Cael M. Keegan (Books)

Cael M. Keegan Books

Cáel M. Keegan delves into the histories and aesthetics of queer and transgender media. His work investigates the circulation, reception, and politics inherent in queer and transgender film, television, and photography. Through this lens, Keegan uncovers the unique impact these forms have had on the media landscape. His approach offers a penetrating look at how queer and transgender representation has shaped, and continues to shape, our understanding of media and society.

Lana and Lilly Wachowski

216 pages
8 hours of reading

4.1(28)Add rating

Lana and Lilly Wachowski have redefined the technically and topically possible while joyfully defying audience expectations. Visionary films like The Matrix trilogy and Cloud Atlas have made them the world's most influential transgender media producers, and their coming out retroactively put trans* aesthetics at the very center of popular American culture. Cáel M. Keegan views the Wachowskis' films as an approach to trans* experience that maps a transgender journey and the promise we might learn "to sense beyond the limits of the given world." Keegan reveals how the filmmakers take up the relationship between identity and coding (be it computers or genes), inheritance and belonging, and how transgender becoming connects to a utopian vision of a post-racial order. Along the way, he theorizes a trans* aesthetic that explores the plasticity of cinema to create new social worlds, new temporalities, and new sensory inputs and outputs. Film comes to disrupt, rearrange, and evolve the cinematic exchange with the senses in the same manner that trans* disrupts, rearranges, and evolves discrete genders and sexes.