Race-ing Transsexuality: Speed Racer and the Pace of White Time

• In Event: The Political Valence of Trans Cinema Now: Communities, Conflicts, and Visual Culture

Abstract

This paper uses the Wachowski sisters’ film Speed Racer (2008) to think through how a popular cinema created by trans directors might trace the record of transgender’s 21st century emergence as a deracinated, futurist form that seeks to speed against and beyond the material marks of both transsexuality and racialization. Although their work is often criticized for not achieving a coherently anti-racist imaginary, the Wachowskis have nonetheless produced Western popular culture’s most influential and direct engagement with race from a transgender perspective. Their cinematic deployments of race trace a conundrum also operating at the heart of current debates about transgender: Should trans politics be aimed at eliminating differences—a future in which gender variation no longer exists—or should they be aimed at producing a post-gender system future, in which the meaning of gender variation becomes radically open? Each of these alternatives is an active question in transgender thought, and each imagines an “after” to gender that carries its own homology with race: Postraciality posits reproductive futurity as the dissolution of racial phenotype, while racial sincerity (Jackson, 2005) asks after the new socialities and kinships—the iterations of “speculative blackness” (Carrington, 2016)—that might emerge in the absence of hypodescent.

Mediating with and across these two approaches, the Wachowskis’ work reveals how a trans aesthetics of race might seek to retain both modes, offering a set of aesthetic strategies for working across the divides that currently structure debates about transgender and race. Their seemingly innocuous PG-13 film Speed Racer pits these approaches against one another, exploring how variant forms of contemporary trans life are conceptualized as either “keeping pace with” or “falling behind” the speed of white time--and therefore as either captive within or exceeding the forward edge of modernity. Speed Racer thus stages a cinematic exploration of the threshold where transsexual and transgender diverge within the racial order of time: The film’s aesthetics animate an emergent dialectic between postracial and racialized modalities of trans as they are relatively positioned within 21st century capitalist temporality, tracing how the accelerating pace of trans emergence is shadowed by an uncanny hauntology--racialized transsexuality. Speed Racer thus illustrates the extractive economy in which futurist and postracial expressions of trans often covertly traffic, pointing to how narratives of trans emergence are purchased at the expense of their mattering remainders.

Author

• Cáel M Keegan, Grand Valley State University