Catherine Crouch

Catherine Couch
Born United States
Occupation Film director, screenwriter

Catherine Crouch is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, and actor. She has been active in independent film-making for over two decades. Most of her work explores gender, race, and class in lesbian and queer lives. She is most well known for Stranger Inside (2001), Stray Dogs (2002), and The Gendercator(2007).

Controversy

The Gendercator "is a satirical take on surgical body modification and gender. The story uses the 'Rip Van Winkle' model to extrapolate from the feminist 70s to a frightening 2048 where politics and technology have conspired to mandate two gender 'choices': Macho male or Barbie babe. In this dystopian future, those whose gender presentation does not comply will be GENDERCATED."[1] This film became controversial, because it was interpreted as "transphobic"; Crouch, however, stated that the film spoke to an intracommunity queer issue where an over-reliance on gender norms was fast becoming a popular and too narrow way to interpret the vast diversity of queer gender and sex expressions.[2] The film portrays a future dystopic world where gender nonconformity is intolerable and where coerced sex-change operations resolve genderqueerness by aligning each person's masculinity with physical maleness or feminity with physical femaleness.

Transgender community members took issue with the film as transphobic, drawing attention to the use of the word "tranny" in the film's dialogue as well as the director's statement in which Crouch spoke against body modification as solution for all gender dissonance. The Gendercator was pulled from Frameline, and was the first film to be pulled in its 31-year history. Frameline viewed the film, approved it for the LGBT festival and put it into the programming. It is a fantasy film that was to be screened with other futuristic and experimental films in the Outer Limits section.[3] Later Frameline yielded to an online protest with approx 130 signatures from the site Left on SF[4] "News and (mostly) opinion from San Francisco’s economic left", which according to Crouch, only six of which had seen the film. Crouch had been invited to San Francisco by Ondine Kilker[5] to screen her film in the fall of 2007. Currently (2010), The Gendercator is the only film in Frameline's history to ever be removed due to controversy. Crouch has a body of work of nine films, all of which have been screened at Frameline; The Gendercator was the first of Crouch's films to be refused from Frameline although this was done after formal acceptance. Crouch maintains that gender pluralism was the core gender message, and that she was representing a lesbian and queer perspective about binary gender roles rather than a phobic response to the lived experiences of transgender and transsexual people.

Filmography

Director

Screenplays

Cinematography and Sound

Acting

References

  1. ↑ "The Gendercator - Catherine Crouch". Retrieved 2015-09-22.
  2. ↑ Epstein, R (2008). "Canary in a Coal Mine". Sinister Wisdom.
  3. ↑ Frameline Outer Limits section
  4. ↑ Leftinsf.com
  5. ↑ "Ondine Kilker". Retrieved 4 October 2014.
  6. ↑ "IMDb". Retrieved 6 December 2013.
  7. ↑ "Queer Film Review". QFR Interviews Yvonne Welbon. Retrieved 6 September 2008.
  8. ↑ "IMDb". Retrieved 10 November 2013.
  9. ↑ Stranger Inside#cite note-1
  10. ↑ "The Bravenew Theaters".
  11. ↑ "Ruth Ellis, "Oldest Know Lesbian Activist"". Queers in History. Retrieved 30 July 2011.
  12. ↑ "IMDb".

External links

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