The figure of the trans feminine grotesque emerged from a uniquely American post–World War II mix of hysteria, fascination, and moral panic surrounding gender variance. This lecture traces how the media spectacle of Christine Jorgensen—a trans woman framed as both curiosity and cautionary tale—became entangled with the lurid revelations surrounding serial killer Ed Gein to produce a cinematic shorthand for trans femininity as deception, monstrosity, and threat. This fusion shaped decades of horror cinema, from Psycho and Dressed to Kill to Sleepaway Camp and The Silence of the Lambs, embedding transmisogynist tropes deep within the genre’s visual language.

While horror is often described as an “empathy machine” capable of transforming monsters into tragic anti-heroes, this promise falters when monstrous figures coded as trans women are viewed by trans women themselves. Rather than catharsis, these films confront trans audiences with the limits of reclamation and reconciliation, exposing how difficult it is to liberate such characters from a hostile cisgender gaze. The cultural currency of the trans feminine grotesque has proven remarkably persistent, continuing well into the twenty-first century.

Drawing on her book Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema, Willow Catelyn Maclay examines how these figures were born from voyeurism, medicalised fear, and political anxiety around trans feminine bodies. She situates these representations alongside the lived realities of trans people, tracing how cinema both reflects and reinforces systems of marginalisation. The lecture also considers contemporary interventions by trans filmmakers such as Alice Maio Mackay, Louise Weard, and Jane Schoenbrun, whose work challenges inherited tropes and imagines new possibilities for transness in horror. At the same time, it interrogates the uneasy resurgence of subtly coded trans feminine monstrosities in recent mainstream horror. Ultimately, the talk argues that the history of transness onscreen cannot be told without reckoning with these disreputable figures and with what it means to love a genre that has so often refused to love you back.

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London @ 19:00:00

Berlin @ 20:00:00

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