The Essential I/Eye in We: A Black TransFeminist Approach to Ethnographic Film

Abstract

This essay is a critical and creative meditation on the process of making my ethnographic film It Gets Messy in Here (2011), a thirty-two-minute short documentary that examines the experiences of Black and Asian American transgender men and masculine of center queer women in public bathrooms. This essay explicates a Trans* and TransFeminist approach to filmmaking, a transformative film praxis that has the ability to move people to a higher level of self-consciousness about their place in the world and the systems that produce that place. This essay explores an intersubjective and self-reflexive approach to scholarship in hopes that it might produce new knowledge about and for the communities being studied, but also new epistemological platforms for that very knowledge.