Posts by Sarah Guinevere Smit

  • Parade Parade and the Phallic Woman Fantasy

    Parade Parade is part of a long tradition of media, especially pornographic media, that fetishizes trans and intersex women as victims and perpetrators of rape. It is also somewhat unusual in its focus on lesbian and long-term relationships.

    Because we marginalized women are considered too unsanitary for the societies we live in, we are forced to look to the margins of media for representation, even if it also dehumanizes us. The narrative violence of the film, to those of us who relate to Kaori’s position, is not at all unlike how the world outside of Parade Parade treats us trans and/or intersex women.

  • Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou and Transgender Cyborgs’ Experience of the Apocalypse

    The story of Alpha Hatsuseno, an android girl in a collapsed world, serves as an allegory for what many transgender people went through during the pandemic. In the solitude and desolation of COVID-19, cut off from the pressures and expectations of society, there was a silent wave of transgender people coming to the realization that they no longer needed to pretend to be someone they were not, beginning their transitions in the midst of death, despair, and loneliness.