Eliza Steinbock
Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change
– Durham and London: Duke University Press, March 2019
Monograph 2019

About

In Shimmering Images I trace 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 George 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.

Awards

“Best First Book” of 2019 by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Reviews

Critical Inquiry, Art Journal, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Journal for Media History, Feral Feminisms, Screen Bodies. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Experience, Perception, and Display, Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry

Buy

Buy the Book here, 30% discount code at Duke UP is P19SHIMR and for EU orders through Combined Academic the code is CSP19SHIMM.