Abstract
This chapter describes how transgender people and their allies in the US combat trans erasure—the exclusion of trans people, especially trans women of colour, from public discourse and history—by producing transmedia texts (i.e., new versions, re-tellings, or extensions of narratives across multiple platforms) that are trans memory projects. The authors frame these trans memory texts as instances of transmedia activism, in that they bring trans people into American cultural memory and recruit support for the trans rights movement. The trans memory projects discussed are: social media protests against a commemoration of the 1991 documentary Paris is burning and against the Roland Emmerich film Stonewall; crowdfunding campaigns for films about Miss Major Griffin-Gracy and Cece McDonald, as well as for those trans women’s support and maintenance; David France’s documentary The death and life of Marsha P. Johnson and criticisms of that film; and the Ryan Murphy–produced television drama Pose, which employs trans writers, producers, and directors as well as the largest cast of transgender series regulars ever assembled.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
‘Cisgender,’ often shortened to ‘cis,’ is ‘an adjective used to describe someone whose gender identity matches their body and the gender assigned to them at birth—in other words, someone who is not transgender, nonbinary, or intersex’ (The Queer Dictionary, 2014).
- 3.
For example, one tweet from 30 August 2015 read: ‘Did you know Macklemore threw the first brick at Stonewall?’ and another tweet from 12 November 2015 read: ‘A lot of people forget that it was Macklemore who threw the firstbrick at the Stonewall riots,’ both referencing the rapper Macklemore, whose 2012 hit ‘Same Love’ expresses support for LGBTQIA communities and was taken up as anthem for the effort to legalise gay marriage. Stonewall’s depiction of a white male character as the initiator of the Stonewall actions struck some as a parallel of the way that Macklemore, a white heterosexual man, became a prominent representative of the gay marriage movement. The ‘threw the first brick’ meme has persisted to the present day. For instance, on 9 April 2019, one tweet read: ‘JK Rowling: Professor McGonagall threw the first brick at stonewall,’ mocking the fact that, in interviews, author J.K. Rowling has repeatedly retconned (that is, she has introduced a ‘retroactive continuity’ for) her Harry Potter universe to include queer characters and storylines, even though her novels and the films based on them only make brief and veiled allusions to queerness.
- 4.
#Resistance is a hashtag frequently used on social media to mark speech and actions that oppose the administration of US President Donald Trump, specifically the administration’s efforts to target women, immigrants, members of particular ethnic and religious groups, and others for unjust restrictions and persecutions.
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De Kosnik, A., Goldberg, C.H., Havard, J., Johnson, P.M. (2020). Trans Memory as Transmedia Activism. In: Merrill, S., Keightley, E., Daphi, P. (eds) Social Movements, Cultural Memory and Digital Media. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32827-6_2
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