In Shimmering Images Eliza Steinbock traces how cinema offers alternative ways to understand gender transitions through a specific aesthetics of change. Drawing on Barthes's idea...

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

Author: Eliza Steinbock
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 03/01/2019
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.52d
ISBN: 9781478003885

About the Author
Eliza Steinbock is Professor and Chair of Transgender Studies, Art and Cultural Activism in the Department of Literature and Art, Maastricht University.