CAEL M KEEGAN

Researcher in LGBT & Queer Studies

Keegan is an expert in LGBTQ Studies whose research specializes in the analysis of transgender media, image production, and aesthetics. Over the course of his career, he has published multiple articles on the global circulation of queer and transgender images, including pieces that investigate the emergence of the transnormative subject in film/television of the Global North, queer juvenility in midcentury American popular melodrama, transgender phenomenologies of image reception, trans masculinities and the visibility dynamics of photographic portraiture, and the political economy of post-2008 LGBT film production.

His current book project, Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Imaging Transgender is the first to interrogate the directors’ filmography (Bound, The Matrix, Sense8) from a transgender studies perspective. Keegan reads the Wachowskis’ films as an aesthetic history of transgender political consciousness as it has evolved discursively in popular media, analyzing how their image-making has influenced the techniques and style of global cinema production. The book claims that, far from being a marginalized or subcultural phenomenon, transgender aesthetics are present and operating at the very center of 21st century global popular culture.

Keegan teaches courses in queer and transgender theory, visual and textual cultures, and LGBTQ social movements at Grand Valley State University. He is currently the national Co-Chair of the Trans/Gender-Variant Caucus of the National Women’s Studies Association in the United States.

“I am thrilled to be representing the groundbreaking and Emmy-nominated documentary series We’ve Been Around in St. Petersburg. Historical narratives about the transgender past, created by and for transgender people, are crucial to locating and finding ourselves in the current moment. Transgender-produced media engage in new ways of approaching not only image creation, but also the ways in which we use images to imagine other times and places. We’ve Been Around is a landmark example of how transgender-produced digital video is altering the form and practice of historiography.”

PRESENTER

EKATERINA MESSOROSH

Trans Activist for T-Action