Visual Resources Special Issue

Discussions concerning both the embodied identity and the societal concept of gender have seemingly become more and more ubiquitous in everyday life. The recent release of the critically and culturally beloved Barbie movie laid bare the limitations of essentialist notions of femininity and masculinity while also playfully unwrapping their divergences from and intersections with other embodied identities such as race and sexuality. It would seem, for once, that society has approached something akin to a postgender moment. Yet with such nuances and expansions toward new potentialities of gender, so comes increased backlash, which attempts to reinstate antiquated regimes of a cisgender binary. Across the United States, politicians, right-wing activist groups, and “concerned” parents work to disenfranchise transgender and gender-diverse youth, arguing that such expressions and open discussions around the fluidity of gender promote something akin to child abuse. The direct results of these concerns include a new litany of anti-trans bills aimed at preventing youth from accessing gender-affirming care within states like Texas and Indiana, directly ignoring the advice and findings of medical professionals and pediatricians worldwide.¹

While it is easy for us to separate such rhetoric from its implicit attempts to reinstate what Lee Edelman identifies as “reproductive futurism”,² and the concomitant concerns for expanding a labor market under the seemingly unending grind of late capitalism, the reality remains that for every attempt to push toward a future of gender inclusion, so too comes an attempt to look backward to a past of gender that was defined by the rigid biological essentialism and gender roles bound by equally fixed understandings of what bodies can occupy the public and private space. Perhaps this made the Barbie movie both a site of cultural celebration and one of pointed conservative critique (such as the bizarre rants of Ben Shapiro), with critics alleging the movie to be a sign of “woke” politics aimed at preparing young girls for a matriarchal world order.³ By simply flipping a traditional binary, the movie plays with and speculates on what gender roles and expression look like when femininity is valued, and masculinity is … well, ken-ough. The movie shows that the current enforcement of gender identity and its norms has a basis only in discursive power and that patriarchy is never simply about culture. Imagining a future of different gender possibilities, as such, requires us to contend with our gendered pasts, as well as framings of gender in the present, to unpack, in earnest, how we take for granted gender as a site of embodiment, re/mediation, and expressions.

The articles in this special issue of Visual Resources aim to do just that: to look at gender across a variety of spatiotemporal contexts to interrogate what it tells us about our ongoing understandings of gender and, in turn, how it can help us prepare for and imagine gender within the not too distant future. Ranging from film analysis to archival theory, the articles in this special issue explicate not only what it means to identify and express one’s gender visually, but also how one’s own embodied gender identity impacts the interpretation of gender – within everything from a boxing match to playing video games online. Each article offers wonderfully critical extensions on Judith Butler’s ever-prescient reminder that “gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure” and that it is always a “continuous act.”⁴

In “Visibilizing Queer Futures Past: Ekphrasis and LGBTQIA + Representation in the Philipine Archive,” Gregorio Ill Caliguia offers critical interventions at the site of archival knowledge production. Through the inventive utilization of deconstructionist interventions on archival theory vis-à-vis Derrida and the refiguring potentials of queer theory, Caliguia takes the Philipine archive as a site of future discourse production. Aiming to reexamine the textual potentials of Filipino embodiments within a postcolonial historiography, the article offers ways to read against historical narratives, textual and otherwise, to imagine a queer-inclusive future for Filipino diasporas.

In “Playing with Gender: Trans Men’s Experience Playing with Masculine Characters, Roles and Identities in Online Video Games,” Jeremy Brenner-Levoy deploys qualitative survey and interview methods to explore how the utilization of masculine avatars and identities within online gaming provides generative affordances to trans men to explore their trans identities, while also practicing the complex social performance associated with hegemonic and counterhegemonic masculinities. Brenner-Levoy’s study extends an ever growing set of scholarly endeavors aimed at highlighting the value of online spaces in the production and communal affirmations of transgender embodiment, here offering an emphasis on trans masculinities, which remain chronically overlooked within this scholarship.

In the issue’s other video game-centric article, “Nintendo Switch-ing Genders: Bowsette and the Potentiality of Transgender Video Game Mechanics,” Jennessa Hester reconstructs the fan-created character of Bowsette as an imagined transgender woman within the Nintendo universe. As Hester notes, fans utilized the Super Crown technology from the 2012 New Super Mario Bros. U. game, which allowed the character of Toad to shift to Toadette, as a viable means with which to produce trans potentialities in the Super Mario franchise. While Hester acknowledges that Nintendo includes a series of trans and non-binary characters, the introduction of a device that produces seamless gender transition provided a new method for producing transgender potentials within fanfiction spaces, wherein scholars like Diana Floegel⁵ have asserted queer worldmaking finds a natural home.

Finally, in “Social Avatars and Future Boxing Identities,” Sarah Crews and Solomon Lennox interrogate two separate cases of boxer success at the intersections of gender and race to examine how one produces a social identity both inside and outside of the ring – and how embodying these identities re/produces concepts of success and failure. Specifically, Crews and Lennox juxtapose the damage done to Franchón Crews-Dezurn’s weave during a boxing match and its subsequent internet virality with the claims by boxer Deontay Wilder that his own pre-fight entrance attire caused him to lose a match due to its weight and the ensuing exhaustion. Like Crews-Dezurn’s, Wilder’s image went viral, but with a prolonged outcome where Wilder utilized the virality to produce a series of successful merchandising campaigns, which culminated in his being photoshopped into images as a kind of Afrofuturist king. Crews and Lennox use these case studies to navigate the queer potentialities of the social avatars of professional athletes, while keenly addressing the intersectional contexts informing both virality and economic viability.

Across these four articles, the authors of this special issue examine the constraints, anxieties, pleasures, and potentialities of gender, offering innovative theoretical interventions and new methodological tools to deconstruct and redefine gendered futurities.

Notes

1 M. Funakoshi and D. Raychaudhuri, “The Rise of Anti-Trans Bills in the US,” Reuters (2023, August 19), https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-HEALTHCARE/TRANS-BILLS/zgvorreyapd/

2 L. Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 2.

3 A. Yang, “The Internet Is Roasting Ben Shapiro for Hate-Watching 'Barbie' – While Dressed like Ken,” NBC News (2023, July 23), https://www.nbcnews.com/pop-culture/movies/internet-roasting-ben-shapiro-hate-watching-barbie-dressed-ken-rcna95843

4 J. Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 519–31, at 531.

5 D. Floegel, “Write the Story You Want to Read”: World-Queering through Slash Fanfiction Creation,” Journal of Documentation 76, no. 4 (2020): 785–805.