Cáel Marcas Keegan
Associate Professor in Critical Sexuality Studies and Film/Media, Concordia University (2023-)
Fulbright Canada Distinguished Research Chair in Film Studies, Carleton University (2021-2022)
Special Editor of Arts and Culture, Transgender Studies Quarterly (2020-)
Keegan’s research and writing analyze the histories and theoretical implications of queer and transgender media representation, aesthetic figuration, and cultural production. Keegan is intellectually and politically committed to the critical exploration of the popular and has written extensively on transgender and queer affects, ontologies, and phenomenologies as articulated through popular media formats, platforms, and genres. His recent work is interested in the cultural formation of the transgender imaginary and the problems that realism and indexicality pose to the popular expression of transgender life. His current research project, Bad Trans Objects, explores the emerging phenomenon of the “good” trans subject and argues for an archive of “bad” trans media objects that might help revivify trans liberation by illustrating the imposed nature of both the male/female and cisgender/transgender binaries.
Books
2018
Lana and Lilly Wachowski: Sensing Transgender. University of Illinois Press, 2018. https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p083839
Edited Volumes
2022
“In Focus: Transing Cinema and Media Studies.” Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61.2 (Winter 2022). 162-212. Edited with Laura Horak.
2018
Somatechnics. Special Issue: “Cinematic Bodies.” Co-edited with Laura Horak and Eliza Steinbock. Vol. 8.1 (March 2018).
Articles
2022
“On the Necessity of Bad Trans Objects.” Film Quarterly 75.3 (Spring 2022). 26-37.
2022
“Introduction: Transing Cinema and Media Studies. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61.2 (Winter 2022). 164-68. Cowritten with Laura Horak.
2020
“Against Queer Theory.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 7.3 (August 2020): 349-53.
2018
“Getting Disciplined: What’s Trans* About Queer Studies Now?” Journal of Homosexuality 67.3 (October 2018). 384-97.
-Reprinted in The Transgender Studies Reader Remix. Eds. Susan Stryker and Dylan McCarthy Blackston. (London: Routledge, 2022).
2018
“Cinematic/Trans*/Bodies Now (And Then, and To Come).” Somatechnics 8.1 (March 2018): 1-13. Cowritten with Laura Horak and Eliza Steinbock.
2017
“History, Disrupted: The Aesthetic Gentrification of Queer and Trans Cinema After the Recession.” Social Alternatives 35.3 (Spring 2017): 50-6.
2016
“Revisitation: A Trans Phenomenology of the Media Image.” MedieKultur 61.1-5 (Fall 2016): 26-41.
2016
“On Being the Object of Compromise.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3.1-2 (Spring 2016): 150-7.
2016
“Emptying the Future: Queer Melodramatics and Negative Utopia on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture 1.1. (Jan. 2016): 9-22.
2013
“Queer Sensations: Postwar American Melodrama and the Crisis of Queer Juvenility,” Thymos 7.2 (Fall 2013): 115-29.
2013
“Moving Bodies: Sympathetic Migrations in Transgender Narrativity,” Genders 55 (Spring 2013). Electronic publication. 6,614 words.
Book Chapters
2021
“Mirror Scene: Transgender Aesthetics in The Matrix and Boys Don’t Cry.” In The Oxford Handbook of Queer Cinema. Eds. Ronald Gregg and Amy Villarejo (Oxford: Oxford UP), 491-510.
2021
“Revisiting the Cluster.” In Sense8: Transcending Television. Eds. Rob Stone and Deborah Shaw (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 219-26.
2020
“Transgender Studies, or How to Do Things with Trans*.” In The Cambridge Companion to Queer Studies. Ed. Siobhan B. Somerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 66-78.
2017
“Nothing to Hide: Selfies, Sex, and the Visibility Dilemma in Trans Male Online Cultures.” Co-authored with T. Raun. In Sex in the Digital Age. Eds. Paul G. Nixon and Isabel K. Dusterhoft (New York: Routledge, 2017), 89-100.
2015
“California and the Queer Utopian Imagination.” In A History of California Literature. Ed. Blake Allmendinger (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015), 327-42.
