Darren Arquero GWS 210: Sexual Subjects Race, Gender and National Bodies Final Paper To Hell with

h that Man Business!: Gender Anxieties in The Salt Mines and The Transformation Panning the dismal space of out-of-service garbage trucks against a dreary city skyline, the camera introduces us to Sara, a self-identified Latina transvestite working as a prostitute in New York City. A diamond in the rough with goldilocks hair similar to Farah Fawcett of the 1970s, she is presented as both a seasoned veteran of the streets and a mentor to Gigi and Giovana, two other transvestite prostitutes whom we also meet in the film. As an image of grace surrounded by the squalor of poverty, disease, and death, Sara is also an image of queer defiance, seemingly unfazed by her physical environment and oppressive life experiences as an exile from Cuba and a refugee of the Mariel boatlift. One year later we meet Sara again only this time, Pastor Terry Wier is our medium to her life, or rather, death as a woman and born again into a man. Sara is now Ricardo, transformed by his devotion to the Christian faith and teachings of a heteronormative lifestyle. While the Salt Mines (1990) follows the lives of Gigi, Giovana, and Sara as they make a home among the salt deposits used by the New York Sanitation Department to clear away snow in the winter, The Transformation (1995) centers on Saras new life as Ricardo, undergoing the transition in order to be rescued by a conservative Christian ministry after discovering she is HIV positive. As seen in these documentary films, how is it possible that, in the space of cinematic time, what once was an image of queer defiance Sara in The Salt Mines becomes the epitome of queer failure and Christian fundamentalist triumph, as embodied in Ricardo in The Transformation? Ultimately, what relationship between reality and representation do these two documentaries suggest? Viewed side-by-side, The Salt Mines and The Transformation charts a series of dynamic

Arquero 2 ambiguities and continual movements across differences of race, sexuality, gender, class, and religion. Moreover, and more troublingly, the latter film does not offer a picture perfect conclusion to Ricardos new life as a born-again Christian who is happily married to the woman of his dreams. Rather, it ends with a brutally honest moment in which Ricardo, now physically impaired by the onslaught of the AIDS virus, reveals his desire that if he still had a choice, I would choose to be a woman. Concluding on a somber affect that leaves viewers stunned at Ricardos self-confession, The Transformation challenges the notion of fixed, visible, and documentable reality as captured in The Salt Mines. Although the use of observational documentary allows filmmakers Susana Aikin and Carlos Aparicio to illustrate the myriad possibilities of representational tactics available to apprehend very elusive subjectivities,1 it also demonstrates the role of documentaries as instances of discourse rather than window[s] on unscripted, undirected, unrehearsed, and unperformed realit[ies].2 Nevertheless, I would argue, the force of these films stems from the fact that they remain narratives grounded in some version of actuality and experience, involving social actors as opposed to stock characters. By engaging the visual texts as offered in these films, this essay explores the incongruities that exist between authenticity and representation as seen on screen. As separate texts, The Salt Mines and The Transformation also offer distinct examples of what Donna Haraway has termed situated knowledges, self-conscious and critical images of living in meanings and bodies that have a chance for the future.3 The questions they raise are thus linked and different: while The Salt Mines looks at a particular group of transvestites in order
1

Kathleen McHugh, Irony and Dissembling: Queer Tactics for Experimental Documentary, in Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary, ed. Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 225. 2 Thomas Waugh, Walking on Tippy Toes: Lesbian and Gay Liberation Documentary of the Post-Stonewall Period 1969-84, in Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary, ed. Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 110. 3 Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1991), 187.

Arquero 3 to question the precarious nature of queer kinship formations in public spaces, The Transformation follows the new Christian life of Ricardo (Sara in The Salt Mines) to demonstrate the forceful nature of ideological state apparatuses to borrow Althussers term in constructing and maintaining the dominant norm of cisgender heterosexuality. In using Cynthia Fuchs description of the self-conscious representations of documentary conventions, The Salt Mines and the Transformation ultimately map a constellation of anxieties about queer expression, verification, and representation by complicating traditional links between visibility and identity and, in particular, by insisting that race, gender, class and, I would add, religion are inextricable from sexuality in any conception of identity or reality.4 Technique for Visibility: Queer Reframing in Observational Documentary In Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image, Roger Hallas (2009) examines a corpus of queer films and videos made between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s in response to the AIDS epidemics in North America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa. While he does not incorporate The Salt Mines or The Transformation as films within his body of queer AIDS media, Hallas use of the term reframing is particularly useful for my analysis of the two documentaries. Hallas explains how his archive of queer AIDS media radically reframes not only the representation of HIV/AIDS but also the mediated spaces in which they circulated.5 As these films are neither mere ideological critiques of the dominant media representation of the epidemic nor corrective attempts to produce positive images of people living with HIV/AIDS, their importance lies in the ability to document both the individual and collective trauma of AIDS. As he clarifies further:
4

Cynthia Fuchs, Hard to Believe: Reality Anxieties in Without You Im Nothing, Paris is Burning, and Dunyementaries, in Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary, ed. Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 191. 5 Roger Hallas, Introduction, in Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 3.

Arquero 4 This discursive act required a sustained dialectical tension between directly attesting to the medical, psychological, and political imperatives produced by AIDS and contesting the enunciative position available to people with HIV/AIDS in dominant media representations, which had consistently subjected their speech to either a shaming abjection or a universalistic humanism. Moreover, the dialectical dynamic of these works reframed not only the bodies of the witnesses seen and heard on the screen but also the relationship of such represented bodies to the diverse viewing bodies in front of the screen.6 In line with Hallas description, The Transformation highlights the specific capacity of documentary to bear witness to the historical trauma of AIDS, as evidenced by the circumstances that inform Saras decision to become Ricardo. However, unlike the films analyzed by Hallas that also document the culture of care emerging from the queer communitys response to the epidemics effects of illness, death, and loss, The Transformation does not incorporate AIDS activism or any type of political mobilization against queer discrimination. Rather, and more tellingly, the film attest to the ways in which dominant discursive regimes as depicted through Terry Wiers use of religious rhetoric have the power to shape queer bodies into right subjects. In using Althusser, to what set of interpellating calls does Sara respond? Because Aiken and Aparicio reframe the discourse on AIDS within narratives of the ordinary and everyday versus through sensationalist accounts, The Salt Mines and The Transformation must also be understood as falling within the observational mode of documentary filmmaking. In Bill Nichols influential study (2001) of contemporary documentary film, he identifies six types, or modes, of documentary. While his classification scheme recognizes the performative mode as particularly salient for social groups who have been historically shunned from the lens of the camera, it is the observational mode of documentary that is at play within Aiken and Aparicios films. Arising from technological innovations of the 1960s that made
6

Ibid.

Arquero 5 possible mobile lightweight cameras and portable sound recording equipment, observational documentary allows the viewer to get an intimate and immediate sense of individual human character in quotidian life. As Nichols elaborates further the perspective of observational documentaries: We look in on life as it is lived. Social actors engage with one another, ignoring the filmmakers. Often the characters are caught up in pressing demands or a crisis of their own. This requires their attention and draws it away from the presence of the filmmakers. The scenes tend, like fiction, to reveal aspects of character and individuality. We make inferences and come to conclusions on the basis of behavior we observe or overhear. The filmmakers retirement to the position of observer calls on the viewer to take a more active role in determining the significance of what is said and done.7 From Nichols description, viewers of both The Salt Mines and The Transformation see and hear firsthand the daily struggles of Gigi, Giovana, and Sara ranging from material conflicts between Gigi and Giovana over feminine articles of clothing and hormone injections to better pass as women, to the internal struggles of Ricardo as he questions his decision to transition for communal and social belonging outside of his former life in the streets as Sara. The viewer of observational documentaries thus becomes a fly on the wall: you observe without intruding, you listen without eavesdropping. The social commitment of observational documentary is wholly apparent, then, given the presence of the camera on the scene that records daily events and lived experiences in the historical world. However, this also affirms a sense of fidelity to what occurs that can pass on events to us as if they simply happened when they have, in fact, been constructed to have that very appearance.8 This constructed nature ultimately demonstrates the power of the queer moving
7

Bill Nichols, How Can We Describe the Observational, Participatory, Reflexive, and Performative Modes of Documentary Film?, in Introduction to Documentary, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 174. 8 Ibid., 177, emphasis added.

Arquero 6 image to simultaneously depict the historical world as it participates in the fabrication of the historical world itself. Given this assertion, how do we read the representations of Gigi, Giovana, and particularly Sara: are they agents of their own reality, or is it the artistic choices of the filmmakers themselves that makes conceivable the agency (or lack thereof) we see on film? From this conceptual mapping, I would now like to move to a consideration of The Salt Mines and The Transformation to what they suggest about reality and representation of queers on and off screen. The Salt Mines: Who Are the Salt People? The Salt Mines is the first of two documentaries about the lives of Gigi, Giovana, and Sara, three Latina transvestite prostitutes living among heaps of snow-melting salt, pieces of scrap metal and debris, and broken-down garbage trucks converted into makeshift homes in an area cordoned off by the Sanitation Department of New York. As the camera provides a glimpse into the everyday and internal realities of these three transvestite women covering their distinct personal histories of family abandonment, experiences of coming out, and their decline from drugs to prostitution and vice versa the viewer encounters images of abjection depicted through nonnormative bodies, subjects who are spatially and socially confined to the lower rungs of society. While the film chronicles the relations among the three close friends as they navigate the evening streets of Manhattan to support their ongoing drug addictions, it also provides the viewer a glimpse into the varied community of homeless people they inhabit The Salt Mines with, affectionately known as The Salt People. From J.R., a male-identified crack addict, to Ruben, a black gay male whom we later learn develops AIDS through prostitution, The Salt Mines depicts a community of exiles who cling to each other for mutual aid and support. In a culture which appears to arrange always and in every way for the annihilation of queers,9 as Judith Butler reminds us, The Salt
9

Judith Butler, Gender is Burning: Questions of Appropriation and Subversion, in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 124.

Arquero 7 Mines is depicted as a safe haven for outcasts of mainstream society. This is most evident through the statement of recently unemployed Bobby, another member of this shunned community, who emphatically declares: [I] got laid off. [I] used to see people who stayed at The Salt Mines and decided to stay with them. Our lifestyles are different, you know? They go out, they hustle. As far as tricks, selling your body, thats not my thing. [However] I dont condemn them because theyre my friends right now. As far as Im concerned, theyre my family. By offering a window into understanding the ethics of association and sociality between strangers and anonymous individuals who, through recurring encounters, become familiar with each other,10 the use of observational documentary creates an intimacy among the viewer and the community of The Salt People projected on screen, thus making their cinematic experiences a part of historical reality. Ranging from George Chaunceys (1994) seminal account of vice districts in Manhattan that illuminated urban gay life and culture in New York City from 1890-1940, to Nayan Shahs (2011) recent study of intimate relations among transient male laborers in the United States and Canada at the turn of the twentieth century, The Salt Mines draws attention to queer kinship formations absent in conventional accounts on poverty, homelessness, and prostitution in New York City. Moreover, despite the difference in medium from Chauncey and Shahs written historical texts, the use of film nonetheless reveals the way people manipulate the spatial and cultural complexity of the city to constitute neighborhoods and community despite the interference of outside agencies and institutions.11 Specifically, an analysis of Gigi, Giovana, and Saras testimonies provides a rich picture of the cultural terrain on which they navigate, a space
10

Nayan Shah, Policing Strangers and Borderlands, in Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 60. 11 Ibid., 59. * The latter group will be elaborated further in the next section.

Arquero 8 often intruded by people malevolent to queer identities and by born-again Christians benevolent to saving transgender people through the healing power of Jesus Christ.* Dressed in a black leather jacket and faux denim jeans with thinly sculpted eyebrows, Gigi provides the first testimony into a day in the life of living in the salt. While her narrative speaks strongly to the everyday struggles for food, clean water, and protection from the elements, I want to focus on two aspects of her story that stress the precarity of transgender lives within public spaces, as well as the identification she makes of being and feeling like a woman. First stating that life in the street is miserable and its more so for us because we are also living in the street, Gigi goes on to provide an example of avoiding a certain city block notorious for shooting transvestite prostitutes with pellet guns. Additionally, she explains her move from the salt deposits to making a home inside the spaces of dilapidated garbage trucks because of persistent police surveillance. These two examples lend weight to the films importance in highlighting otherwise hidden histories of queer lives that are silenced and erased by a society dominated by heterosexual and gender normative regimes of power. The Salt People, even in their abjection, are ultimately seen as beings that threaten the greater social order and thus warrant government control and suppression. This assertion is most poignantly demonstrated at the end of the film where the removal of salt by plows in the winter stands in as a metaphor for the destruction and disintegration of queer public spaces and culture, as described in such works as Samuel Delanys (1999) Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. In speaking to the urban centers redevelopment for the safety and wellbeing of tourists and families, the city instituted not only a violent reconfiguration of its own landscape but also a legal and moral revamping of its own discursive structures, changing laws about sex, health, and zoning, in the course of which it has been willing, and even anxious, to

Arquero 9 exploit everything from homophobia and AIDS to family values and fear of drugs.12 As Gigi acts as a tour guide of The Salt Mines, showing the viewer the barbed wire fence erected around the now-abandoned space she once called home at the conclusion of the film, the documentary functions as a piece of evidence to demonstrate the impact of repression in the lives of The Salt People. Within the space of New York City, as the film alludes to, individuals like Gigi, Giovana, and Sara are not allowed or welcomed to exist in their difference as transvestite prostitutes of color. In terms of Gigis discussion of identifying as a woman, she speaks candidly to the camera about her revelation, at the age of 13, of feeling she was a woman encased in the body of a man. The viewer soon learns that this identification is what leads to her exclusion and loss of support from her family, led by her mothers lack of acceptance of what Gayle Salamon calls the felt sense of the body that Gigi experiences.13 Moreover, the viewer watches as Gigi becomes tearyeyed when speaking about the admiration she holds for her father, a man who accepted his childs identification with something other than their assigned gender at birth. We thus empathize with Gigis affective loss and longing for her fathers love. What is interesting about this scene is the way it explores what it means to be embodied and the subsequent costs, consequences, and sacrifices of living out that embodiment. In discussing Gigis felt sense of the body versus her bodily materiality, it is useful to invoke Salamons summary of the connection psychoanalyst Paul Schilder makes between the two via the body image: We only have recourse to our bodies through a body image, a psychic representation of the body that is constructed over time. The body image is multiple (any person always has
12

Samuel Delany, Writers Preface, in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 1999), xi-xii. 13 Gayle Salamon, Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 2.

Arquero 10 more than one), it is flexible (its configuration changes over time), it arises from our relations with other people, and its contours are only rarely identical to the contours of the body as it is perceived from the outside.14 She then states, Thus our sense of the body image, the postural model of the body, is a sedimented effect without a stable reference or predictable content, since it may be different in form and shape, moment to moment, through each new iteration.15 As understood from this description, the (trans) body is a site that encompasses an abundance of materiality and meaning, which denaturalizes gender the presumed binary categories of male and female as a selfevident or natural fact. This assertion is not one held by Gigis mother, whose lack of recognition of genders constructed nature causes her eventual rejection of Gigi that leads to her ousting on the streets of New York. Despite her fear of not being able to see her father as he ages toward death, the documentary frames Gigis embodiment of a female subjectivity as more than enough reason to sever immediate family ties. As Salamon quotes Schilder to further explain that changes in the body-image tend immediately to become changes in the body,16 the viewer recognizes this on screen with the use of hormone injections by Gigi and Giovana to better pass as women. Conspicuously absent from this scene, however, is Sara, whom we later learn is staying at the Terminal Hotel at the end of the film. Given this conclusion to The Salt Mines, it then comes as a surprise when The Transformation presents us with Ricardo, the formerly homeless transvestite prostitute once known as Sara. I now turn to a reading of the film to analyze the power of Christian rhetoric that informs Saras transformation to become a cisgender, heterosexual man we are confronted with on screen. Ultimately, Ricardos presence in the second film speaks to the shaky grounds on which

14 15

Ibid., 29. Ibid., 30. 16 Ibid, 32.

Arquero 11 observational documentary can capture reality as experienced in everyday life. The Transformation: The Interpolating Calls of the Christian Church The opening scene of The Transformation, the companion piece to The Salt Mines, resembles that of an expository film more so than an observational documentary. Within the introductory frame we are presented with a photo album held open by two white hands: on the right side of the album we recognize a black and white photo of Sara, while on the left side we see another black and white photo of a person assumed to be male, given the cues by their gender presentation in posture, demeanor, and clothing. As the camera focuses on these two photos, we hear the voice of Pastor Terry Wier, whom the viewer learns is the one holding the album. Speaking contemptuously about Saras life on the street as a prostitute and transvestite, he then reveals to the viewer that the photos we are looking at are of the same person: Sara is now Ricardo with the help of Terrys Dallas ministry of born-again Christians who, in his life as the former, was missing an aspect of his identity that did not make him a whole person, and thus is the reason why he ended up on the streets. As Terry states, [Ricardo] never knew what it was to be a man. Terrys opening narrative introduces a moral and ideological perspective that sets up the chronological sequence of the documentary, which chiefly follows the life of Ricardo as a churchgoing and married man in Dallas who has renounced his gender presentation as female, as well as his homosexuality, for the sake of a life espoused in biblical scriptures. The Transformation also highlights the power at work through the personhood of Terry, whose missionary goal of saving transvestites and drag queens through offerings of shelter and monetary assistance comes at a deep price: the renunciation of their queer identity in order to become subjects of the Christian Church and to experience the redeeming grace of Jesus Christ. By highlighting the point of view of Ricardos new life from two distinct yet interrelated narratives, The Transformation raises provocative questions regarding gender identity and the strive toward

Arquero 12 self-determination. Given the films conclusion with Ricardos painful disclosure of wishing he could once again become a woman, the piece ultimately questions whether authentic conversion and representation can be achieved, respectively in the life of Ricardo/Sara and within the medium of documentary film itself. Up until the concluding five minutes of the film, the camera provides a perspective of Ricardo that presents him in what seems to be a genuinely cheerful and happy demeanor. Here the documentary records and acts as evidence of Ricardos transformation into a cisgender and heteronormative man by accomplishing what are considered milestones within American society. From tying the knot with Betty, another member of Terrys church in Dallas, to moving into a new home to start a nuclear family, the viewer listens to Ricardos chilling words of appreciation and gratitude for contracting AIDS, the virus that enabled him to lose any semblance of Sara and that brought him within the fold of the Christian Church. As he relates in a rather charismatic tone: I thank God that I have AIDS. If I hadnt found out I was HIV positive, I wouldnt have come off the street and I wouldnt have devoted myself to God. I am not a fanatic: I just love you the way God loves me and it doesnt matter if you are a hooker or a crook because Ive been there before. Ricardos narrative and new subjectivity as a born-again Christian is further supported by the filmmakers inclusion of interviews with Jim and Robby, a church couple from Terrys ministry whom the viewer learns provided shelter and mentorship to Ricardo on the correct ways to be a man. These interviews support Schilders assertion that the body image is something that is flexible and can arise out of relations with other people, considering the responsibility placed upon Jim and Robby in helping to discipline Ricardo with male mannerisms for, as Jimmy proudly relates, If something needs fixing, it's generally fixed by the man.... So I started showing him how

Arquero 13 to do things, showing him how to do a little yard work, things he had never done before. This statement automatically creates a binary model of gender in which masculinity is defined by what it is not, which is embodied in all things that are weak, submissive, and incapable or, stereotypes of what it means to be feminine. Here Robby speaks for Ricardo by saying, He had a heavy desire that no one would look at him and see any kind of female mannerisms or traits. He worked at it very hard. She goes on further to state: He never believed he could be anything ever different than a homosexual Then all in a sudden he had a desire for women that he never had before. You know, a helpmate, a wife. He couldnt believe that the Lord could do that for him. And when he met Betty, that was it. It was history from there. I include this quote to highlight the gross conflation that Robby makes between gender and sexuality, in which sexuality replaces something that is really an issue of gender for Ricardo. In Susan Strykers (2004) commentary on the relationship between trans and gay and lesbian studies in Transgender Studies: Queer Theorys Evil Twin, she rightly asserts that all too often transgender phenomena are misapprehended through a lens that privileges sexual orientation and sexual identity as the primary means of differing from heteronormativity. Most disturbingly, transgender increasingly functions as the site in which to contain all gender trouble, thereby helping secure both homosexuality and heterosexuality as stable and normative categories of personhood. This has damaging, isolative political corollaries. 17 While the exploration of this question is beyond the scope of this paper, are such damaging [and] isolative political corollaries symbolized through Ricardos regret and eventual death at the end of the film? Turning now to Terry Wiers role in the documentary, The Transformation characterizes him as the pastor Ricardo/Sara relies on for guidance (read: material and financial support) after
17

Susan Stryker, Transgender Studies: Queer Theorys Evil Twin, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 2 (2004): 214.

Arquero 14 discovering he is HIV positive. Terry, in describing the significance of his ministry for the salvation of transvestites and prostitutes, justifies his missionary work through constant appeals to biblical scriptures. Specifically, he invokes Bible verses that speak to the similarities that exist between transgender individuals and eunuchs in biblical narratives, who he states are people born without the desire for the opposite sex and who are upheld to a higher standard within the Kingdom of Heaven. Here he cites Matthew 19:12 to self-righteously state: Satan says you are either a man, woman, or gay. God says you are either a man, woman, or eunuch. This leads him to conclude that, given their privileged status in the afterlife, transvestites should rejoice in their temporal suffering because in a theology of sanctification through suffering, earthly trials will lead to greater glory in heaven.18 This example is just one out of the many instances throughout the film in which Terrys appeal to Christian fundamentalist rhetoric justifies his patrolling of queer identities. In God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence, Michael Cobb (2006) describes Christian speech as a forceful entity, describing religious rhetoric as a secure form of language: Its semantic security reveals something unique about religious rhetoric, at least in the United States: theres something about Western religious language mostly white Anglo Protestant Christian religious language that makes one feel its importance for reasons well beyond the actual content the language communicates. This seemingly inherent social conservatism of religious language guards, if not creates, a nation that does not want to have its foundational social organization, the family, substantially and systematically changed or challenged.19 Cobbs analysis helps to demonstrate how Terrys use of Christian theological discourse becomes the complicit actor in some of the worst forms of social coercion and injustice seen in the
18 19

For more information, see 1 Pet. 4:12-19 NRSV. Michael Cobb, God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 22.

Arquero 15 documentary, evidenced by Ricardos regret at becoming a man at the end of the film. Moreover, theologian Dale Martin provides the most striking critique of Christian fundamentalists as represented by Terry, Jimmy, and Robby who use theological discourse to justify oppression. Martin states that such Christians fail to understand the simple concept that the Bible does not speak: When people talk about what the Bible says, they are using a metaphor that has confused them into thinking that the Bible actually exercises its own agency in telling people what to do. The fact is, the Bible, or any text, cannot speak Real knowledge of the text of scripture and the history of Christian churches shows that opposition to [LGBT] Christians and their full inclusion in the church is motivated not by loyalty to scripture and tradition but by prejudice and discrimination.20 Given Terrys use of the Bible as a rule book to sustain a life of Christian morality for Ricardo and the transvestites he proselytizes in the streets of New York, its contemporary use as an epistemological foundation for ethics is ultimately what informs the walking away of queer individuals from any type of organized religion. Consequently, Why does Ricardo stay? becomes a key question for viewers at the end of the film, when it is revealed that Ricardos story is selfishly used for fundraising efforts by Terrys church to build a live-in program for transvestites, drag queens, and other gender variant people to free themselves from sin. As the documentary concludes with a follow-up with Ricardo a year after the films initial recording, we hear his final words in the film: I repented for my past life and now when I think about everything I lived, I get very emotional. [However] I remember some of it as beautiful because the real truth is that I enjoyed it If I still had the choice, even if I could change my life right now even now that I have my wife and everything I would choose to be a woman.

20

Dale Basil Martin, The Misuse and Abuse of Scripture and Tradition, The Anglican Communion, June 15, 2007, http://www.anglicancommunion.org/listening/book_resources/docs/Dale%20martin.scripture.tradition.pdf.

Arquero 16 The Transformation thus leaves its viewers with a lingering and haunting question: does Terrys ministry really save Ricardo, or has it forced him to make a grave sacrifice of living a life of fulfillment as Sara? Conclusion: Reflexivity and Documenting Reality When questioned about Ricardo in The Transformation, co-filmmaker Susana Aikin reflects: I think there are many layers in what happened to Ricardo. There was a material layer where he basically transformed from a very marginal social person to an integrated social being into our mainstream society. I think also that he went through a spiritual change in the sense that he learned to appreciate himself better as a human being But in terms of whether he became a straight man, I think were talking about very shifty things here, and I think the film speaks for itself.21 Presented with Aikins acknowledgement of the shifty nature of Ricardos identification as a born-again Christian and a newly straight man, the documentary ceases to be purely observational. Rather, it becomes one that is reflexive in nature, as Aikin and Aparicio ask the viewers themselves to see documentary for what it really is: a construction and/or representation. As Nichols explains this mode of documentary, Rather than following the filmmaker in his or her engagement with other social actors, we now attend to the filmmakers engagement with us, speaking not only about the historical world but about the problems and issues of representing it as well.22 As the filmmakers allow space for the viewing audience to come to their own conclusion of Ricardos life, we are allowed to question how The Salt Mines and The Transformation represent the historical world, as well as to what gets represented.23 Furthermore, as both films function as politically reflexive documentaries, The Salt Mines
21

POV The Transformation, POV - Acclaimed Point-of-View Documentary Films | PBS, July 9, 1996, http://www.pbs.org/pov/thetransformation/film_description.php. 22 Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 194. 23 Ibid.

Arquero 17 and The Transformation permit us to engage and reframe our assumptions and expectations about the historical world more than about film form.24 Such visual texts call social conventions into question; so while the former film involves most of the aspects of observational documentary, it also seeks to produce a heightened consciousness about the marginalization and policing of queer public life and sexuality in the contemporary world. It counters the prevailing tropes of transvestite prostitutes with radically different representations and displaces them with innovative forms of queer kinship relations despite the hardships of poverty, illness, and death that defines homelessness in urban spaces. In terms of the latter documentary, The Transformation challenges entrenched notions of the goodwill of Christian missionary work and serves to give name and face to what was once before invisible: the oppression and destruction caused by Christian fundamentalist rhetoric. Specifically, Ricardos painful transformation acts to support a new way of seeing, a distinct perspective on the social order created when the code of the penetrator to use Robert Goss term to describe people who employ a heteronormative reading of the Bible is taken to be the literal word of God in all matters of the secular.25 Although this paper has detailed the lives of Gigi and Sara/Ricardo as (re)presented on screen, I would like to conclude with a final comment on the transformation Giovana undergoes between the two documentaries for the positive implications it has for the future. Like her two close friends, Giovanas presence on the streets is defined by drug use and prostitution, but with one major difference: we also learn of her dreams to escape the confines of The Salt Mines, replete with a job and a home that [she] can go to. To be looked and be treated like a regular human being. Its simple. As she bluntly questions, Its not too much to ask for, is it? While such dreams exists as phantasms in the first film, the second documentary demonstrates those visions
24 25

Ibid., 198 Robert Goss, Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus Acted Up (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2002), 187.

Arquero 18 becoming a reality. Here we meet Giovana again; and while she goes through a similar transformation to Ricardo, her change is not one of becoming a man through the saving grace of Christianity. Rather, it is a transformation to live fully as herself a woman living at home with her mother and sister, two individuals who respect and understand Giovanas felt sense of the body. Taken together, the trans narratives of Gigi, Giovana, and Sara/Ricardo, as stated by Paige Johnson, point the way to a different understanding of how bodies mean, how representation works, and what counts as legitimate knowledge, all of which are epistemological concerns [that] have material consequences for the quality of transgender lives.26 Ultimately, the heightened consciousness these films induce their viewers to achieve opens up a gap between knowledge and desire, between what is and what might be. Politically reflexive documentaries point to us as viewers and social actors, not to films, as the agents who can bridge this gap between what exists and the new forms we can make from it.27

26 27

Paige Johnson, Trans Studies (GWS 210 Keyword Entry, University of California, Berkeley, 2012), 2-3. Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 199.

Arquero 19 Bibliography Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. Chauncey, George. Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Cobb, Michael. God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Delany, Samuel. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Fuchs, Cynthia Fuchs. Hard to Believe: Reality Anxieties in Without You Im Nothing, Paris is Burning, and Dunyementaries. In Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary, ed. Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Goss, Robert. Queering Christ: Beyond Jesus Acted Up. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2002. Hallas, Roger. Introduction. In Reframing Bodies: AIDS, Bearing Witness, and the Queer Moving Image. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. Haraway, Donna. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Routledge, 1991. Johnson, Paige. Trans Studies. GWS 210 Keyword Entry, University of California, Berkeley, 2012. Martin, Dale Basil. The Misuse and Abuse of Scripture and Tradition. The Anglican Communion. June 15, 2007. http://www.anglicancommunion.org/listening/book_ resources/docs/Dale%20martin.scripture.tradition.pdf. McHugh, Kathleen. Irony and Dissembling: Queer Tactics for Experimental Documentary. In Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary, ed. Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Nichols, Bill. How Can We Describe the Observational, Participatory, Reflexive, and Performative Modes of Documentary Film? In Introduction to Documentary. 2nd ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010. POV The Transformation. POV - Acclaimed Point-of-View Documentary Films | PBS. July 9, 1996. http://www.pbs.org/pov/thetransformation/film_description.php.

Arquero 20 Salamon, Gayle. Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Shah, Nayan. Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Stryker, Susan. Transgender Studies: Queer Theorys Evil Twin. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 10, no. 2 (2004): 212-215. Waugh, Thomas. Walking on Tippy Toes: Lesbian and Gay Liberation Documentary of the Post-Stonewall Period 1969-84. In Between the Sheets, in the Streets: Queer, Lesbian, Gay Documentary, ed. Chris Holmlund and Cynthia Fuchs. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 110.