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against a trans narrative

Jules Rosskam

2009 01:01:00 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9DV video

Description

Trans filmmaker Jules Rosskam's against a trans narrative is a provocative and personal experimental documentary investigating dominant constructions of trans-masculine identity, gender, and the nature of community.

By sensitively framing the film through his own personal journey within the trans-masculine community, Rosskam creates an electric and original investigation into gender politics and social self-identity.

Blending fiction, nonfiction, and experimental film genres, against a trans narrative employs a genre-busting combination of intimate diary footage, stylized dramatic scenes, spoken-word performance, faux audition tapes, and roundtable interview footage to explore and initiate a dialogue between feminists, queers, and trans-folk about the way we construct personal and historical narratives.  Careful attention is paid to the ways generation, race, class, and culture impact our understandings of gender.

About Jules Rosskam

Jules Rosskam is an interdisciplinary artist and educator working in photo, text, animation, performance, and video systematically investigating the constructions and regulations of identity-based communities.  Rosskam's work is invested in the places that make us most uncomfortable, the liminal space between truth and fiction, narrative and documentary, performance and reality.  While much of Rosskam's previous work has explored various facets of transgender experience and identity, more generally s/he is concerned with the notions of authenticity that are employed in order to erect boundaries around all identity formations.  On a structural level, Rosskam's video work seeks to disrupt the viewer's experience of "truth" and "knowledge", in favor of both a deeper intellectual understanding of the materials/issues presented as well as an experiential understanding that forgoes cathexis as a mode of affecting the audience.