GENDERNAUTS by Monika Treut

GENDERNAUTS

by Monika Treut

1999, 86 minutes

Made at the height of the tech boom of the late 1990s, Monika Treut’s Teddy Award-winning Gendernauts is a portrait of a group of trans artists, activists, and academics living in San Francisco—including historian Susan Stryker, web designer Stafford, video artists Jordy Jones and Texas Tomboy, intersex activist Hida Viloria, and “Goddess of Cyberspace” Sandy Stone. Treut also catches up with Annie Sprinkle and Max Wolf Valerio, who she first profiled in 1992’s Female Misbehavior. Viewed now, over 25 years since its initial release, Gendernauts remains a fascinatingly multifaceted look at the way that technology and the internet reshaped trans culture at the close of the 20th century.

"The criticism I get is from people who say, ‘Where's the suffering in this?' I happen to choose to deal with people who choose what they want to become. Transgendered people are one of the best-connected minorities on the Internet. It's the perfect medium for people to have different personas. It's making everyone transgendered in a way." - Monika Treut

FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR: THE FILMS OF MONIKA TREUT

Ever since the release of her debut feature Seduction: The Cruel Woman (made in collaboration with filmmaker and longtime cinematographer Elfi Mikesch) in 1985, Hamburg-based filmmaker Monika Treut has devoted herself to depicting and documenting queer lives on screen, exploring the mysteries and ambiguities of gender, and transgressing repressive sexual mores and ideas. Fiercely controversial in her native Germany—where Die Zeit once proclaimed that “films like Monika Treut’s are destroying cinema”—Treut found much more acceptance for her work in the burgeoning queer film festival and independent film scenes in America, leading to several decadeslong collaborations with queer icons like trans poet Max Wolf Valerio and “post-porn modernist” Annie Sprinkle.

FEMALE MISBEHAVIOR brings the core of the first half of Treut’s career together in the form of recent restorations by the Hamburg Kinemathek. Encompassing both narratives (Virgin Machine, My Father is Coming) and documentaries (Didn’t Do It for Love, Gendernauts), these seven films are fearless explorations of sex and gender that trace the more taboo and less-documented arcs of queer history of the late 20th century.