A3 Refereed book chapter or chapter in a compilation book
The Audiovisual Construction of Transgender Identity in Transamerica
Authors: Välimäki Susanna
Editors: Richardson John, Gorbman Claudia, Vernalis Carol
Publishing place: New York, Oxford
Publication year: 2013
Book title : The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics
First page : 374
Last page: 390
Number of pages: 17
ISBN: 978-0-19-973386-6
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199733866.013.030
Abstract
The chapter discusses audiovisual communication and the construction of transgender subjectivity in the filmTransamerica (dir. Duncan Tucker, 2005), which portrays a male-to-female transgender woman’s journey of self-discovery and parenthood while driving with a teenage son across America. Combining audiovisual analysis with queer and transgender studies, the film is interpreted as a queering—or more precisely, a transgendering—of the standard road movie format, adopted as the means of depicting the culmination of the protagonist’s gender transition. The analysis focuses on how the journey trope of transgenderness is constructed in the film music and sound. Special attention is devoted to the use of American country music to symbolize an identity in transition, the use of music encoded for ethnic identity to highlight transgender people’s social status and create a potentially progressive space of intersectionality and multiculturality, and gendered play in uses of the human voice.
The chapter discusses audiovisual communication and the construction of transgender subjectivity in the filmTransamerica (dir. Duncan Tucker, 2005), which portrays a male-to-female transgender woman’s journey of self-discovery and parenthood while driving with a teenage son across America. Combining audiovisual analysis with queer and transgender studies, the film is interpreted as a queering—or more precisely, a transgendering—of the standard road movie format, adopted as the means of depicting the culmination of the protagonist’s gender transition. The analysis focuses on how the journey trope of transgenderness is constructed in the film music and sound. Special attention is devoted to the use of American country music to symbolize an identity in transition, the use of music encoded for ethnic identity to highlight transgender people’s social status and create a potentially progressive space of intersectionality and multiculturality, and gendered play in uses of the human voice.