Seeing Myself, But Not Quite: The Perverse Spectatorship of Transsexual Gay Men

• In Event: Visual Communication: Images and Identities

Abstract

Despite the recent increase in public representations of transsexual men in the United States, those transmen who identify as gay have remained largely absent. This study applies a continuum of spectatorship to examine how gay and non-gay transmen manage their personal and social identities through their relative ability to observe public representations of themselves. This continuum, ranging from spectatorship to perverse spectatorship to oppositional spectatorship, allows for the analysis of varying degrees of identification.

Author

• E. Tristan Booth, Arizona State University