MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Feminism has denied the validity of the transgender experience. Rather, feminism needs to retheorize its understanding of identity in light of new insights offered by the transgender experience in the structural and systemic production of the “liminal” or the “grey” space. This article exposes the nascent vocabulary or language of transgender theory. It also describes the emergence of transgender theory from feminist and queer theories that use social constructivist approaches to challenge essentialist ideas that maintained the oppression of certain gender and sexual identities. These ideas will be examined and applied to the docu-series I Am Cait, which chronicles Caitlyn Jenner’s narrative of first, ‘coming out and, transitioning’ in the first season and then ‘living’ as a woman and being her ‘authentic self’ in the second season. Season one and season two will be examined together as both seasons occur within the first six months of Jenner’s transition. There are, however, some fundamental differences between the two seasons. Caitlyn Jenner is able to give a voice to an otherwise oppressed group, purely because of her celebrity status created by her close association with the Kardashians. The article makes acute observations about Caitlyn with regards to her portrayal of a woman, her manipulation of the media, her role as an advocate for transgenders, her level of acceptance and inclusion and the use of trans as a description for a third gender. This paper is an ethnographic study of Caitlyn Jenner’s reality show based on conversation analysis and an examination of what is being said (explicit meaning) and as well as what is not being said (implicit meaning). The main framing theory consists of representation and the application of what constitutes a documentary and it’s various defining features, described by Francis Bonner in Recording Reality: Documentary Film and Television.