disrupt, our forms of evidence, leaving us unsettled, beside ourselves, and facing our own false consciousness. A bad trans object, therefore illustrates how our current organization of sex and gender is imposed rather than natural, indicating

00:36:34.000 --> 00:36:52.000
what might lie outside those categorizations.  The root function of the bad trans object is therefore not to simply lament the existence of sexual difference, but to illustrate how the symbolic economy of the sex binary has been incomplete from the very beginning.

00:36:52.000 --> 00:37:06.000
Which is to say that bad trans objects reveal what is already known about sexed embodiment, but has nonetheless been intentionally forgotten.

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In this project, I imagine and craft a new archive that might serve as a liberatory repository for lost forgotten or cancelled “bad” trans media objects.

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In doing so I elaborate new techniques for reading valuing and expanding upon the qualities of trans badness, as a radical and essential property.

00:37:27.000 --> 00:37:39.000
This work is especially pressing in a social and political environment that is increasingly fixated on circulating palatable, positive and traditionally beautiful images of transgender life.

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While popular media has become fascinated with “good” and “valid” trans identities, I suggest a turn toward the bad trans object in order to track the aspects of trans difference that our current politics no longer support. From their location at the margins

00:37:55.000 --> 00:38:10.000
of the available trans media archive, these bad objects remain capable of articulating deeper questions about sex and gender than most of today's mainstream “good” transgender media. Although they are less socially valued,

00:38:10.000 --> 00:38:19.000
they point to a broader vision for trans politics than the provisional inclusion into cisnormative worlds that “good” media provide.

00:38:19.000 --> 00:38:27.000
And as I was speaking I just kind of showed you a quick little slideshow of some of the, the media texts I'm working with. In this project.

00:38:27.000 --> 00:38:47.000
But tonight, I'm going to actually focus on this last one on the most unwelcome of guests Pat Riley, who you might know from Saturday Night Live as Julia Sweeney’s character that she created four seasons was 1991, 92 and 93 of SNL and then followed up

00:38:47.000 --> 00:38:54.000
with a film It's Pat the movie in 1994 that I'm going to talk to you about.

00:38:54.000 --> 00:39:00.000
So I'll begin with this quote from work in progress show runner Abby McEnany.

00:39:00.000 --> 00:39:07.000
“You're never called ‘Pat’ in a nice way.”

00:39:07.000 --> 00:39:24.000
The pilot of the Abby McEnany sitcom Work in Progress, which aired on Showtime from 2019 to 2022 circulates around a chance encounter between the lead character, Abby, played by McEnany, (a self described “fat, queer dyke”), and the real-life actor Julia

00:39:24.000 --> 00:39:42.000
Sweeney, who became famous in the 1990s for portraying the ambiguously sex character, “Pat Riley” on Saturday Night Live. Abby (played by McEnany) notices Sweeney at a restaurant and confronts her, explaining how Pat “ruined her life.”

00:39:42.000 --> 00:39:53.000
The scene is followed by a flashback in which a younger Abby is insulted at a party by a college aged man who calls her, Pat, echoing showrunner McEnany actual experience.

00:39:53.000 --> 00:40:02.000
Pat, as Abby explains to Sweeney, was a bad object use by bigots to make fun of gender non-conforming people like herself.

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Introduced by a short jingle - “What's that? It's Pat!”  - the androgynous sketch character was a staple of Saturday Night Live from 1990-1993. Sweeney appeared in the role a total of thirteen times before starring in a feature film.

00:40:16.000 --> 00:40:22.000
It’s Pat the movie in 1994.

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By structuring its pilot around the figure of Pat, Work in Progress frames Pat as a “bad” trans object - a dangerous example of transphobic mockery created at the expense of queer and trans people.

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However, the humor surrounding Pat, both on SNL and in the feature film, was not quite the derisive bigotry that Abby assumes that was. Instead, the laughs were almost always generated by the other characters’ unhealthy obsession with classifying Pat sex.

00:40:51.000 --> 00:41:06.000
Returning to It’s Pat: The Movie after the transgender tipping point, what at first seemed to be a wildly transphobic film, now appears to actively resist many of the stigmatizing tropes of transgender representation, most critically, the underlying


00:41:06.000 --> 00:41:13.000
system of sex assignment that makes the fact of Pat's existence an impossibility.

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If Pat is a “bad” trans object, it is precisely because Pat's presence forces the viewer to confront the paradox of material bodies that remain unclassifiable under a purportedly natural binary sex schema.

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The fundamental joke of It’s Pat, is therefore the joke of binary sex itself - a categorizing system that is treated as a form of material truth, but that ultimately cannot be relied on.

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It’s Pat the movie follows the titular character Pat Riley, played by Julia Sweeney, as they fall in love with and get engaged to another ambiguously ed to non-binary person.

00:41:53.000 --> 00:42:08.000
Chris, played by Dave Foley. And I just want to say, like, the fact that there's, like, a movie about two potentially intersex, and non-binary people just having a , and falling in, is kind of amazing, and it's not really acknowledged because

00:42:08.000 --> 00:42:24.000
this film was kind of immediately panned - you should check out the rotten tomatoes page on it it's hilarious, like some people are like, I want to vomit, the critics hated it so much, but then also contemporary trans politics have made it kind of impossible

00:42:24.000 --> 00:42:29.000
for us to, like, think of this movie as a resource.

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As their relationship , Pat's new neighbor Kyle played by Charles Rocket becomes erotically obsessed with discovering Pat’s sex, and begins to stalk and harass Pat. It is Kyle's obsession with classifying Pat, that is the major source of violence and

00:42:44.000 --> 00:42:47.000
conflict in the text.

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But unlike other trans themed films from this period, the movie continually stymies this desire and blocks it from achieving any kind of release.

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Kyle steals and decrypts Pat's diary and attempt to learn the “truth” about Pat, but the diary ends up containing nothing but self-important humdrum details - it's like shopping lists, and birdwatching notes, and just the most boring interior life you can imagine.

00:43:14.000 --> 00:43:21.000
Kyle is driven insane by the lack of a revelation finally attacking Pat in the catwalk area above an ongoing rock concert.

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As Pat falls into the stage ringing their pants are caught on a hook and they dangle, naked and exposed above the stage, however, Pat’s sex is not revealed to the viewer, or to Kyle, who is dragged away by security guards. It’s Pat, the movie, ends

00:43:37.000 --> 00:43:53.000
with Pat happily marrying Chris without any ceremonially gender roles. By never resolving the question of Pat’s sex, the film refuses to participate in the “reveal,” that was an expected convention of pre-tipping point trans themed films.

00:43:53.000 --> 00:44:11.000
However, It’s Pat goes even further, suggesting that a genital reveal is actually less pleasurable and the enjoyment of not being able to know what or where sex is. The film's happy ending is one in which viewers know enough to know not even to ask the

00:44:11.000 --> 00:44:18.000
question of sex, thereby opening up other modes of trans and queer relationality.

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While the use of “it” to describe Pat in the film's title, could be interpreted - if we're taking on a sort of cancellation mindset  - as dehumanizing, the text largely presents this use as a limitation of both epistemology and discourse, rather than any failure

00:44:35.000 --> 00:44:46.000
on Pat’s part. Because Pat does not fall into any known sex category, there is no way to explain what Pat is. Pat is just Pat.

00:44:46.000 --> 00:45:03.000
They therefore become a kind of tautology that the other characters, especially the obsessive Kyle, get caught in and cannot escape, because there was no “true sex” to be located and disclosed the loop of “Pat is Pat is Pat” can never be closed.

00:45:03.000 --> 00:45:13.000
Pat is a conundrum that frustrates the other characters’ curiosities and exceeds their vocabularies. There is simply no answer to the question Pat continually raises.

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There's nothing necessarily wrong with Pat, however, only with the anxiety, they produce and other people. Pat isn't confused by their own sex. Other people are. Part of what makes Pat so infuriating to the other characters,

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is there a blind lack of concern about the unsettling ambiguity they introduced to every situation.

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Pat is annoying to the other characters in the film precisely because there are so unselfconscious, so utterly uninterested in the “difficult confession” that constitutes modern sexuality, that even their “secret” diary is just a laundry list of

00:45:49.000 --> 00:45:52.000
petty observations.

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And I'll say here in an aside that this is really, this like desire to shore oneself up as a legitimate subject is what really differentiates like Pat from Abby on Work in Progress.

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If you've seen Work in Progress, which you should it's a great show.

00:46:08.000 --> 00:46:23.000
The pilot opens with Abby in therapy, like, confessing all of her kind of sex and gender dysfunction to her therapist. Wanting to kind of be “fixed,” right? Become a “good” subject.

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And the irony is that this, there's no end to this dysfunction, and so the therapist has died and is sitting there a dead body, like already in rigor mortis because there's no way for Abby to ever exhaust all of the dysfunction, that she brings into the

00:46:43.000 --> 00:46:49.000
system right. So, Abby wants to be fixed by institutions and to become good.

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(I think my fire alarm is going off) I'm sorry, and Pat is generally impervious to these logics just doesn't care about being good or, you know, just goes about their business, you know.

00:47:02.000 --> 00:47:15.000
So in a direct repudiation of the conventions of transgender and intersex representations. There is no mystery to be revealed from under Pat’s clothes or within their flesh. Pat simply exists.

00:47:15.000 --> 00:47:31.000
Still, the mere existence of Pat is enough to “ruin the lives” of those around them, who are existentially attached to the concept of binary sex. Pat’s indeterminacy unravels their genders and sexualities is revealing their instability and provoking discomfort

00:47:31.000 --> 00:47:40.000
and panic. Because people cannot no Pat’s sex they struggle to figure out whether or not they are in a homosexual or heterosexual situation.

00:47:40.000 --> 00:47:52.000
This discomfort is passed along to the audience as a source of dramatic tension as well as humor, which is typical of cross-dressing movies right? Is the scene a date or a hangout? A seduction or a scene gender gossip session.

00:47:52.000 --> 00:48:06.000
What makes this film unique is that neither the audience nor the characters in the film can tell. This tension illustrates how the conventions of straight, gay and lesbian modes of desire require clearly sexed bodies.

00:48:06.000 --> 00:48:11.000
But unlike media texts that rely on a genital revealed to put sex and gender back in order, 

00:48:11.000 --> 00:48:18.000
It's Pat never resolves into the lack/excess economy of sexual difference.

00:48:18.000 --> 00:48:29.000
It's Pat the movie is a bad trans object that dramatically fails the May Test because, remember, the May Test says you can't laugh at transness, it can't be a source of humor or a twist.

00:48:29.000 --> 00:48:31.000
Right?

00:48:31.000 --> 00:48:49.000
So this film would be considered failing that test and yet powerfully illustrates the same claims Rivera was making on stage in 1973: the sex binary is not necessary for desire for sociality or for politics.

00:48:49.000 --> 00:49:05.000
Unlike many of today's “good” transgender media objects, It's Pat points directly at the medically and legally enforced sex binary as the source of transgender oppression. That critics and activists have dismissed the film as “bad” suggests a narrowing of the

00:49:05.000 --> 00:49:15.000
the ability to read what counts as trans politics, whereby liberal attempts to assimilate trans difference have come to supplant more abolitionist imaginaries.

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However, it is only by being truly bad, by insisting on the incompleteness of what currently pass for sex and gender, that these systems can truly be overturned.

00:49:26.000 --> 00:49:40.000
In a world where transness is commonly punished, and often selected for eradication, being thought of as “good,” as “valid,” having nice things said about us by the systems that govern us are hard things for trans people to not want.

00:49:40.000 --> 00:49:55.000
And yet, a trans politics of abolition requires the desire for something else, something as yet outside of the available systems of classification, something that might make nearly everyone feel … bad.

00:49:55.000 --> 00:50:09.000
Truly embracing badness means moving beyond a politics in which the least disruptive forms of transgender identity are granted a marginal amount of inclusion, it instead means pursuing a world in which the distinction between cis and trans ceases to

00:50:09.000 --> 00:50:24.000
exist altogether because the system's enforcing the sex binary have been dismantled. Achieving this new bad world might very well mean looking backward, at the lessons that less comforting media objects contain.

00:50:24.000 --> 00:50:37.000
This project is therefore intended as a form of “trans care” for the dated awkward strident archive of bad trans media, for the trans people who love the bad object the transgender body is,

00:50:37.000 --> 00:50:46.000
and for all of us who wish to find ways of continuing to be resistantly bad subjects now, and into the future, we desire.

00:50:46.000 --> 00:50:57.000
Thank you.

00:50:57.000 --> 00:51:12.000
Laura Horak: All right, thank you so much Cáel that was fantastic. So, we are moving into the Q&A part of the evening, and the way it's going to work, we're going to open up the chat and, Kit if you could do that.

00:51:12.000 --> 00:51:22.000
So you have two options you can either write your question directly in the chat, and then I'll read it out loud, or if you would like to speak your questions, just write in the chat, ‘I have a question.’

00:51:22.000 --> 00:51:28.000
And then I will use zoom to ask you to unmute and then you can speak your question in turn.

00:51:28.000 --> 00:51:41.000
So go ahead, let's see, has it been opened? Let's see, participants can chat with everyone. Okay, So go ahead and write questions in the chat.

00:51:41.000 --> 00:51:49.000
And I will call on you.

00:51:49.000 --> 00:52:01.000
Excellent Nicole, I will find you in my list, and then, I'm asking you to unmute. Just a second.

00:52:01.000 --> 00:52:02.000
Go ahead

Nicole Morse (they): Good evening.

00:52:02.000 --> 00:52:12.000
Thank you so much for this event and Cáel I'm just thrilled about this project, can't wait for the next stages of it but this was amazing.

00:52:12.000 --> 00:52:27.000
The question that is coming to my mind, I'm fascinated by the May Test, which seems to be a very kind of serious and earnest misreading of the Bechdel test and I'm wondering if that, in some ways, even plays into the bad object in the sense that, you know

00:52:27.000 --> 00:52:43.000
Bechdel original cartoon was not meant to be a test of whether something was a feminist film, it was just a joke, revealing by creating such a low bar, that nonetheless most films can't pass, how sexist Hollywood film was so in a sense, Bechdel, you know,

00:52:43.000 --> 00:53:01.000
who has her own kind of complicated relationship to trans identity, which I'm bracketing right now.  You know she was objecting to the status quo through a kind of snarky cartoon that has then been taken up in a very serious earnest way as a test

00:53:01.000 --> 00:53:16.000
of feminist filmmaking, and then it feels like the May Test, you know, yet furthers that that very serious engagement with, you know, how can we establish the rules for being good, and so that's the thought that comes to my mind.  I'm curious if

00:53:16.000 --> 00:53:28.000
that is, that that quality of seriousness – I’m thinking also of Lauren Berlant’s work on seriousness, like humorless -  how that relates to your work.

00:53:28.000 --> 00:53:44.000
Cáel: Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned Berlant, because this project really is indebted to their work on the silly archive, you know, and like this the sort of stuff that's just lying around and that no one wants to take seriously, you know. When

00:53:44.000 --> 00:53:53.000
I say bad objects, a lot of people are like “ are you referencing Melanie Klein?” and like no, I'm actually referencing Lauren Berlant - just kind of in a different way, you know.

00:53:53.000 --> 00:54:09.000
But, what's interesting there also I think - I love that you pointed this out right - because I think it's even the way that Bechdel Test is getting used as sort of like a, like a litmus test for a political kind of resonance was not really what Bechdel was

00:54:09.000 --> 00:54:24.000
doing right? Like that test is, is formalist. It's about the formal properties of a film, not about the political content. I think it could be a nefariously bad film politically, and still pass that test.

00:54:24.000 --> 00:54:39.000
But then the additional kind of layer of the May Test, which is one that kind of borrows a formalist argument, and makes it into an argument about affect, right? That like, this film has to have these sets of feelings in it.

00:54:39.000 --> 00:55:01.000
And also, ward off these other set of feelings by doing x y, presenting things this way, so that, you know, and so what was one, a sub cultural critique has become, you know, now, like, cultural! I want to say right like, mainstream.  And also, sort of has, become

00:55:01.000 --> 00:55:16.000
far more prescriptive and Bechdel I think ever thought it could be. Which really you could, you could think about how the shift really illustrates how our thoughts - the way we think about media has shifted over the course of the development of like the

00:55:16.000 --> 00:55:18.000
digital age.

00:55:18.000 --> 00:55:31.000
So yeah, that's another kind of layer here that I might want to think more carefully about is like, how did it, how did this become about, I don't want to feel XYZ waves when I watch something

00:55:31.000 --> 00:55:33.000
Laura Horak: Great thanks! 

00:55:33.000 --> 00:55:49.000
I'll read the next question out loud, and from Katherine “incredibly illuminating talk. I was just wondering where the trans serial killer Silence of the Lambs, Dressed to Kill, etc… fit within the conception of bad trans objects, and whether they can be 

00:55:49.000 --> 00:55:54.000
viewed through a more nuanced lens.”

00:55:54.000 --> 00:56:10.000
Cáel: Oh yes in fact, I started this project writing on Rocky Horror and Silence of the Lambs and Sleepaway Camp. And so, um, my, my foray into comedy is an attempt to kind of flesh the project out, outside the boundaries of genre, right? Because horror has this

00:56:10.000 --> 00:56:14.000
very specific sort of

00:56:14.000 --> 00:56:21.000
function about the return of the repressed and the way that transsexuality particularly has been figured within that visual economy.

00:56:21.000 --> 00:56:32.000
So, I absolutely think that if you are listening carefully when we started the landing slide we actually had some songs from Silence of the Lambs playing.

00:56:32.000 --> 00:56:47.000
And I like recuperating those films because they give us a really important window into the sort of, one of the fundamental sources of violence that has already taken place in our culture, which is the system of sex assignment, from the very beginning.  Like

00:56:47.000 --> 00:56:57.000
for me, horror is always about the terrible thing that has already happened. Right? And then, the ensuing consequences that cannot be escaped. Right?

00:56:57.000 --> 00:57:13.000
And so, in, in that context, we always are already in a context where this violence has taken place. And so, the serial killer helps us understand it, reflects it back to us, and losing those figures.

00:57:13.000 --> 00:57:18.000
I think we lose crucial information about the gender system.

00:57:18.000 --> 00:57:29.000
I think Silence is a fantastic film about the seduction of white feminism into the state, and it's weaponization against trans people.

00:57:29.000 --> 00:57:37.000
And we kind of lose we lose that analysis, if we say, like we just can't watch this movie anymore.

00:57:37.000 --> 00:57:53.000
Laura Horak: The next question is from the Keita (?), “the physical body has always been the determining factor when it comes to assuming gender. How then does one push back against this long-standing norm, so as to say, given that the heterosexual cisgender white male

00:57:53.000 --> 00:58:00.000
is the self, and everyone else gets termed as the other or the deficit.”

00:58:00.000 --> 00:58:14.000
Cáel: Well, that's an interesting question because we haven't always defined and assigned sex, the way we do, right? Like it's a fairly recent historical shift to think of their only being two sexes, the way that we do.

00:58:14.000 --> 00:58:29.000
That's… The majority of human history that was not the theory. And just because we have that idea now doesn't mean it's more accurate than past ideas, it serves a certain kind of politics, that serves a certain white supremacist agenda, especially

00:58:29.000 --> 00:58:31.000
in, in, in the global north.

00:58:31.000 --> 00:58:46.000
And so what I'm trying to do in this talk is say like hey what if we were actually scientific about sex instead of just re-articulating a model that was developed to really kind of undergird and legalize the gender binary right? If you look at the

00:58:46.000 --> 00:58:51.000
work of Judith Butler or recent work by Jules Gill-Peterson.

00:58:51.000 --> 00:59:00.000
Those scholars have noted that like gender, the gender binary gets invented first and then the sex binary gets invented to kind of lock people into the social roles.

00:59:00.000 --> 00:59:16.000
But sex is not a binary formation in the human body, and we keep changing the parts of the human body we use to define sex and determine it as well, right we keep shifting and shifting and shifting our focus secondary sex characteristics, external


00:59:16.000 --> 00:59:29.000
Genitalia, gametes then it was chromosomes, what's it going to be next right? And every time we do that we end up finding non binary formations within the human body.

00:59:29.000 --> 00:59:35.000
So, like, my argument is we really need to learn from like feminist science studies.

00:59:35.000 --> 00:59:53.000
Really, right, we really need to go back to people saying there needs to be much more complex understandings of sex embodiment that don't just rely on like these sort of 19th century norms for maleness femaleness.

00:59:53.000 --> 01:00:05.000
Laura Horak: Great. And we have a comment from Philip, “a non-watermarked version of the Rivera speech video is available at the Internet Archive.” so that's exciting thanks for sharing that link.

01:00:05.000 --> 01:00:15.000
I also got a direct message that Naveed has a question so Naveed I will ask you to unmute.

01:00:15.000 --> 01:00:16.000
Naveed: Hello.

01:00:16.000 --> 01:00:24.000
Thank you for organizing this amazing talk and thank thank you Cáel for this amazing presentation.

01:00:24.000 --> 01:00:43.000
So, when you were talking about these characters in It's Pat that two non binary people fall in love, and then I guess they married in the film.

01:00:43.000 --> 01:00:56.000
So I was thinking based on those definitions that you gave for like two definitions of like a bad, bad trans objects, based on how you put emphasis in the phrase, I was thinking.

01:00:56.000 --> 01:01:12.000
Do these characters who somehow follow this non queer temporality that is that was like that we all have right this falling in love.

01:01:12.000 --> 01:01:20.000
The hetero normative temporality falling in love married and having children like doing a step by step one by one.

01:01:20.000 --> 01:01:23.000
When, when the characters.

01:01:23.000 --> 01:01:26.000
Follow these checkpoints.

01:01:26.000 --> 01:01:38.000
Do they turn out to be a good trans subject or are they still like quote unquote bad chance. Oh, yeah.

01:01:38.000 --> 01:01:40.000
Cáel: I muted myself, sorry.

01:01:40.000 --> 01:01:55.000
That's a great question. I find this is why I really want to center trans studies over Queer Studies in this work, because I think we could look at the sort of genre conventions of this film and say, Oh, it's normative, they're getting married right

01:01:55.000 --> 01:01:56.000
and have a whole critique of that.

01:01:56.000 --> 01:02:10.000
have a whole critique of that. And this is where. So, but I'm not sure that always serves like trans politics because in trans studies we have less of a concern with anti-normativity, and more of a concern with what I might call non-normative it.

01:02:10.000 --> 01:02:32.000
Meaning, we're not necessarily concerned with like defying or resisting the normative, but rather with posing models within which the normative simply like changes shape or illustrates new aspects by which normativity, 

01:02:32.000 --> 01:02:45.000
not to be resistant, but lived through, or lived past, right? This critique that like norms are bad always attaches to the figure of the gender normative transsexual who then becomes like the bad guy right like you are repeating gender and these normative

01:02:45.000 --> 01:02:59.000
ways. And I think that's often like a mis-application of this investment in anti-normativity that like lingers in Queer Studies, but has been talked about is actually its own internal norm.

01:02:59.000 --> 01:03:10.000
So when we make that anti normative critique. We have to ask “Wait, am I just re articulating a disciplinary norm within Queer Studies itself, and what are the effects on trans bodies when we do that?”

01:03:10.000 --> 01:03:26.000
So, yeah, you could say that, um, it's one of many readings of this film. And for me, it's a reading that doesn't really lead anywhere useful, and so that's why I don't do it in this project, um, but I see what you're saying.

01:03:26.000 --> 01:03:40.000
LAURA Horak: All right, and we have a question from Rox,  Rox can go ahead and unmute. 

Rox: Hey, I can actually add to that as I recently watched, It's Pat per your suggestion.

01:03:40.000 --> 01:03:53.000
And it is a wild ride and I myself read the concluding marriage ceremony less like… I get what you're saying about how endearing it is that they fall in love and have each other but in the structure of like the joke of the film it is the

01:03:53.000 --> 01:04:08.000
concluding like “eff you” that like supposedly these two people can get married. This is 94 so this is pre gay marriage like, like so. But like, again, those witnessing the marriage and us as viewers still don't know what's going on and you know

01:04:08.000 --> 01:04:17.000
like it's still, it's, you know, a big, in this case I read the wedding as a big middle fingers out to all of us who would like to sort these things out.

01:04:17.000 --> 01:04:39.000
But, um, I was sort of… there is sort of …between this interest in Silence of the Lambs and the trans murder genre, and the comedy of It's Pat, there is a film of the same year, 1994, which is perhaps more what might be in mind, of those thinking of this new

01:04:39.000 --> 01:04:56.000
test. And that is Jim Carrey's Ace Ventura Pet Detective and so I'm wondering if, you know, I'm sort of wanting to push back on this good/bad binary that might still a little bit be an operation when they're like many bads or and it's not really,  you gave

01:04:56.000 --> 01:05:16.000
us many bads at the beginning, but I'm wondering if you're also going to tackle a film like that, that sort of exists between these other bad trans texts of the same real era too.  Also ‘Is this a project about the 90s?’ would be another, another question.

01:05:16.000 --> 01:05:24.000
Cáel: I don't know whether it's about the 90s or not yet. I'm, you know, um…

01:05:24.000 --> 01:05:40.000
I have questions about what doing that sort of historiography would do to what I want to say, but I get what you're saying about,  and what you can't see,  and what I'm reading is like bad in quotes codes versus bad not in quotes, and then also the sort of

01:05:40.000 --> 01:05:58.000
bad that I would just say is useless, meaning it's the kind of bad where you can't do anything with it, and, and I would put Ace Ventura in that category, right? Like it's, it's bad, but it's bad in a way that is bad within the sort of like traditional sense

01:05:58.000 --> 01:06:14.000
of bad that I'm pushing against right. And also I understand the like idea that, like I'm not really talking about good and bad as a binary I'm talking about bad as outside the defined epistemology of sex and gender. And good as, like, something we

01:06:14.000 --> 01:06:30.000
can still grab on to.  So I'm, you know, I'm working with the forms of bad that show up in the project. Um, but yeah I wouldn't simply go out and argue that you should watch everything horrible, on, on earth and think that you're going to somehow end up

01:06:30.000 --> 01:06:38.000
liberated from gender that way like No, don't do that to yourself.

01:06:38.000 --> 01:06:52.000
Rox: Yeah, maybe even just pointing to it could help articulate, for those confused about It's Pat as to why It's Pat is not Ventura, you know? Yeah, I'm fascinated, I'm thinking about comedy a lot these days too so…

Cáel: I know you are.

01:06:52.000 --> 01:07:07.000
I mean, yeah. So for me, Ace Ventura is interested in shoring the sex binary back up, the comedy is about the horror of something that that like, and the reaction that's supposed to be funny is about snapping everything back into order right?

01:07:07.000 --> 01:07:12.000
Whereas, It's Pat makes makes Charles Rocket’s character,

01:07:12.000 --> 01:07:29.000
the thing you don't want to be, not the trans body, right? And so it knows enough to know not to do that, and to actually kind of comment on transphobia with this, and to invert the structure, so that it's pleasurable to have sex and gender not make

01:07:29.000 --> 01:07:32.000
sense rather than right like upset.

01:07:32.000 --> 01:07:42.000
Yeah. 

Rox: Can I ask one tiny follow up question about access since archives have come up, and that is - do you know if the SNL episodes from the 90s are available?

01:07:42.000 --> 01:07:51.000

since I found that It's Pat movie, but am I going to be able to find those if I wanted to… 

Cáel: I don't know yet. I'm working on that.

01:07:51.000 --> 01:07:53.000
Yeah.

01:07:53.000 --> 01:07:57.000
Okay, Elven Ring has taken over my evenings.

01:07:57.000 --> 01:08:03.000
But but yeah I can let you know when I, when I get to that question.

01:08:03.000 --> 01:08:08.000
Laura Horak: Sounds like we need a secret Pat server being established

01:08:08.000 --> 01:08:15.000
Alright, the next question is from Joshua, Nice to see you here too.

01:08:15.000 --> 01:08:27.000
“I'm wondering how you're distinguishing goodness/badness in terms of production value, I know in your earlier presentation camp and B horror, and then a slick Hollywood thriller are all aligned.

01:08:27.000 --> 01:08:40.000
So is there something trans about a bad movie? Do something like Pink Flamingos fall into that kind of description or the John Waters Opus, is one example of badness or Ed Wood?

01:08:40.000 --> 01:08:43.000
Cáel: Great question.

01:08:43.000 --> 01:09:00.000
There is a whole body of literature on on trash cinema, badcinema, and also there's the whole question of negativity over in queer theory, and what I'm trying to do is something different than all of those prior theorizations, where for me, what makes

01:09:00.000 --> 01:09:13.000
something bad is about it's about its epistemological utility, rather than its production value or its or even it's like a low, high culture position, right?

01:09:13.000 --> 01:09:28.000
So, I guess you could argue that something like, I think my favorite John Waters movie in this line is probably something like Female Trouble. Rather than saying all of Waters’ films are bad trans cinema but thinking about the 

01:09:28.000 --> 01:09:35.000
particular politics being articulated there. Yeah, Yeah.

01:09:35.000 --> 01:09:38.000
But, you know,

01:09:38.000 --> 01:09:49.000
in some ways, this is, like, I think goes back to Rox’s question… this is a cross-generational project, because I'm trying to say, “hey, hey young people.

01:09:49.000 --> 01:10:04.000
Stop.” Get it like, like there maybe a different way to approach this older material that allows it to become useful again, at the same time that we think about, kind of, where we've ended up with the trans politics we ended up practicing, that we're very much modelled 

01:10:04.000 --> 01:10:14.000
on gay and lesbian rights discourse right? Driven largely by the political institutions purporting to serve all these populations with the same strategies.

01:10:14.000 --> 01:10:30.000
So, uh … that didn't work out so well. And um, I kinda want to create a project that allows people back across that divide in some way.

01:10:30.000 --> 01:10:33.000
Laura Horak: . The next question is from Pilar.

01:10:33.000 --> 01:10:41.000
I'm thinking about the bad object is not only the thing that doesn't fit, but also the thing that doesn't want to fit. Thinking about the subject

01:10:41.000 --> 01:10:54.000
that doesn't want to be captured as an object. The thing that capital utilizes, abuses, discards. Thinking about fugitive politics here wondering if you can speak on that.

01:10:54.000 --> 01:11:12.000
Cáel: Yeah, I mean, fugitivity is a really important idea - particularly in black and critical ethnic studies and Indigenous Studies - um, and it definitely falls into the work here although, again, I, I want to be careful about articulating a politics

01:11:12.000 --> 01:11:29.000
that says ‘to be a viable politically viable trans subject you have to resist and evade gender, right, like, I don't want to draw what Julia Serano would call subversivist lines between like radical gender identities and like conservative ones. I want to

01:11:29.000 --> 01:11:49.000
be very careful about that, because that's what's happened in terms of, you know, sort of criticize… like a lot of anti-trans feminism's and anti-trans, sort of, queer theory attitudes have to do with kind of pinning this label of ‘gender joiners’ on trans

01:11:49.000 --> 01:12:09.000
people right? So it again, like, I am not coming at this project necessarily with an anti-normative lens, but one that simply is non-normative like It's Pat the movie Pat isn't like out to resist gender or destroy gender or break the binary right Pat is

01:12:09.000 --> 01:12:11.000
simply going about their day.

01:12:11.000 --> 01:12:22.000
And it's everything else happening around Pat that illustrates that work rather than Pat articulating a kind of hostile revolutionary politics.

01:12:22.000 --> 01:12:27.000
So, I think some some attention to the nuance between again, um

01:12:27.000 --> 01:12:47.000
queer modes of how we thought about resistant embodiment, and trans modes of, sort of care, and reciprocity, and survival. And you know, again, we don't want to only have bodies that want to be outside of the gender system entirely be the good… we don't

01:12:47.000 --> 01:12:52.000
want to re-articulate a ‘good’ body, basically right by doing that.

01:12:52.000 --> 01:13:02.000
So absolutely related ideas, but some nuances between maybe what I'm emphasizing and some of that other work.

01:13:02.000 --> 01:13:22.000
Laura Horak: Right, so, um, Madeline asked a question in a direct message about Ace Ventura but you've, you've already talked about, but was also wondering about Zoolander II  - similar to Ace Ventura as not that bad?

01:13:22.000 --> 01:13:28.000
Cáel: Haven’t seen it! No comment. I know a little about it but I haven't subjected myself to it. Should I?

01:13:28.000 --> 01:13:33.000
Laura Horak: I don't know Madeline, do you want to recommend it?

01:13:33.000 --> 01:13:36.000
Alright, well we'll see in the chat.

01:13:36.000 --> 01:13:44.000
I did want to share a great quote that Adam shared: Mae West said “when I'm good I'm very good but when I’m bad, I'm better.”

01:13:44.000 --> 01:13:58.000
Imagining Pat saying something like that. Jamie says, “just wanted to say thank you so much for this wonderful talk, the potential etymology of bad was eye opening and I'm curious about this from an applied linguistics perspective.

01:13:58.000 --> 01:14:12.000
Do you have any recommendations for further readings and resources to learn more about historical language around binary non binary gender and transness?”

01:14:12.000 --> 01:14:25.000
Cáel: I don't off the bat, but I do know that Cole, who commented earlier had something about the word ‘travesty.’ Did you want to mention that Cole?

01:14:25.000 --> 01:14:32.000
Laura Horak: I will unmute, I will ask you to unmute. Just a minute.

01:14:32.000 --> 01:14:36.000
Cáel: Showing up under Joshua Bastian Cole. 

01:14:36.000 --> 01:14:38.000
Cole: Hi.

01:14:38.000 --> 01:14:41.000
Yeah, it was something I came along.

01:14:41.000 --> 01:14:53.000
through dance studies, that there's a tradition, particularly in classical dance called a en travesty it's Italian and it's routed to the word travesty.

01:14:53.000 --> 01:15:05.000
And these are classical roles that are frequently performed, that are cross dressed roles, or what we recognize in in theater as britches roles, perhaps.

01:15:05.000 --> 01:15:25.000
But the word travesty is related to this right, so our sense of the tragedy of it the badness of it is actually everything to do with not only cross dressing, but these stories in which across dressed character, Not only is passing, but also through

01:15:25.000 --> 01:15:34.000
this passing, it has some sort of romantic relationship and sometimes steals the girl from the, otherwise hero and things like that.

01:15:34.000 --> 01:15:39.000
That was just one encounter of that of that relationship that I'd come across before.

01:15:39.000 --> 01:15:47.000
But that's as much as I know that, I'm not a linguist myself so it was just luck to find it.

01:15:47.000 --> 01:16:02.000
Laura Horak: I'll make a small comment to just with my historian hat just not that looking, you know … I don't know about, like, a lot of ordinary words that have these secret trans pasts, but I often encounter people saying oh there was no language for this before, but

01:16:02.000 --> 01:16:12.000
there was, in fact, a huge proliferation of language there was hundreds of words for various kinds of gender and sexuality that, like most people have forgotten.

01:16:12.000 --> 01:16:17.000
So anyways, just that this is a very fruitful and rich field.

01:16:17.000 --> 01:16:29.000
Alright so, I think AJ suggesting maybe the Pat stuff is on peacock, people can look into that if we do find the answer we will put it on Twitter, as requested by Nico.

01:16:29.000 --> 01:16:34.000
AJ also recommended Raquel Gates’ Double Negative.

01:16:34.000 --> 01:16:49.000
Various recommendations and then Evan asked the question. “I'm wondering how you might connect or distance your conception of the bad trans object with Halberstam’s Queer Art of Failure, and how this connects to the tensions that exists between within and between


01:16:49.000 --> 01:16:54.000
queer theory and trans theory. Great question.

01:16:54.000 --> 01:17:13.000
Cáel: Yeah, that's something I've been getting ready to tackle. I'm particularly interested in the failure, not to create upon, of the anti-social turn in queer theory to take up the figure of the transsexual.

01:17:13.000 --> 01:17:34.000
There seems to be a complete lack of engagement with transsexuality and dysphoria, particularly in this body of work that's all about self-shattering anti-relationality - I mean what's more anti relational than dysphoria, you know? -  and so I've, I've long

01:17:34.000 --> 01:17:53.000
been kind of like stumped about why there's no fruitful connection built there except maybe for Halberstam’s contributions to kind of the edges of that turn on in his own questioning of the white and whiteness and cisness of the affective archive of

01:17:53.000 --> 01:17:55.000
that turn.

01:17:55.000 --> 01:18:07.000
And so, Halberstam is the place I go to, but even their failure still reads to me as a very anti normative reading.

01:18:07.000 --> 01:18:17.000
Like, I don't think this is not about saying that trans people are gender failures and reveling in that it's about saying the system itself is the failure.

01:18:17.000 --> 01:18:29.000
Right? It's the epistemological structure we've created through which to recognize gender and sex as things they are not like they are passing as things they are not gender and sex are right.

01:18:29.000 --> 01:18:43.000
And that is the problem, and the problem is not within the system, it's about the system structure itself. And so, I'm, I'm trying to kind of push beyond some of where that work is articulated in the field.

01:18:43.000 --> 01:19:00.000
And then also, um, there's a kind of weird shadow trans imaginary running through the anti social thesis. If you go back and look at Bersani particularly the way in which he kind of imagines, you know, his concept of self-shattering by imagining self

01:19:00.000 --> 01:19:15.000
himself as a woman having sex right like he's like nothing is more horrifying to people than a man, taking his sex like a woman and there's a sort of like figuration of himself as almost like a trans woman, or trans man, even there.

01:19:15.000 --> 01:19:31.000
And yet that never really but that never really turns into a confrontation with sexual difference, as a like Lacanian and Freudian, like understructure in the work that needs to be thought about more critically. It's almost like because these folks needed

01:19:31.000 --> 01:19:47.000
sexual difference to remain in place, they couldn't actually take up transsexuality as a topic, and it's particularly clear in Homos when you look at Bersani literally say, like, this Judith Butler stuff is really interesting, but we can't actually

01:19:47.000 --> 01:19:57.000
take social construction or performativity on board, because if we did, it would deconstruct the gay subject. And therefore, there could be no gay politics.

01:19:57.000 --> 01:20:13.000
Because there, there would be no way to be a legibly sexed body anymore, right? Like that's the undergirding implication, and it's also what makes TERFs really annoyed about the use of this, you know the borders like ‘don't eradicate the

01:20:13.000 --> 01:20:23.000
category of women please we want to have gender but we can't do that.’ That's the line right? You can see the same thing happening over in in early anti-social theory as well.

01:20:23.000 --> 01:20:38.000
So I kind of want to tackle that a little bit in this book, um, I'm not sure how much of the book will be a confrontation with those those terms but I definitely want to explain why

01:20:38.000 --> 01:20:47.000
I think ultimately the anti-social thesis fails, is because of its cisnormativity and its inability to actually tackle sexual difference it means to keep it in order to.

01:20:47.000 --> 01:20:54.000
It needs to keep the sexual economy in place, rather than actually totally shatter it.

01:20:54.000 --> 01:21:01.000
So, I don't know, that's just a discourse on kind of where I'm at with that. That's a great question.

01:21:01.000 --> 01:21:12.000
Laura Horak: All right, we have a number of comments that I just wanted to share, Beck says, “Just a comment, feeling like a bad trans object because my life doesn't pass the May Test.”

01:21:12.000 --> 01:21:16.000
Càel: ha ha ha, Mine Neither

01:21:16.000 --> 01:21:27.000
Laura Horak: Chicory has recommended a book, What's your Pronoun: Beyond He and She by Dennis Baron, which is a fantastic look at the history of gender neutral third person singular pronoun.

01:21:27.000 --> 01:21:33.000
Madeline also got back to me on the Zoolander II question.

01:21:33.000 --> 01:21:44.000
They say it's a stupidly funny/ridiculous movie in my opinion that might be interesting to analyze for its presentation of trans characters I would recommend it for research purposes.

01:21:44.000 --> 01:21:49.000
Cáel: noted thank you for the homework.

01:21:49.000 --> 01:21:55.000
Laura Horak: And Nicole says I love this shift from anti normal activity to non-normativity really rich.

01:21:55.000 --> 01:22:01.000
Cáel: I can't take credit for that, that comes from other trans discourse spaces.

01:22:01.000 --> 01:22:07.000
Possibly from the Trans Studies Now issue of TSQ somewhere in there.

01:22:07.000 --> 01:22:14.000
But it really got me thinking about how this is, this is an operative difference that often goes unstated and is really important.

01:22:14.000 --> 01:22:24.000
Laura Horak: And Evan, on that note, recommends a great source for thinking about non-normativity, rather than anti-normativity is Alexis Shotwell’s Open Normativities.

01:22:24.000 --> 01:22:33.000
So, I think Alexis is here, was here, but is definitely here in Ottawa so when you come back, that would be a nice connection.

01:22:33.000 --> 01:22:39.000
Cáel: Alexis’ booked Against Purity is also very important to my thinking here.

01:22:39.000 --> 01:22:47.000
Laura Horak: And Cole asked, “Is there space here for when something is actually like really good?”

01:22:47.000 --> 01:23:01.000
Cáel: What do you mean by really good? Do you mean, bad?

01:23:01.000 --> 01:23:06.000
Cole: Oh yeah. Um,

01:23:06.000 --> 01:23:22.000
well I mean, I'm relating it to some of the objects that I'm, I'm interested in, but I'm thinking about, you know, when someone like a character is considered sort of inferior in some kind of way but actually it turns out they're, like, they're better

01:23:22.000 --> 01:23:43.000
at something, then you know, like they actually are in some way, like not settling into the negativity in a certain way, but actually have like abilities or some sort of something, that's enhanced in some kind of way right from an outsider otherness


01:23:43.000 --> 01:23:57.000
marginalized position otherwise. If that makes sense.

Cáel: yeah this is why my project isn’t about failure. It can be about supersession or ecstatics, it can be about, revealing the system’s inadequacy, you know? You can do that…

01:23:57.000 --> 01:24:16.000
Traditionally, we, we think of doing that by like someone who's secretly not bad fails, right, but it could also be someone just shatters the system by being so brilliant are so talented that like the metrics are completely artificially imposed right?

01:24:16.000 --> 01:24:28.000
and illustrates that like the norms themselves are reflective of some other set of conditions that, and that, you know, certain types of expression,

01:24:28.000 --> 01:24:34.000
can't even come into the world because of how we articulate what's good, or like what we're listening for right.

01:24:34.000 --> 01:24:45.000
Some of my work on sensation is operative here to in the project. Like what we see, and what we hear, are very limited bandwidths of what is actually going on right?

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And on another piece I distinguish between Trans and Queer Studies by talking about how you know Queer Studies is primarily interested in desire whereas trans studies is interested in the ecstatic, meaning like the expansion of the self, like being

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oneself outside oneself. It literally means to be beside oneself: ecstasy.

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Laura Horak: I feel like that is a lovely place to end. We're basically at time.

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Everyone helped me thank Cáel for presenting today and thanks all of you for taking the time out of your day to attend this, it's been really wonderful having you here. 

Cáel: Thanks everybody, I really appreciate all your comments and questions. You’re helping me with this work, so thank you so much for your time tonight.

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And I see that cat Rox. Don’t think I don't

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Laura Horak: Have a great evening everyone.