Warhol's transgender superstars: A materialist examination of the body in cinematic text

Kenneth G Stavitzke, Purdue University

Abstract

Beginning in 1968, Andy Warhol and budding filmmaker Paul Morrissey collaborate with an unusual array of superstars to create three visionary and controversial films that showcase the transgender body as one point of resistance against the hegemonic powers of capitalism. Flesh, Trash, and Women in Revolt are three films-as-texts that introduce, iconize, and commercialize the transgender body through metatheatre, biomythography, and the advent of absurdist cinema. Featuring three transgender superstars (Candy Darling, Jackie Curtis, and Holly Woodlawn), these three texts—upon close examination—reveal how consumerism materially constructs all bodies in oppression through an essential, painful, and binary tension of consumer and commodity. Using pseudo-pornography, psychodrama, and camp style, Warhol-Morrissey celebrates the body as a narrative metalepsis, and the result is an oppressive hyperreality that reckons the body as simultaneous product and process within consumerism. As this oppression further unites all bodies through the death of subjectivity, Warhol-Morrissey employs two salient, unifying motifs within travesty across these three films, and these motifs are maternal bodies and genderless babies. Through these two interrelated motifs, Warhol-Morrissey exploits transgender bodies to deconstruct gender essentialism and challenge reproductive futurism. Despite commercialization, Warhol-Morrissey's triad of transgender films situates sociopolitical activism in the present tense through queer opposition to address urgent inequalities and the painful suffering of bodies within a contemporary world. Within such immediacy, bodies unite forthwith and directly, and future generations do not necessarily inherit the prejudices, disparities, and pain that demand crucial and pressing action today.

Degree

M.A.

Advisors

Morrow, Purdue University.

Subject Area

Philosophy|LGBTQ studies|Gender studies|Film studies

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