Celebrating transness: Tangerine and the iPhone

ABSTRACT

Filming with unconventional apparatuses and techniques is one way to intervene in and complicate cisnormative visual grammars. In employing the iPhone as a filming device for depicting trans characters, Sean Baker’s Tangerine expands possibilities for visual expression while foregrounding and celebrating difference both at the level of film and identity.

KEYWORDS:

• iPhone
• Tangerine
• transness
• cisnormative
• perception

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Stephanie A. Graves, Mary Hocks, Peter R. Nennig, and David E. St. John for their thoughtful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Viewers can reasonably infer that Razmik specifically seeks out people who present as women but who have a penis given that, in a previous scene, Razmik mistakes a cis sexworker for a trans sexworker and angrily dismisses her from his car once he discovers she has a vagina.