Cáel M. Keegan is bringing his cutting-edge research skills on queer media studies to Carleton University as a scholar-in-residence this academic year.
During his stay, Keegan, an associate professor of women, gender and sexuality studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, is working with Carleton’s Transgender Media Lab (TML). TML investigates audio-visual work by transgender, Two Spirit, nonbinary, intersex and gender-nonconforming people. Keegan is collaborating with the lab on a research project related to misrepresentation of the transgender community in the media.
Initially scheduled to come to Ottawa in the fall, Keegan has been working virtually due to COVID-19 restrictions and will arrive in the winter term instead.
While working as a lecturer in American and ethnic studies after completing his PhD, Keegan met various leading scholars in queer media studies across North America. Laura Horak, an associate professor of film studies at Carleton, was introduced to Keegan at a conference on transgender studies.
“We had an amazing time at this conference that was majority trans people. [It was] all people in trans studies presenting their work and thinking together,” Horak said.
Once established in the queer academic circle, Keegan began working on a book looking at the work of transgender media producers, the Wachowski sisters, through a critical transgender lens. Lilly and Lana Wachoswki directed The Matrix series and Speed Racer, and produced the film V for Vendetta along with the 2016 Netflix series Sense 8.
“No one had looked at their work through a critical trans lens in academia,” he said.
In 2016, while Keegan was still in the writing process, Lilly Wachowski came out as trans.
“One day, I was sitting around and I suddenly got 100 Google alerts within four minutes … Then I realized what had happened,” Keegan said.
Keegan published his book, Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender, in late 2018.
Rox Samer, professor of visual and performing arts at Clark University in Massachusetts and longtime collaborator of Keegan’s, said this publication was one of Keegan’s “most intellectually rewarding” projects.
Samer said the excitement surrounding the work didn’t wear off, even after the initial release.
“It was a real delight the next year, too, to see the book out in the world. To talk to other people who are reading it and countering it and engaging with Cáel’s ideas,” Samer said.
With Keegan’s book publication in mind, Horak reconnected with Keegan in 2020 to invite him to a residency with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Carleton and to work with the TML.
Currently, Keegan is writing a new book on the topic of trans representation that explores “bad trans movies,” with help from the Transgender Media Portal, an online database created by the TML team that holds resources and information on transgender media.
“All the movies that people say we shouldn’t watch anymore because they’re transphobic or whatever—I’m staging a defence of ‘bad’, ‘cancelled’ media for being more productive in some ways than some of the more sanitized images of transness we’re getting,” Keegan said.
In the future, Keegan said he would like to see more transgender scholars in academia.
“I’m proud of the stuff I’ve done but I’m aware that a lot of other people are not getting the same opportunities,” he said. “I’ve had to work really hard as a person who’s out as trans and who writes about trans issues.”
Featured image provided by Cáel M. Keegan.
