The cum shot: trans men and visual economies of ejaculation

Abstract

In this article I explore how transgender and cisgender participants in internet-mediated visual and print-based sexual cinematic discourse frame the construction of orgasms among trans masculine and other male-identified, female-assigned at birth, subjects. Specifically, I focus on the visual and linguistic platforms of amateur videos featuring trans men's genitals posted on XTube, a website that hosts user-submitted films as well as space for user commentary. Importantly, the ‘visual’ text of the film content articulates in productive and perhaps unexpected ways with the ‘figurative’ dialogue of language used to frame the video as well as that deployed by posted responses to the film. Situating trans men's genitals as both discursively and phenomenologically managed alongside ‘the privileging of the visual over the figurative’ I focus on employing frameworks of audience reception, how trans men and their sexual interlocutors, as either consumers of film or physical participants, both reproduce and destabilize hegemonic notions of maleness. Specifically, I consider how hegemonic notions of maleness extend to genital function and the politics of ejaculation and ‘cum’, or the bodily fluids produced peri and post orgasm, to reflect the ideological ‘productivity of genitals’ for trans subjects.