In this introduction to the special issue Representing Trans, the authors reflect on the radical changes in trans representation between the early 1990s and the present. Through brief reflections on Pose (2018-) and other landmark examples of trans representation in film and television, the authors show how these changes attest to complex interrelations between visibility, recognition, and violence. Beyond the realm of film and television, the introduction also discusses broader media representations that connect the question of visibility to political debates and the regulation of public spaces. Highlighting a variety of trans theorical engagements with different forms of mediality (including literature), the authors propose a more expansive understanding of trans as a reading practice as well as a method of analysing and transing medial forms.

This section includes eighty-six short original essays commissioned for the inaugural issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly. Written by emerging academics, community-based writers, and senior scholars, each essay in this special issue, ''Postposttranssexual: Key Concepts for a Twenty-First-Century Transgender Studies,'' revolves around a particular keyword or concept. Some contributions focus on a concept central to transgender studies; others describe a term of art from another discipline or interdisciplinary area and show how it might relate to transgender studies. While far from providing a complete picture of the field, these keywords begin to elucidate a conceptual vocabulary for transgender studies. Some of the submissions offer a deep and resilient resistance to the entire project of mapping the field terminologically; some reveal yet-unrealized critical potentials for the field; some take existing terms from canonical thinkers and develop the significance for transgender studies; some offer overviews of well-known methodologies and demonstrate their applicability within transgender studies; some suggest how transgender issues play out in various fields; and some map the productive tensions between trans studies and other interdisciplines.

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Trans* is used in this edited volume as an umbrella term including a whole spectrum of identity-generating and/or contingent expressions of gender variability, gender embodiment and non-standard gender identities. The term is also employed for self-designations and life plans in various geopolitical and historical contexts from a decolonial perspective. The asterisk evokes the language of informatics, by which the addition of an asterisk (*) after the entering of a word on a server gives the user access to all entries found that contain said word accompanied by others complementing them (Gómez Beltrán 2018, 425). From this standpoint, Trans* Time: Projecting Transness in European (TV) Series explores multiple and complementary understandings of being trans* and reveals the way trans* people are depicted in European televisual and digital streaming series in France, Great Britain, Italy, Portugal, Spain and the Netherlands. Trans* visibility has reached a peak in recent years, so much so that we can state that we are living in trans* times at present. This peak is especially noticeable in the media, and most specifically in television series, where we are also witnessing a prime time for trans* representations, and hence a trans* time in series. Sophia Burset in Orange is the New Black (Kohan et al./Netflix 2013-2019) or Maura, the protagonist of the series Transparent (Soloway et al./Amazon 2014-2019,) are maybe two of the most internationally well-known examples of this media surge.This visibility is not completely new and does not come from a vacuum. 1 Christine Jorgensen's 'transition' in 1953 favoured the mediatisation of transness in mass media, but did not reach television, since the "topic was considered too risquée for family-oriented entertainment"

Drawing on Heather Love and Dan Irving, this piece argues that Rodrigo García's film Albert Nobbs has a place in transgender studies because it offers a cinematic opportunity to engage in feeling backward, to view sadness, dysphoria, and loneliness as part of an important, (re)current register of transgender affect.