TRACING THE TRANS* IMAGINARY AND ITS SENSORIAL FORMS

(Tron, 1982)

Cáel M. Keegan is Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Grand Valley State University. He is the 2021-2022 Fulbright Canada Distinguished Research Chair of the Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton University. His research analyzes queer and transgender media representation, aesthetic figuration, and cultural production.

Keegan’s book, Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender (University of Illinois Press) stages the first academic analysis of the Wachowski sisters as the world’s most influential transgender media producers. Arguing that the Wachowskis’ careers have been co-constitutive with the historical appearance of transgender, the book traces how their cinema invents a trans* aesthetics of the senses that has progressively disrupted conventional schemas of race, gender, space, and time. It is in the Wachowskis’ art, Keegan posits, that transgender cultural production most centrally confronts cinema’s construction of “the real,” and in which we most directly witness white, Western transgender subjectivity’s effects on global visual culture. Thus, the Wachowskis’ work is an inescapable archive for sensing the politics of both race and gender in the present moment.

(The Matrix, 1999)

Keegan teaches courses in transgender, queer, and feminist theories, popular and visual cultures, American studies, and LGBTQ cultures/identities/histories.

(“Open Source,” Edie Fake)