Main Argument in Shimmering Images by Eliza Steinbock

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Main Argument of the Text
In Shimmering Images, the author highlights how cinema offers specific ways of understanding gender transitions through a particular change aesthetic. In this regard, change is a universal experience. The author argues that cinema and trans share unique status in that the heart of both cinematic and transgender embodiment is the transformation potential. The author draws her argument of conceptual shimmers by connecting their cognates and appearance in the work of Michel Foucault, Susan Striker, Gilles Deleuze, Steven Shaviro, and Roland Barthes (Steinbock, 2011). These scholars highlight how shimmering effectively describes the ongoing process of change with the transgender person disrupting the fixed notion of gender for cinemas is process-oriented rather than object-oriented. The author describes the shimmer as a concept and a formal film property. The goal is to explore the potential of cinemas to think and feel in a nonbinary way. Therefore, Steinbock paints shimmer as an umbrella term for how film technologies and transgender operate to display the change theme. Steinbock also invites readers to create their mental constructions of how films attract ways of desiring, knowing, and loving, which are interconnected with the community, identity, and positionality.
Interventions the Author is Aiming To Make and How Well They Have Done It
On page 9, Steinbock outlines her interest in the shimmering images to outplay the binary oppositions that center the paradigm of sex and gender sexuality found in feminist theory. According to the author, transgender embodiment and film are interconnected. Both incorporate liminality, in-betweenness, indeterminacy, ambiguous perceptibility, and intermediacy. Throughout the book's three chapters, the author offers several conceptual models of thinking through various li...