We Walk Among You:Trans Identity Politics Goes to the Movies

Recent legal and social acknowledgement of (some) trans citizenship claims demonstrates the continuing evolution of trans politics and identity and the relationship between socio-political identities and popular culture. This article examines current debates over trans citizenship and identity and argues that certain kinds of identity and citizenship claims have cultural currency in contemporary representations of sex/gender. In order to address these issues, this article highlights key disputes and tensions in contemporary debates about transgender identity, citizenship, and claims to legal rights by examining the ways in which sex/gender identity is portrayed in three films—Cabaret, Transamerica, and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Each film demonstrates various ways of interpreting and reworking the constraints of heteronormative binary notions of sex/gender, and these struggles over meaning are also reflected in the ways in which different articulations of trans identity and citizenship claims have been legally and culturally recognized. The article explores the ways in which particular accounts of trans identity are given primacy within law and how film can help us to reflect upon questions about which sexed/gendered people get to count as legal citizens. The article concludes by reminding us that despite discourses of recognition, it is important to remember the exclusionary, as well as the inclusionary, tendencies of law. </jats:p

The Trouble with Drink: Intoxication, (In)capacity, and the Evaporation of Consent to Sex

The paper explores the contemporary concerns surrounding issues of intoxicated consent in cases of rape, particularly as expressed in U.K. case law, statute, and government policy. During the course of this paper, I will examine recent research on the problematic role of alcohol in sexual assault before going on to discuss specific policy and legislative responses to the problem of intoxicated consent. I will also engage in a close reading of several recent rape cases in the U.K. in which the capacity of the intoxicated complainant to consent to sexual intimacy has been of central concern. The paper deals only with actus reus aspects of how consent unfolds in rape cases, and in particular, what amounts to consent when a woman is extremely intoxicated to the point where her capacity to consent is in doubt