making and recording transgender history
by Douglas Messerli
Isabelle Solas (writer and director) Nos corps sont vos
champs de bataille (Our Bodies Are Your Battlefields) / 2021 [documentary]
If you are among those many sis
heterosexuals who believe that transsexuals (women born into male bodies in
which they felt trapped) spend their time once freed into the appropriate
gender by dressing up in gowns, putting on makeup, and coloring their nails,
you need to see Argentine documentarian Isabelle Solas’ film Our Bodies Are
Your Battlefield where we follow the political struggles of several
Argentine and one Peruvian transgender activists who fight long and hard for
their rights and basic civil protections. Focusing on two women, Claudia and
Violeta, Solas presents their long journeys through the years, the friends
who’ve they established in the process, as well as the lonely exhaustion they
must endure for their cause.
These women look very much like the feminist advocates they are,
although often unrecognized as such. In fact, they are at war with so many
forces larger than theirs one wonders, at moments, how they even endure their
chosen avocations; but perhaps it is because they are so denigrated by the
dominate and basically conservative culture in which they live and are equally
ignored and even hated by their sister feminists, that they are forced to make
themselves heard simply to prevent the kind of incidents which this film
chronicles, beginning with a trial from 2018 of man convicted of stabling to
death a major transgender activist, Diana Sacayán in 2015.
In her review of this film in the Washington City Paper, Ella
Feldman nicely describes the first scenes of Solas’ film:
“It opens in an Argentine courtroom,
where a judge delivers a sentence for Gabriel David Marino, who brutally killed
Diana Sacayán, a transgender woman who dedicated her life to advocating for her
community. The judge describes the harrowing details of her murder plainly,
while Marino sits, unflinching. Outside the courthouse, trans women hold signs
condemning “transvesticido,” or transvesticide. (In Argentina, the term
transvestite is embraced by the trans community.)”
The murderer’s conviction, one of the first in Argentine under laws
against gender-motivated hate crimes which Sacayán and the central figures in
this film fought for, was a truly historic event.
From the general past, Solas moves quickly to the specific, introducing
us to Claudia Vásquez Haro, a transgender scholar and activist, in a moment of
private joy as she runs across the sand with five dogs only to join, a moment
later, her mother and sister, laid out on a blanket. Claudia will soon be one
of the level-headed voices central to this story.
She is a Peruvian immigrant who has long lived in La Plata, making
history as the first Argentine trans woman to receive a doctorate degree. Cath
Clarke of The Guardian describes her as “a funny, witty force of nature
who is doing her damnedest to lobby feminist groups for more trans inclusion.”
“Spirited and bold,” observes Feldman, “Vasquez Haro comes alive when she
speaks to crowds at marches and political gatherings. Rights, in her eyes, need
to be demanded, and bodies need to be put on the line.”
She and numerous of her activist friends have come together for the
annual women’s conference, while at the same time the film follows the latest
presidential election which ends, fortunately, with the liberal with liberal
Alberto Fernández ousting right-wing businessman Mauricio Macri.
If you might think these transgender women have every reason and right
to join the feminists on the stand to speak with the vast community of women
still fighting for legal rights, you haven’t encountered the “trans-exclusionary
radical feminists” (TERFs) who, even along with many centrists, resent and
fight the inclusion of transgender individuals in the conference.
Claudia, as we quickly learn, is close to her mother and family who have
supported her at all times; but many of the women for who she battles were
kicked out of their homes at early age for admitting to their parents their
gender dysphoria, and were forced to survive as transgender prostitutes on the
street. They too have fought the patriarchal system that not only denigrates
women but vilifies and attempts to destroy men who identify as women. Most
feminists today can enjoy the relative safety of their heterosexual unions,
while transgender women—whether lesbian, straights, and those who find love
only with other transgender individuals—have few safety nets or legal
protections. Gay men and lesbians have far more rights than transgender
individuals.
Claudia and her friends, however, must fight their way even into the
conference grounds, and when it comes time for the public speeches, Claudia
brings in a gay man dressed in drag to help, with her friends, to literally
lift up her body against the pushes and shoves of the TERFs and others, so that
she too might speak to the issues for which the conference in general argue. *
The second major focus of Solas’ film, Violeta Alegre works as an
anthropologist, and we follow her not through the political melee in which
Claudia is involved, but as a visitor to a group of trans women whom she
intends to interview about their romantic and sexual relationships. Her methods
of resistance include the quieter activities of walking the night streets of
Buenos Aires to paste up posters over political advertisements, and quietly
question the women she meets, discovering a wide divergence among them, which
Solas is eager to identify: as Feldman summarizes, “Some are immigrants, others
are native-born. Some are light-skinned, others are women of color. Some are
lesbians, some are straight. Some are sex workers, others believe sex work should
be abolished.”
At one point in the film Violeta celebrates her 30th birthday, which
brings up the issue of an observation earlier in the film that life expectancy
for transgender women is 32 in Argentina. At the party we see lovers and
friends come together for a joyful gathering of drink and dance, Violeta
herself joining the dance floor and pulling in one of the dancers for gentle,
long kiss.
We get the feeling that Violeta’s life is a kind of never-ending round
of travels where she lectures on the numerous aspects of transgender life that
she has uncovered, it being a sexuality that perhaps was first identified in
scientific papers as late as the late 19th century and had little serious
research before Magnus Hirschfeld’s studies in Weimar Germany, documents
utterly destroyed by the Nazis. What she has learned, accordingly, is essential
to be shared with trans communities wherever they exist.
Near the end of the film, Violeta is feted in a provincial city showing
photographs of black and white images of trans women from other eras,
dressed-up formally for secret balls and celebrations. For the attendees she is
nearly like a goddess bringing them knowledge of who they are and what they
have been.
But it is not an easy life for either the fiery advocate or the
traveling anthropologist/historian who looks tired and fairly lonely, both of
whom have quite literally lived lives, like so very many transgender women,
whose bodies have become the battlefields of others.
*Watching this film for the first
time was somewhat confusing since, as Feldman notes: “The details of this
landscape are largely left for the viewer to infer on their own, a choice that
succeeds in upholding the film’s verité tone, but may be challenging for
viewers unfamiliar with Argentine politics.”
Los Angeles, June 24, 2023
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (June 2023).
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