Traveling Texts, Transgender Lives: Imaginative Resources, Transcultural Media, and the Globalization of Gender

Abstract

This project investigates non-cisgender people’s use of media from outside of their own cultural location in processes of gender identity formation. I explored questions of which transcultural texts were important to non-cisgender audiences, what they thought about gender representation in media that originated both within and outside of their own cultural sphere, and how these representations mattered to them as they negotiated their own gender variant identities, through a case study along the U.S.-Japan axis of media exchange. I conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 44 participants, 21 from the U.S. and 23 from Japan, between June and September of 2022. Both U.S. and Japanese informants said that transcultural media played an important role in their discovery, understanding, and ongoing negotiation of their gender identities, but their interpretations of the same texts diverged significantly. While U.S. informants praised Japanese media for its transgressive representations of gender fluidity, Japanese informants called Japanese media stereotypical and regressive, and actively avoided media from their own local context. My findings point to the ongoing influence of global power dynamics in which the U.S. is positioned at the “forefront” of global discourses on gender and equality, and also to the significant role of the Internet and streaming media in processes of gender globalization. I utilize the concept of imaginative resources—images and ideas, transmitted through media, that audiences use to (re)imagine themselves and the world around them—to help explain informants’ negotiation of gender in an increasingly globalized and mediatized world. Drawing from hybridity theory, I argue that transcultural media helps audiences access imaginative resources by means of—not in spite of—the cultural distance between production and reception. Cultural distance enables greater polysemy and invites audiences to perform alternative readings of media texts, creating imaginative resources that they can deploy to trouble existing hegemonies.