Lana and Lilly Wachowski

This book analyzes the filmmaking careers of Lana and Lilly Wachowski as the world’s most influential transgender media producers. Situated at the intersection of trans* studies and black feminist film studies, it argues that the Wachowskis’ cinema has been co-constitutive with the historical appearance of transgender, tracing how their work invents a trans* aesthetics of sensation that has disrupted conventional schemas of race, gender, space, and time. Offering new readings of the Wachowskis’ films and television, it illustrates the previously unsensed presence of transgender in the subtext of queer cinema, in the design of digital video, and in the emergence of a twenty-first-century global cinematic imaginary. It is in the Wachowskis’ art, the author argues, that transgender cultural production most centrally confronts cinema’s construction of reality, and in which white, Western transgender subjectivity most directly impacts global visual culture. Thus, the Wachowskis’ cinema is an inescapable archive for sensing the politics of race and gender in the present moment.