Experience has a way of resisting representation. When it emerges into the sphere of perceptibility, it does so as fleeting refraction. Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change investigates these moments of fugitive recognition, conceiving them as aesthetic, affective, and perceptual events or “shimmers.” Eliza Steinbock intervenes in certain of transgender studies' inaugural queries around embodiment, textuality, and epistemology by attending to the many luminous concordances between transgender life and moving image media. Shimmering Images ventures to understand cinema and transness as engaged in a mutually poietic assemblage, producing effects and affects “through the bodily practice and technological principle of disjunction” (6).
Articulating this affinity anew, Steinbock is following a trajectory in transgender studies that seeks to complicate questions of visibility and representation, marked notably by the paradox introduced by Tourmaline, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton (2017: xv–xvi): increased “positive representation” can also indicate,...
