Gender & Women's Studies

"Don’t Ask, Just Watch: Black Transmasculinity, Military Policy, and Contemporary Television" by Dr. Adrian King.

This lecture focuses on the intersection of trans representation in media and LGBTQ military policy through the roles of actor Marquise Vilsón, a Black trans man. In particular, I focus on Vilsón’s appearance as a participant in the 2005 documentary The Aggressives and his guest star character in a 2018 episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit (SVU) titled "Service.” By putting these two pieces of media in conversation, I demonstrate how emerging projects of trans representation, particularly of Black transmasculinity, can be both incorporated into dominant modes of media and the US national imaginary. This work comes out of my larger project on Black transmasculinity on television that examines how trans representation on television, trans institutional inclusion, and trans rights were ideologically connected under the framework of trans visibility in the United States for the last 15 years.

Adrian King is Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow in Trans Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.