As trans healthcare access becomes increasingly precarious, leftist discourses around trans care trend towards oversimplification. In reaction to right-wing ideologies that paint gender affirming care for minors as child abuse and for adults as criminal-pathological, liberal commentators describe trans healthcare through a positive dialectic of sickness, treatment, and recovery. This linear narrative erases trans people who are also disabled and/or who have had to medicalize themselves, literally make themselves sick, in order to receive care. Due to austerity social welfare systems, many trans women will remain debilitated long after their neovaginal nerves reconnect. How do we visibilize these women’s stories cinematically in ways that do not further demonize us as navel gazing snowflakes or posit representation as a solution to crises of neoliberal political economy?

To navigate this question, I turn to cinematic narratives of disability and (un)recovery to think through futures of care. In addition to theorizing with own short film Sydney & Kim [2023], this paper looks closely at Todd Haynes’ 1995 film Safe, which describes a binary of capitalist care and New Age care. Haynes’ implicit critique demonstrates the urgency of a third path of care, one that resists atomization. Sydney & Kim is motivated in part by queer cinematic works that index queerness obliquely, exploring what queerness is by showing what it is not. Narrative projects like Haynes’ Safe and Gregg Araki’s TV sitcom pilot This is How the World Ends [2000], employ an apophatic cinema of queerness, exaggerating cisness and straightness to the point of explosion. In a moment when Trans Cinema is still congealing into a genre, I hope Sydney & Kim can offer a cinematic language of refusal, in which the historical failures in achieving trans liberation through recognition inform the filmic structure itself.

PRY is an artistic intervention into the potential and form of the eBook. It argues for a consideration of native media in publishing beyond the simple emulation of print on screen. Composed for the affordances of the iPad, PRY invokes touch along with cinema, game design and literary arts in service of its story world. Here, to read is to pry into a world of unreliable narration and shifted memory where content is not simply juxtaposed, but layered along a 3D reading axis.

The artwork described in this thesis suggests that we consider every sensory experience an active tuning of our senses and ourselves in relation to each other and the world. Through a series of interactive sound and light installations composed of microphones, audio cables, a piano, contact speakers, wind chimes, a camera obscura, a sound score, and the body of the artist’s car, this work emphasizes the interrelated nature of human existence and experience within the many contexts of a given site. Each work suggests reflection on the many systems in which our perceptions are embedded socially, physiologically, and phenomenologically. Each work is tuned to human presence in relation to context, specifically the UCSD MFA Main Gallery and the convention of the thesis itself.

As installation of this exhibition was made impossible by the COVID-19 pandemic, this document outlines the aforementioned exhibition as a score to be realized and also describes an ongoing photo series, live binaural performance, and site-specific music performance made in the artist’s home and broadcast online during the “shelter in place” mandate. These works parallel core conceptual trajectories from the thesis: reorienting perspectives on the overlooked aspects of home and everyday space, and toward the significance of listening and sincere experience in relation to site, place, and others. This work strives to sensitize every aspect of embodied experience to the poetics of the familiar.