Vantage Points: On Media as Trans Memoir by Chase Joynt

Chase Joynt is a non-fiction filmmaker and author whose work often focuses on trans themes. His 2022 documentary feature, Framing Agnes, was about a pseudonymized, transgender woman who participated in Harold Garfinkel’s gender health research at UCLA in the 1960s. The New Yorker named the film a Best Movie of the Year. His 2016 book, You Only Live Twice, written with HIV-positive movie artist Mike Hoolboom explores the films of Chris Marker (1921-2012), transition tales, and the particularities of what the authors call ‘second lives.’

In Vantage Points, Joynt reflects on the trauma of being sexually abused by an uncle as a teen and what masculinity means to him now, as a trans man. The framework for the analysis is Marshall McLuhan’s theories of media, which are most well known by the phrase “the medium is the message.” Joynt recounts McLuhan’s simplest explanation: the lightbulb is pure information; it has no content.

If you can puzzle that one out, you may be ready to tackle Joynt’s latest, which is brilliant, frustrating, and deeply sad. “Joynt recalls Sarah McLaughlin’s 1993 album, Tumbling Towards Ecstasy, because it’s what was playing the first time his uncle assaulted him. Though the book is subtitled, Trans Memoir, much of the memoir narrative is about this abusive, criminal relationship. Joynt later transitioned, but the transition story is not told here. What readers will see, however, is Joynt’s two lives – and his bright intelligence.

Joynt’s approach encourages multiple readings, multiple opportunities, paths taken and not taken.

If this is how men behave (abuse their family), then imagine how unsettling it must be for Joynt to emerge into this identity. Look at that verb. Is it the right one? Embrace this identity? Become this identity? There are lots of vantage points, right? Joynt’s approach encourages multiple readings, multiple opportunities, paths taken and not taken. Then he explicates McLuhan under maximum pressure, pointing out, for example, how often McLuhan describes media as extensions of the body – and McLuhan’s imagining of the body is starkly patriarchal.

Why combine McLuhan and memoir? Joynt discovers after the death of a member of his family that he and Marshall share a common ancestor. Just as Joynt must find space for his identity as a man within inherited / disrupted norms of manhood, so too Joynt as artist must grapple with the frameworks of storytelling / interpretation McLuhan represented. Joynt makes use of insights shared by Sarah Sharma (co-editor) and others in Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan (2022).

This is a slim, dense book, one that is as much art object as argument. It makes use of typography and printing styles in the manner McLuhan did in books like Counterblast (1969). In a world full of shocks and countershocks, Joynt shakes the patriarchy in this amazing counterblast of his own.

In a world full of shocks and countershocks, Joynt shakes the patriarchy in this amazing counterblast of his own.

In a September 2024 interview with BOMB magazine, Joynt ponders if a memoir can represent all of life’s complexities:

Is it possible to think and represent all of these things together? So often, the trajectories—and market demands—of life writing require authors to choose a lane: Is this a trans book or a media studies book? Is it about masculinity? Violence? Family? Archives? Marshall McLuhan?

He answers, “Yes.”

Chase Joynt is a director and writer whose films have won more than twenty-five jury and audience awards internationally. His latest documentary feature, Framing Agnes, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award. Joynt is the author of the Lambda Literary Award finalist You Only Live Twice (co-authored with Mike Hoolboom) and Boys Don’t Cry (co-authored with Morgan M. Page).

Publisher: Arsenal Pulp Press (September 17, 2024)
Paperback 7″ x 4″ | 256 pages
ISBN: 9781551529578

Michael Bryson

Michael Bryson has been reviewing books since the 1990s in publications such as The Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Paragraph Magazine, Id Magazine, and Quill & Quire. His short story collections include Thirteen Shades of Black and White (1999) and The Lizard and Other Stories (2009). His fiction has appeared in Best Canadian Stories and other anthologies. His story Survival is available as a Kindle single. From 1999-2018, he oversaw 78 issues of fiction, poetry, reviews, author interviews, essays, and other features at The Danforth Review. He lives in Scarborough, Ontario, and blogs at Art/Life: Scribblings.