Shimmering images : trans cinema, embodiment, and the aesthetics of change / Eliza Steinbock.

Traces how cinema offers alternative ways to understand gender transitions through a specific aesthetics of change. Drawing on Barthe's idea of the "shimmer" and Foucault's notion of sex as a mirage, the author shows how sex and gender can appear mirage-like on film, an effect they label shimmering. The author applies the concept of shimmering - which delineates change in its emergent form as well as the qualities of transforming bodies, images, and affects - to analyses of films that span time and genre. These include examinations of the fantastic and phantasmagorical shimmerings of sex change in Georges Méliès's nineteenth-century trick films and Lili Elbe's 1931 autobiographical writings and photomontage in "Man into Woman." The author also explores more recent documentaries, science fiction, and pornographic and experimental films. Presenting a cinematic philosophy of transgender embodiment that demonstrates how shimmering images mediate transitioning, the author not only offers a corrective to the gender binary orientation of feminist film theory; they open up new means to understand trans ontologies aepistemologiesies as emergent, affective, and processual.