The aim of this special issue is to enable a dialogue between masculinity studies and transgender studies and attempt to find common areas of inquiry and mutual knowledge production in such conventionally divided arenas. The contributions to the issue explore a multiplicity of masculinities, which are seen as situational positions that can be deployed and activated by a variety of bodies, and in this way attempt to de-essentialize masculinity as grounded in a cis-male body. In this introduction, we discuss how masculinity studies have approached transgender issues, its general lack of interest in trans masculinities, as well as how transgender studies have related to masculinity theorizing.

Trans Cinema and its Exit Scapes offers a critical and creative intervention into cultural representations of gendered body dissidence in contemporary film. The study argues for the possibility of finding spaces of "disidentification", so-called "exit scapes" within the films. Exit scapes disrupt the dominant cinematic regime set up for the trans character, which ties them into stories of discrimination, humiliation and violence. In Trans Cinema, for instance films such as Hedwig and the Angry Inch (2001), Transamerica (2005), Romeos (2011) and Laurence Anyways (2012), scenes of singing, dancing and dreaming allow a different form of engagement with the films. As argued here, they allow a critical re-reading and an affirmative re-imagining of trans embodiment. The aim of this study is to investigate the utopian and hopeful potential within Trans Cinema from a critical transfeminist perspective. While focusing in particular on trans entrants as "spectators" or readers, this study draws on the work of a wide range of feminist and cultural scholars, such as Sara Ahmed, Susan Stryker, José Esteban Muñoz, Trinh T.Minh-Ha, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway.The thesis etches out cinematic spatiotemporalities that unfold possibilities of utopian worlding and trans becoming through a set of conceptual innovations. By utilising a critical approach to audio-visuality and feminist film theory, the thesis re-conceptualises haptic spectatorship theory and its critique in western modernist ocularcentricism through a set of conceptual innovations. The methodological tools developed in this thesis, such as the "entrant", the "exit scape" and "sensible cinematic intra-activity", feature here as a multisensorial methodology for transdisciplinary transgender studies and feminist film theory as well as visual culture at large. T r a n s C i n e m a a n D i T s e X i T s C a P e s T r a n s C i n e m a a n D i T s e X i T s C a P e s a T ransF emi nisT re a D i nG O F U TO P ian sensi B i Li T Y anD G en D er D issi D en C e i n CO n T em POra rY F i L m W i B k e s T raU B e

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Part I VulnerabIlIty as a battleground 2 Negotiating vulnerability in the trigger warning debates 29 Katariina Kyrölä 3 Trigger happy From content warning to censorship 51 Jack Halberstam 4 Feminist hurt/ feminism hurts 59 Sara Ahmed Part II VulnerabIlIty and VIsIbIlIty 5 Little pink White fragility and black social death 71 Ylva Habel 6 Visibility and vulnerability Translatina world-making in The Salt Mines and Wildness 95 Laura Horak 7 White vulnerability and the politics of reproduction in Top of the Lake: China Girl

This article is an exploration of trans and non-binary representation in independent Swedish film productions. Two award-winning films, Pojktanten (She Male Snails, 2012) and Nånting måste gå sönder (Something Must Break, 2014), created by director Ester Martin Bergsmark (in collaboration with author Eli Levén), will be in focus and discussed through their ecological aesthetics that build on what I call intimate otherness. The two films represent not only a significant debut moment for Swedish trans cinema, but also offer a radical engagement with nature and the unnatural. While Bergsmark’s films incite a vivid aestheticisation of environmental pollution, ranging from items of garbage in the forest to untidyrooms, unwashed clothes, and dirty bathing water, the films’ ecological aesthetics, as I argue, imagine an enchanted space in which the trans body emerges as livable. Historically reduced to an “unnatural” and “contaminated” embodiment, trans bodies in the films form an intimate otherness with non-human objects and landscapes at the urban peripheries, at the margins of normativity and productivity. The films’ ecological aesthetics shift gender non-conformity from “unnatural” into a possibility. These aesthetics, I suggest, unfold into a gender-dissident´ landscape of rebellious and poetic, intimate otherness.