Online Roundtable and Book Launch: Debating Contemporary Trans TV & Film

Event Description:

This online event will consist of a roundtable debating the state and future of trans film and television, chaired by Dr Missy Molloy (Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington) with panellists Dr Paige Macintosh (Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington), Dr Tof Eklund (Auckland University of Technology) and Char Chadwick (Hong Kong Baptist University). Next, Dr Amy Boyle (University of New South Wales) will introduce Paige Macintosh’s monograph, Debating Authenticity: Authorship, Aesthetics and Embodiment in Trans Media (Edinburgh University Press 2025).

Panel Details:

Dr Missy Molloy (she/her) is a senior lecturer in film at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand, where she lectures on women’s, queer, posthuman and activist cinemas. She is co-author of Screening the Posthuman (Oxford University Press) and co-editor of ReFocus: The Films of Susanne Bier (Edinburgh University Press). Her recent publications include the video essay “Art Cinema’s Suicidal Posthuman Women” ([in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies), and “Indigenous Screen Sovereignty in the Genre Films of Lisa Jackson, Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers and Danis Goulet” (Film-Philosophy).

Dr Paige Macintosh (they/them) is a scholar based in Aotearoa New Zealand working in queer and trans screen media. They are the author of Debating Authenticity: Authorship, Aesthetics and Embodiment in Trans Media (Edinburgh University Press). Past publications include articles for New Review of Film and Television, Screen Bodies, and New Zealand Sociology. Their scholarship explores, among other things, trans cultural capital, Aotearoa trans media culture, and evocations of trans embodiment in genre filmmaking.

Dr Tof Eklund (they/them) is AuDHD, nonbinary, and a lecturer at Auckland University of Technology in Aotearoa New Zealand. Their broad interest in how people find and create meaning has led them to teach, supervise, and study queer media and theory, intersectionality, games, comics, zines, and other odd bits and bobs. They are co-author of a forthcoming book on queer comics, a revised edition of their romantasy novel Autumn Harvest: Maiden is due out in 2026, and their most recent publications are "Can Universities Be Considered Queer Institutions?” with Scott Pilkington and “A crone of judgment: Queen Meve in Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales.”

Charlotte Chadwick (Char) (they/them) is a PhD candidate (HKPFS awardee) in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. Char holds a BA Hons in English and Drama from VUW Te Herenga Waka and Waipapa Taumata Rau University of Auckland, and an MA in Literature at the University of Melbourne. Their dissertation is on Burmeseness and cinema, and their research interests include film, performance, creative practice, globalisation, gender and sexuality.

Book details:

Debating Authenticity merges phenomenology, paratextual analysis, genre studies, cultural theory, and trans scholarship to investigate emerging debates regarding trans media’s authorship, authenticity, and aesthetics across the first two decades of the twenty-first century. By questioning how trans people, both on-and offscreen, are deployed within mainstream cultural industries as representatives of political and cultural progressiveness Paige Macintosh interrogates consultancy roles and their authorship status. Building on trans scholars’ new attention to trans aesthetics, they also consider how scholars might productively counter the charged debates currently informing trans media scholarship by reconsidering the categorisation of trans media and beginning to reroute the power of canonisation from cis industry elites to trans viewers. Looking to genre studies – particularly the intersections of gothic horror, science fiction, and spectacle-driven genres like the musical or melodrama – Macintosh outlines their own variation of trans aesthetics, one that is capable of countering trans cinemas melancholic tendencies.

If you have any questions about this event, please contact Dr Amy Boyle at amy.boyle@unsw.edu.au.