Tranny, Please!

The statement above I hope encapsulates the videos below which prominently feature trans folks. It supposedly originated with Project Runway's Christian Siriano, who is perhaps one of the more embarrassing members of the family to be featured in the show's programming, particularly noteworthy for his over use of the word "fierce" and his horrific interpretation of a beehive combined with a '70s razor cut, by way of early 90's emo.

Here he is fetishizing Asian's:




1)
Cazwell, "I seen Beyonce at Burger King."


2)
Calpernia "What not to ask a transperson."


Although, I think Calpernia is right in offering a corrective to seemingly well meaning people who read her as a transperson and want the details, she is at times surprisingly condescending, and possibly a classist. I don't really want to make a judgment about whether Calpernia is actually a classist, but I realize there is often problems articulating critique and elevating one's self or group in the mode of humor or comedy. I tend to think that comedy is largely a reactionary mode of expression (the comedic narrative often demands a wedding at its conclusion).

My suspicions, I guess would jive with Henri Bergson's theory about laughter, that it is a fundamentally social gesture, "it's function is to intimidate by humiliating." He links this in particular to how slapstick comedy tends to render individuals as behaving as "mechanisms." So laughter operates as a social corrective to what Bergson calls "antisocial" tendencies. Regis Debray, author of Praise Be Our Lords: A political education, notes that Che Guevara and Fidel Castro were suspicious and horrified by jokes and were never seen laughing. For Debray this suggests their assumed relationship to the "divinity" of history. I am not clear on what to make of this connection however.