Genderbende

For decades, performance artist and writer Kate Bornstein has been exploding binaries and deconstructing gender. And, her own identity. Trans-dyke. Reluctant polyamorist. Sadomasochist. Recovering Scientologist. Pioneering Gender Outlaw. Kate Bornstein Is a Queer and Pleasant Danger, joins her on her latest tour capturing rollicking public performances and painful personal revelations as it bears witness to Kate as a trailblazing artist theorist activist who inhabits a space between male and female with wit, style, and astonishing candor. By turns meditative and playful, the film invites us on a thought provoking journey through Kate's world to seek answers to some of life's biggest questions.

In the indigenous communities around the town of Juchitán, the world is not divided simply into males and females. The local Zapotec people have made room for a third category, which they call “muxes” - men who consider themselves women and live in a socially sanctioned limbo between the two genders.

Are there trans people in the punk movement? How does punk resists in a brazilian state as conservative as Goiás? Is it open to different gender expressions?

Arguing that advertising not only sells things, but also ideas about the world, media scholar Sut Jhally offers a blistering analysis of commercial culture's inability to let go of reactionary gender representations. Jhally's starting point is the breakthrough work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman, whose 1959 book The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life prefigured the growing field of performance studies. Jhally applies Goffman's analysis of the body in print advertising to hundreds of print ads today, uncovering an astonishing pattern of regressive and destructive gender codes. By looking beyond advertising as a medium that simply sells products, and beyond analyses of gender that tend to focus on either biology or objectification, The Codes of Gender offers important insights into the social construction of masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.

A short animated documentary featuring archival recordings of the filmmaker's Volga-German Great-Great-Grandmother, Mary Frank Lind, in which she recalls key memories of childhood—her father's windmill, warm rains, wolf sightings, bone trading, and her passion for carpentry, which broke gender norms but was supported by her father.

Five transgender women share their prison experiences. Interviews with attorneys, doctors, and other experts are also included.

Two girls in their early 20s explore topics of femininity, girlhood, and normalized violence perpetrated on women.

In this modern, coming of age documentary, Naomi, Jojo and Arham grapple with economic divides, gender roles, and family dynamics while competing in the fastest growing high school sport in the country: girl’s wrestling.

An exploration of the space where femininity and criminality collide. The film collages archival footage clips culled from silent films, original footage and computer-generated imagery with a series of narratives drawn from true crime confessions, early criminological texts, and the filmmaker's own reflections. The result is a cool and piercing meditation on the way the categories of "woman" and "criminal" have been constructed.

This documentary is about sexism and masculinity. It’s also a journey through reflections on male condition, an attempt to strip away beliefs, myths and prejudices about masculinity. Why is there violence against women? We try to answer that by the hand of a former pimp trapped by his past and an artist, son of a prostitute, who transforms his pain into provocative performances. In parallel, the class of a high school teacher and a team of publicists become debate scenarios on the same theme, while interspersed reflections of several influential men who address the issue of masculinity from multiple points of view. A rich and complex approach that invites us to reflect on our own gender related education and socialization.

Drag Queens and their cabaret shows are well-known in France, but Drag Kings still remain very much on the sidelines. Chriss Lag traveled all over France and met 22 Kings to bring them front and center.