Dude! Kaitlyn Alexander has a guest spot as a nonbinary photographer on The Bold Type and they are great. Here’s hoping Pamela Dolan gets what is coming to her.
As American cultural consumers of film and TV, many of us are all too familiar with the heralding of white men as knights in shining armor while people of color and LGBTQ+ people are portrayed as manipulative, homicidal, or just plain cruel. From Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs to Melissa Robinson from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective; White Rose on Mr. Robot to CeCe from Pretty Little Liars,media has too often reduced trans women and transfeminine people to nefarious antagonists who are one-dimensionally over-invested in threatening cisgender men’s lives and heterosexuality. The imperative for nuanced queer and trans characters in film and television needs no new argumentation — we deserve to be seen as multifaceted and complex human beings.
However, the hyperbolic trans villainess is needed now more than ever. She challenges the accepted norms often set by glorified heroes. And as queer social movements receive increasing attention from mainstream media, the imaginary of what queer life and community can and should be becomes pacified. What a thought, that cinematic representation does not have to be realistic or naturalistic, gesturing to lives already lived in the world! What if trans women were afforded the cultural space to be unbelievable? And how can that trans fever dream speculate emergent tactics for reshaping our present despotic reality of police violence and U.S. empire expansion?
With mainstream turns to “multifaceted” female characters in film and television, the value of an overstated character has been collapsed to its consideration as a shallow pleasure pump. To be fair, such exaggerated representations often reduce trans women to props that only exist to drive the narrative development of other characters. And while hyperbolic characters can be read as unidimensional and reductive of the complexity of lived experience, the characters I am interested in are the ones whose lives, desires, and flaws are inflated beyond the stratosphere — to the point that they are alien to the social order audiences expect to see.
In a particularly queer fashion, camp is one such style that intentionally explodes reality in its oversignification of behaviors, situations, desires, and loves. Campy villains can resist assimilation by virtue that they are necessarily strangers to friendly neighborhood dinner parties, subjects that glitch any attempted uploading to a LinkedIn profile. And assimilation is worth challenging not necessarily because dinner parties and LinkedIn are the worst things in the world, but because it homogenizes difference. Beyond the party being a total snooze, the campy, disruptive guest is needed to stoke the mutant energy that corrupts a vanilla get-together into a rager to remember.
Some of the most campy, obscene, repulsive, and aggressively subversive trans villainesses, from Babs Johnson in Pink Flamingos to Myra Breckinridge in the self-titled Myra Breckinridge to Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, stunk up the silver screen in the wake of the 1969 Stonewall riots — before Smirnoff apocalyptically sponsored Pride Parades. The characters of Myra, Babs, and Frank-N-Furter are crafted with a purpose that is scarcely seen today: an unapologetic commitment to enfleshing transsexuals, drag queens, and transvestites that do not and cannot exist off-screen due to their simple refusal to adhere to the laws of physics and/or the state. Myra pursues the destruction of manhood itself in a Hollywood stuck in the Golden Age of film. Babs terrorizes Baltimore with her sadistic desire to assume the throne of filthiest person alive. Frank-N-Furter, hailing from Transsexual Transylvania, captures the secret to life itself, engineers a golden-haired hunk, and comes out as an alien.
Just as actual trans women are too good to be stuck portraying the same, dull representations of the gruel of everyday life, these villainesses are too bad to be true: They bust open the wardrobe to a Narnia of worlds that The Cisgenders have monopolized for far too long.
