The Dallas Buyers Club

Abstract

The representation of transgender lives on film is of increasing thematic concern within both mainstream and independent cinema. The ways in which filmmakers represent and depict trans* people communicate to audiences certain views about transgender lives and concerns. Production and exhibition of a film provokes engagement with the subject, inviting reading, interpretation, and misinterpretation. Dallas Buyers Club (dir. Jean-Marc Vallee, 2013) sits uneasily with contemporary transliterate (Ford 2014, 2016) audiences. The trans* body is misrepresented through a narrative of negative affect and economic precarity and as a trope erased in cinematic time, through the central character Rayon (Jared Leto), a trans* woman, and the establishment of an HIV medication “buyers club” in the mid-1980s.