Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Throughout the twentieth century, the American public has been fascinated with transsexuals, transvestites, and transgender people. This has led to the trans community being at the center of American popular culture, having both a positive and negative impact on the trans community’s pursuit of nationwide acceptance. Unlike most civil rights’ movements, the battle for transgender rights and protections has not been linear, which can be seen from the way that the trans community has been portrayed in the cinema, the media, and in literature. My thesis is: The portrayal of trans people in popular culture has varied immensely over time, which is a direct reflection of how the public opinion of the trans community has followed the same trend. My methodology was cinema and literary analysis by critiquing how the media, movies, and literature have portrayed trans people over the 20th century. I found that the way trans people have been portrayed and how they’re depicted in popular culture has not been a linear rise. For example, the way that trans people were portrayed in certain films in the 1950s was much more progressive than how they were portrayed in certain films in the 1990s. In conclusion, phenomena such as this are due to popular opinion of trans people varying similarly over time, which can be measured by how the media, cinema, and literature depicted trans people, and how these projects were received at the time.