The film follows the story of Jamie, a struggling butch lesbian actress who gets cast as a man in a film. The main plot is a romantic comedy between Jamie's male alter-ego, "Male Jamie," and Jill, a heterosexual woman on set. The film's subplots include Jamie's bisexual roommate Lola and her cat actor Howard, Lola's abrasive butch German girlfriend Andi, and Jamie's gay Asian friend David.
In the indigenous communities around the town of Juchitán, the world is not divided simply into males and females. The local Zapotec people have made room for a third category, which they call “muxes” - men who consider themselves women and live in a socially sanctioned limbo between the two genders.
Three intersex individuals overcame shame, secrecy and unauthorized surgery throughout their childhoods to enjoy successful adulthoods, choosing to ignore medical advice to conceal their bodies and coming out as who they truly are.
Both a visit to a very peculiar exhibition at the Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden, Germany, as well as an unprejudiced look at the artistic depiction of violence throughout history and the ways in which that depiction has been gendered.
Five transgender women share their prison experiences. Interviews with attorneys, doctors, and other experts are also included.
The documentary by Mari Soppela focuses on glass ceilings, a metaphor for the invisible borders between men and women in work life. Talk about glass ceilings is usually associated with women’s opportunities to advance to well paid managerial positions, but the documentary connects itself more broadly to the structural problems of work life from women’s perspective. Glass ceilings are long trials about equal pay, having to continually prove one’s skills, and 85-cent euros. The topic cannot be handled without intersectional crossings: what are invisible glass ceilings for some, are solid concrete for others.
My Transparent Life chronicles the journey of one trans man, one trans woman and a trans couple as transition from the sex they were born with to the sex they identify with.
Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.
Fred Martinez was a Navajo youth slain at the age of 16 by a man who bragged to his friends that he 'bug-smashed a fag'. But Fred was part of an honored Navajo tradition - the 'nadleeh', or 'two-spirit', who possesses a balance of masculine and feminine traits.
Pidgeon Pagonis, a lead activist and educator from the intersex community, crusades for body autonomy and the freedom to choose one’s own path.
The #MeToo movement has shined much-needed light on the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and abuse and created unprecedented demand for gender violence prevention models that actually work. THE BYSTANDER MOMENT tells the story of one of the most prominent and proven of these models - the innovative bystander approach developed by pioneering scholar and activist Jackson Katz and his colleagues at Northeastern University's Center for the Study of Sport in Society in the 1990s.
An exploration of the Samoan faafafine, boys who are raised as girls, who fulfill a traditional role in Samoan culture. In the past they have shared women's traditional work but today are becoming more westernized and look more like drag queens. Several anthropologists comment on the phenomenon examining issues of culture and gender and the complexities of sexual identity.
Kyle Dean was a misfit in her North Carolina school. She was called "Creature" because she was a boy who knew she was a girl in part of the country where such things were not understood or tolerated. As soon as she could she left North Carolina for Hollywood where she felt that she'd stand more of a chance of becoming who she wanted to be. Now as Stacey she's going back to visit with with Mom and Pop.
Repping best view to date into the world of the Indian eunuch, “Between the Lines: India’s Third Gender” may not answer all the questions it poses, but helmer Thomas Wartmann provides an intimate glimpse at a community whose members are considered pariahs and conduits of supernatural force. Following shutterbug Anita Khemka in her quest to discover why these castrated men fascinate and repel, docu concentrates on three personalities and uses them as guides to their highly stratified world. Under its nautch skirts, film has strong enough legs to step out into international arthouses.
For decades, performance artist and writer Kate Bornstein has been exploding binaries and deconstructing gender. And, her own identity. Trans-dyke. Reluctant polyamorist. Sadomasochist. Recovering Scientologist. Pioneering Gender Outlaw. Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger, joins her on her latest tour capturing rollicking public performances and painful personal revelations as it bears witness to Kate as a trailblazing artist theorist activist who inhabits a space between male and female with wit, style, and astonishing candor. By turns meditative and playful, the film invites us on a thought provoking journey through Kate's world to seek answers to some of life's biggest questions.
In Man Made, Sunny tries to find out what society's ideas regarding masculinity entails. Does testosteron define your masculinity? Can men be victims? And do men suffer under these ideas? In the twentieth century, feminists have fought for the freedom of women and subsequently their emancipation. Is now the time for the emancipation of men, are they next to be set free?
Portraits of six women and their drag king alter-egos.
Two girls in their early 20s explore topics of femininity, girlhood, and normalized violence perpetrated on women.
An exploration of the space where femininity and criminality collide. The film collages archival footage clips culled from silent films, original footage and computer-generated imagery with a series of narratives drawn from true crime confessions, early criminological texts, and the filmmaker's own reflections. The result is a cool and piercing meditation on the way the categories of "woman" and "criminal" have been constructed.
In this modern, coming of age documentary, Naomi, Jojo and Arham grapple with economic divides, gender roles, and family dynamics while competing in the fastest growing high school sport in the country: girl’s wrestling.