Film screening & Get-together Double feature Monika Treut: Gendernauts (1999) and Genderation (2021)

CovidCheck event:

A CovidCheck certificate (paper or digital version) must be presented to attend the event. This rule applies for everyone from 12 years + 2 months and above. Further information about our CovidCheck measures here.

Screening of Gendernauts: update

On Tuesday February 8, as planned, queer loox will show the film Genderation (2021). The screening will be followed by an online discussion with director Monika Treut, live from Hamburg.

The film Gendernauts (1999) will be screened remotely and accessible online until Wednesday, February 9.
URL: https://​vimeo​.com/​2​2​3​5​81641
Password: mtrefM2021

When director Monika Treut set out at the end of the 1990s to make a film about the emerging phenomenon of ​‘trans’ (transgender, transsexuality), it was to San Francisco, the epicentre of the trans scene, that she headed. With her documentary, Gendernauts (1999), she created a cinematic tribute to all the fascinating artists she met during her journey through the land of the new genders. Treut portrayed gender-mixers and sexual cyborgs, who changed their bodies with new technologies and biochemistry and thereby questioned the very existence of ​‘male’ and ​‘female’.

More than two decades later, Treut returns to California to meet again with the protagonists of the Gendernauts: Sandy Stone, Susan Stryker, Stafford and Max Wolf Valerio, the pioneers of the 90s trans movement. Most of them lived in San Francisco, then a haven for outsiders and part of the sexual avantgarde. Today, they are aged between 58 and 84 and are mostly living elsewhere. San Francisco has become the dormitory town of the well-paid employees of the high-tech companies in Silicon Valley. The alternative movement has moved to the less expensive areas.

How have their lives changed in the intervening years? How do these civil-rights activists deal with the right-wing conservative politics that threaten the hard-won rights of social minorities? Gendernauts looks back on a time that now seems utopian and shows us the creative resistance of the gendernauts against the challenging living conditions for trans people.