Project 1: Un Transición Awkward

Project Description:

The project is a video which takes place entirely in a bathroom.  It begins with a stop motion animation portrayal of a day in the life of a Mexican immigrant to America accompanied by a popular mariachi style song.   The immigrant, played by myself in drag, represents one of my male immigrant predecessors dressed in heavy boots and other clothing inspired by the large number of male immigrants living in my neighborhood on East Riverside in Austin.   He begins the day by waking up in a bathtub, dressing, and grooming, and then goes off to work a couple of typical immigrant male-dominated contractor jobs as a fruit picker and a construction worker.   At the end of the day he reaffirms his masculinity for the viewer through the act of shaving his face. 

            At this point, the so far tangible narrative begins to fall apart and become confusing.   The music becomes eerily out of tune and is accompanied by an irritating screech, increasing in volume to a scream as the man shave's his face with a pink-handled women's razor and, after a dark pause, proceeds to shave off his entire head.   The past transforms rapidly into the present with a transition from stop-motion animation to video and a sudden explosion of several loud and fast-paced songs at once.  A frightening video of a doctor delivering a baby in strobe-light flickers in and out of a stop motion animation of myself discarding the male costume and assuming my true present appearance as a 4^th generation immigrant Mexican American queer identified female college student.   This choppy transition is followed by a series of short video clips in which I contrast my freedom and will to experiment with my general appearance and gender expression with the static and limited Mexican American masculinity expressed in the first part of the video.   The clips include footage of myself cutting my own hair, adorning my face with body jewelry, lipstick, and a mustache, and extending my abdomen to imitate how I might look if I were pregnant to a continued soundtrack of fast-paced, chaotic music, now with English lyrics rather than Spanish.   This section also includes a few extremely short video clips of myself actually editing the video, a further image of my agency in authoring my own identity and personal history.  

Among the barrage of images there are also a few still photos of the immigrant applying lipstick to his own face and caring for a newborn infant.   The final clip is of myself as a woman in the construction worker's helmet, pulling back the red shower curtain like a stage curtain to reveal my empty shower followed by a cut to darkness accompanied by the sampled voice of a slideshow narrator reading a quote by Mark Rothko proclaiming that, "It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way, not his way". Watch the video.

How it was made:

The video was made using Adobe Photoshop 7.0 and Adobe Premiere Pro to manipulate and edit photos taken with a 5 mega-pixel Canon digital camera, video taken with a Dell webcam, and mp3 sound file versions of the following songs:

“Duele” –Elida Y Avante

“Like a Dead Bat in a Box, White Matters Go On” –Melt Banana

“Soldier Girl” –The Polyphonic Spree

“Great Escape” –I Am the World Trade Center

“By the Balls” –Vomit Punx

“The Warning” –Hot Chip

“Slideshow at Free University” –Le Tigre

“Sitting” –M83

“My Guru” –Bombay the Hard Way

All acting, costuming, filming, photography, set building, and editing were performed by myself.

Relationship to class readings and discussions and my own experience with trans:

The intention of my project was to reveal trans-related aspects of cross-generational culture change within my own family, focusing on a transition in cultural attitudes and education surrounding the exploration of gender and sexuality.  I chose my own bathroom as the setting for the video because I felt that a great deal of gender and sex exploration happens in the privacy of the bathroom.   The transitions in music and visual images were intended as a reflection of the confusing changes that have occurred in my family over the past few generations.  Aside from this, I included obvious elements of trans such as cross-dressing, national border crossing, body modification, job switching, language switching, and time passage to create an atmosphere of change and identity exploration.  

Several moments in the video were also informed by our class readings and discussions.  The scene in which the immigrant shaves off his own head and disappears into the following confusion was inspired by Jean Baudrillard's fear of the end of signification and the destruction of the modern world by transsexuals as border violators.   The shaving and the following terrifying images are intended to instill the viewer with confusion and a fear of endless liminality and chaos causing a longing for the tangible events of the pre-transitional part of the film.   This longing will not be satisfied as the film does not give in to the fear of fluid boundaries.  The images and music become less frightening and confusing as the viewer is intended to realize that the outcome of this transition is not chaos and destruction, but in fact the construction of new identities and possibilities for self discovery as the result of a less restrictive order.

The second part of the film borrows from Kate Bornstein, Donna Harroway, and Sandy Stone's writings in its attempt to present the possibility of an identity made up of several parts and not confined to the limitations of either role in the gender binary.   Clips of myself actually editing the video are a literal manifestation of our class discussion about inventing your own history and Harroway's claim that knowledge is situated.   The final quote in the film also points to the idea of inventing and protecting one's own individual history from erasure by a master narrative invented by others.