The Cisnormative Wall: Distinguishing Gazes in Modern American Television and Film Featuring Transgender Characters (2013-2020)

This thesis analyzed modern American television and film works: "The Danish Girl (2015)," "Orange is the New Black (2013)," "Dallas Buyers Club (2013)," "POSE (2018)" and "Euphoria (2019)," in relation to the transgender representations they presented onscreen. The works were selected after what TIME magazine called the "Transgender Tipping Point," in response to the recent increased visibility of transgender characters in media. This thesis argues that increased visibility does not equate to positive impacts on the lives of real-life people who are transgender. The television and film works are used to discuss transgender tropes as depicted onscreen and in real-life, and to articulate the nuances that decipher cisnormative gazes from transnormative gazes. All of these pieces take a run at cisnormative assumptions that have traditionally excluded transgender people from the mainstream. What is at stake is whether they do enough to break through what I call the cisnormative wall, the cisnormative rhetoric that prevails in the United States. When dealing with the representation of transgender characters, the first question that arises is: Is the character portrayed by a cisgender or transgender person? Other important questions I explore are: Is the transgender character minimized to simply their transgender status? Does the work conflate sex, sexuality, and gender identity — intrinsically linking sexuality to gender expression? And can the transgender character be categorized as “victim� or “villain?� (As previous representations have cast these titles upon them). Using both qualitative and statistical data, this thesis incorporates a combination of television and film analysis using Transgender Studies texts and statistical data centering the transgender population living in the United States to place the works on a spectrum from cisnormative to transnormative.