General Editor's Introduction

Abstract

I have long been confounded, as a brown transsexual as much as a scholar and historian of trans of color life, with the realism ascribed to the 2015 film Tangerine, a Sundance hit that chronicles the Christmas Eve of Sindee and Alexandra, two trans women of color and best friends hustling the streets of Los Angeles. Certainly the film’s director, Sean Baker, who describes Tangerine as “an entertaining film and socialist-realist film,” lent the term to critics and reviewers. Much was likewise made of the fact that Tangerinewas shot entirely on iPhones with two lead actresses who actually lived in the life, serving as Baker’s supposed “conduit to the world of transgender prostitution around the Hollywood intersection of Santa Monica Boulevard and Highland Avenue,” as one review put it (Thompson 2015). Yet the claim of realism, of the specific location and authenticity of Sindee’s and Alexandra’s performances, has always struck me as infelicitous. Much like the cis men who buy sex from the protagonists, the celebration of Tangerine’s ostensible realism has always seemed, to me, to say much more about the desires and projective expectations of its audience than what the film depicts—a work of fiction, need it be repeated, no matter how much it might be said to be verité. Why would Sindee and Alexandra reflect realism as opposed to, say, realness, a term actually invented by Black and brown trans femmes? Perhaps the answer has something to do with how trans women of color and Black trans women, especially when saturated with sensational narratives of sex work, poverty, and transsexual desire, have long been a punching bag for not only mass culture but also high theory. Think only of Judith Butler’s (1997) egregious (but quite typical for queer theory at the time) reading of Venus Xtravaganza’s death in Paris Is Burning as some kind of inevitable comeuppance for her literal failure and ideological failure to be queer enough to righteously subvert the desire for a happy, safe life. Even in the 1990s, when the word transgenderwas still in its AngloAmerican infancy, both as a term used by social service organizations working with poor trans women of color sex workers and as an umbrella category for