As seen on screen
Juliet Jacques asks whether trans screen roles should be played by trans actors – and points towards the overlapping claims to authenticity which might be involved – one kind resulting from the audience’s knowledge of the performer’s personal biography, and an another derived from the professional skill of the performer in turning out a “realistic” (i.e. naturalistic) performance.
In that respect, the issue begins to resemble the status of lesbian and gay actors, as well as disabled performers – that is, members of marginal communities whose lives have commonly been presented by actors who are not members of those communities, professionals who can “pass” under naturalism.
The standardised response at this point (already at work in the comments on Jacques’ piece) is that “acting is just acting” and that it shouldn’t matter what the actor may or may not be in their private life, providing the performance they create is good. It’s a seemingly reasonable response, but one which cleanly separates the final product from the politics of production – and assumes that the representation of marginal communities can be safely left in the hands of skilled, well-meaning others.
The problem, then, is that it disguises the cultural power involved in the act of representation: you don’t have to be a member of a marginal community to understand that the question of who gets cast tends to be bound up in the question of what kinds of stories get told and which cultural images are circulated and then held to be true. It passes over the fact that not everyone is granted commonly respected or recognised (or indeed recognisable) public lives, and that not everything can be reliably represented by the iconicity of naturalism.
In other words, Jacques’ question may seem irrelevant if you’re reasonably content with the way you have always been represented – with honesty, diversity and some kind of accuracy. It may not be a problem if your cultural visibility (and the legitimacy that goes with it) is secure. It is a problem, though, if your most common experience has been of invisibility, of disempowerment, of having derogatory, stereotypical or simply reductive images presented as authentic if they are even seen at all. If that’s the case, the question of who is involved in telling stories about your life – and the lives of those like you – can become incredibly important, incredibly quickly.