Mass Communication, Minority Representation, and National Identity: Transgender in Mainstream Australian Television and Film

This paper identifies a significant yet often overlooked tradition of male-to-female transgender representation in mainstream Australian television and film, which has given voice and validity to gender minorities in Australia. The term transgender encompasses a wide range of expressions and experiences of gender that fall outside or between the normative categories of feminine/masculine, male/female. Screen media are powerful instruments of mass communication and this paper looks to mainstream Australian television and film as vital carriers of Australian culture. Over the last half-century, transgender representations have been emerging in Australian screen texts, functioning as ruptures of queer visibility that change ways of seeing and understanding gender and sexuality in Australian culture. Transgender celebrities and reality TV contestants have sustained a queer presence on Australian television, and since the release of The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) a growing selection of transgender characters have appeared in Australian films across varying genres, from comedies to social realism. In evoking queer models of gender, these representations work to destabilise gender binaries; however, this mainstream integration of queer gender-crossing is subject to certain caveats. This paper identifies that a framework has developed for ‘acceptable’ transgender representation in mainstream Australian screen culture, a framework assembled around practical considerations of queer representation in the mainstream, as well as cultural conditions specific to Australian culture and national identity. The framework for mainstream Australian transgender screen representation that has developed over time comprises: the evocation of celebrity; the positioning of transgender as a staged performance; the privileging of a transgender figure that is a white showgirl drag queen; and/or the contrasting of queer male-to-female transgender subjectivities and ‘Aussie’ hetero-masculinities. Despite the limits of this framework, this paper also observes developments in the evolution of transgender representation, finding it to be an adaptable scaffold in the process of expanding to include a more diverse array of Australian subject positions