“I don’t just want to look female; I want to be beautiful”: theorizing passing as labor in the transition vlogs of Gigi Gorgeous and Natalie Wynn

ABSTRACT

In September 2018, transgender YouTuber Natalie Wynn (aka ContraPoints) released “The Aesthetic,” a video in which she explored the social pressure placed on trans women in the public eye to pass. Taking this video as a starting point, I analyze trans beauty influencer Gigi Gorgeous’s early transition vlogs in which she details her experiences with cosmetic surgery. The narrative Gorgeous constructs in these vlogs, I contend, employs transnormative discourses that center an internal struggle with gender dysphoria. However, I complicate this narrative by placing Gorgeous’s vlogs in conversation with Wynn’s vlog where she recounts her own experience with facial feminization surgery, pointing to the external pressures she faces to conform to beauty norms. I contextualize these narratives within the literatures on aesthetic labor and social media influencers to explore how Gorgeous and Wynn’s desires to pass and to be beautiful are informed by their status as highly visible trans women working in the cultural industries. By theorizing passing as labor, I argue that beautification practices such as cosmetic surgery are investments that trans women in the public eye make in the hopes of attaining social and economic capital.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnormativity
• passing
• cosmetic surgery
• aesthetic labor
• social media influencers

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. TJ Billard, Dr. Aymar Jean Christian, Dr. Willa Dong, Avery Everhart, Dr. Lauren Herold, Dr. Rachel Kuo, and Dr. Michelle Shumate for their invaluable feedback and support during the writing process. I would also like to thank my MTSB colleagues—particularly Mohammad Behroozian, Henry Dambanemuya, Kapil Garg, Nick Hagar, Kerstin Kalke, Mora Matassi, and Abir Saha—for helping me to develop this paper and holding me accountable to a writing schedule. Finally, I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their comments, which helped me to focus and strengthen the arguments made in this paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Wynn is also commonly known as ContraPoints, which is the name of her YouTube channel and not a pseudonym she uses for herself. In this article I refer to her by name.

2. Gigi Gorgeous is Giselle Lazzarato Getty’s pseudonym. I use the name Gigi Gorgeous as this is the name by which she is best known.

3. I use the term influencer as an umbrella term to refer to public figures who are primarily known for their social media presence, including microcelebrities, bloggers and vloggers, and other content creators. See Crystal Abidin’s (2015) similar usage.

4. Gorgeous herself has stated that she chose not to proceed with bottom surgery when she had the opportunity (2019).

5. “Walking while trans” refers to the common perception that anti-loitering laws disproportionately penalize trans women of color, under the assumption that they are sex workers.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Erique Zhang

Erique Zhang (they/she) is a PhD candidate in Northwestern University’s School of Communication. Their research asks how media industries produce normative beauty standards and how transgender women and femmes then understand, navigate, and resist these norms. Erique’s work has been published in Studies in Costume & Performance, Fashion Studies Journal, International Journal of Communication, and Journal of Cinema and Media Studies. Erique is affiliated with the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies and the Center for Applied Transgender Studies.