Public Lecture: Cáel Keegan, “Bound Together: The Sensorial Life of Trans* Media Forms”

Queer media studies scholarship focusing on transgender identity has been primarily concerned with the quality of representation: a politically necessary but narrow focus that fixes the form of what might be considered “transgender” media. Such positivist approaches often treat transgender people as if we pre-exist our mediated significations, obscuring how transgender identities might themselves be generated through aesthetic encounter. Drawing on emergent methods from trans* studies, this talk revisits the Wachowski sisters’ debut film, Bound (1996), to explore how media texts may become trans* through their formal capacities to express transgender sensation. Originally perceived as an exercise in lesbian style, Bound enacts a sensorial pedagogy that reveals how trans* modes of imagination have been historically enfolded with queer desire. To read Bound as a transgender text means abandoning what we think we see to sense otherwise – a trans* method that traces how media forms and transgender phenomena are bound together in a mutually constitutive sensorial life.

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Cáel Keegan is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Liberal Studies at Grand Valley State University. He is the author of Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender (University of Illinois Press, 2018) and co-editor of Somatechnics 8.1: “Cinematic Bodies.” His writing also appears in Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture, Mediekultur, Genders, Transgender Studies Quarterly, Journal of Homosexuality, and Spectator 37.2: “Transgender Media.” Dr Keegan is the Secretary of the Queer Caucus of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.