coming out of my cage and, damn, i haven’t been doing too fine! i’ve been autopilot-ing through my world for too long. autopilot-ing doesn’t feel like the most ethical way of doing and being. frankly, some of this autopilot comes from seeing everything from a grief and loss perspective: as much as life is about transformation, it is also about loss. another part of this autopilot is my somatic burnout. i feel it in my stomach upset, headaches that remind me of when i was drinking, shaky hands. (how much of this burnout pertains to losses of my own, we shall see.)
studying loss from psychosocial and cognitive perspectives place much of my political and faith beliefs into a clearer view. this essay combines, i think, my seminarian and sociological imaginations to think through a film you all should watch if you haven’t already. (also, the soundtrack by Matthew Herbert is a miracle that i’ve been listening to nonstop. it features Daniela Vega, an opera singer who plays Marina, the lead, in A Fantastic Woman, the film I’m writing to you about.)
this one goes out to all my trans and gender-nonconforming lovelies. i see your grief. i see you.
content notice: transphobia in all forms, anti-LGBTQ, anti-Latinx, and anti-trans hate crimes, environmental racism, partial nudity in screengrabs, and movie spoilers!!!
Reflecting on the hate crime massacre at Pulse, a gay nightclub frequented by predominantly Latinx LGBTQ+ people in Orlando, Florida in 2013, Raechel Tiffe (2017) asks, “What is it to live with ubiquitous grief, with the trauma of probable death?” (p. 533). In the same essay, Tiffe tends to the final text message sent from a friend, also Latinx and queer. The friend recognizes the future, “the horizon” (Tiffe, 2017, p. 536), in the author just before his death. Futurity and death interweave through the lives of many LGBTQ+ people. Yet the friend charges the author to be more grievable –– and therefore more visible, more outspoken, more livable –– than spectral in life and in death. Queer death studies tease out a claim made by gender scholar Judith Butler: those who are grievable led livable lives, human lives (Butler, 2004, as cited by Whitestone, Giles, & Linz, 2020). To look towards the horizon is to profess the humanity of LGBTQ+ people, particularly LGBTQ+ people of color. This paper looks to the horizon of transgender death studies and calls for care that centers the bereavement experiences of transgender people, whose grief is “made unliveable” (Goret-Hansen, 2021, p. 608, in Alasuutari, et al., 2021) by structural, cultural, and interpersonal disenfranchisement.
Using the 2017 film A Fantastic Woman, I’m arguing that bereaved transgender women experience cumulative losses that include disenfranchised grief (Doka & Martin, 2002) and forced de-transition via stigma wrought from cisnormative familial and legal structures (Whitestone, Giles, & Linz, 2020). Marina, a young transgender woman working as a singer and waitress in Santiago, Chile, loses her partner, Orlando, after he experiences a brain aneurysm. In the wake of his death, Marina and Orlando’s romantic relationship is challenged by Orlando’s ex-wife and son, as well as a detective who insists that Marina was a sex worker victimized by Orlando, twenty years her senior. Orlando’s son and the detective try to force de-transition upon Marina, but she moves through this violence –– and her grief –– in a way that suggests familiarity with loss. Although Marina’s familiarity with loss is reflected in her gravitation to coping strategies including music and hitting a punching bag, the film is careful to not equate psychosocial losses Marina has likely experienced as a trans woman (Matsuno & Israel, 2018) to her grief for Orlando. She decides to transgress grieving rules that are meant to exclude her, and ultimately risks her life to attend Orlando’s funeral. Hallucinations and searching for continuing bonds with Orlando mark her grief as a familiar-yet-unfamiliar loss (Simpleton, 2015). Balancing normal-yet-unsettling signs of grief, A Fantastic Woman succeeds in depicting a trans woman’s grief without pathologizing it (Clarke, 2017). Because the film implicates the cisgender viewer in this tendency to pathologize, I understand this film as an essential addition to models of transgender resilience (Matsuno and Israel, 2018) and queer death studies. Recommendations for using the film as a case study for professional development will be offered at the paper’s end.
Acknowledgment of Limitations
This paper contains limitations to understanding and caring for bereaved transgender women of color. While the film does not address anti-Black, negative racialization in Chile (Doig-Acuña, 2020), it is important to name that this paper and other scholarly works will inadvertently perpetuate the whitewashing of queer and/or death studies (Tiffe, 2017). Research around queer bereavement surveys majority-White populations, and many samples are majority-cisgender as well (Alasuutari 2021; Bristowe, Marshall, &Hardin, 2016; Whitestone, Giles, & Linz, 2020). As multidisciplinary approaches to death studies become more prevalent, practitioners working with LGBTQ+ populations must be careful not to pathologize queer Black and Brown grievers (Clarke, 2017). Clarke (2017) names that diagnostic categories including complicated grief or ambiguous loss impose exacting linearity onto the tasks of grief. In a U.S.-specific context, grief is always complicated and ambiguous for negatively racialized people because, historically and systemically, their losses go “unmourned and [are] barred from recognition” (Simpleton, 2015, 4). Advancing Freud’s pathology of melancholia, both Simpleton and Clarke suggest that grief both unmoors and settles the self in Black people generally, and in queer Black people specifically. This grief –– the grief that is and is not melancholia –– is the grief that is “irresolvable” (Cheng, 2001, as cited by Clarke, 2017) for negatively racialized people living in a neocolonial police state.
Disenfranchised Griefs: LGBTQ+ Experiences of Loss
Disenfranchised grief, a term proposed by Doka and Martin (2002), is contextual in that certain types of loss, mourners, and grief will always be legitimated by societal and legal norms, while others are excluded. Transgender women are at risk of all three types of disenfranchisement; this will be discussed at length in the following section. More often than not, however, literature on disenfranchisement and LGBTQ+ persons locate disenfranchised loss within families of transgender people, going as far as to suggest that gender-affirming transition is a type of loss or even death (Alasuutari, et al., 2021; Talusan, 2019; Weaver, 2020). Some families, through heteronormative mourning rituals and legal pressures, force transgender people to de-transition after death (Weaver, 2020; Whitestone, Giles, & Linz, 2020; Wojick, 2009). Weaver (2020) discusses the interplay between postmortem detransition and detransition through disenfranchisement in her case study of two deaths of transgender women. Postmortem detransition is defined as the “verbal, visual, and material rejection of a person’s gender identity” in and after death (Weaver, 2020, p. 61). Examples of postmortem detransition abound –– Leelah Alcorn, Jennifer Gable, Lourival Bezerra de Sá, Riah Milton, Dominique “Rem’mie” Fells, Brayla Stone, Shaki Peters (Paterson, 2020) –– where gravemarkers, obituaries, and police reports purposely misrepresent the gender identity of the dead. I emphasize purposely because these trans people were well known as transgender to their loved ones and communities. Police departments, for one, have a longstanding history of incarcerating transgender people in facilities that do not align with their gender identity (National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, 2017). Too often, transgender people of color are targeted by police for “walking while trans” (Lopez, 2015), code for being profiled as a sex worker or drug dealer. After death, police scrutinize and misrepresent trans lives, at times with the support of birth family, clinicians, lawyers, and even funeral home directors (Wojick, 2009).
Forced detransitioning also occurs in the bereavement of transgender people, who are criminalized, pathologized, and perceived as harbingers of death (Alasuutari 2021; Alasuutari, et al., 2021; Bristowe, Marshall, & Harding, 2016). This latter type of violent detransitioning can take place by requiring documentation of the relationship to the deceased; by negating relationships to the deceased (e.g., that a relationship between two trans women was a relationship between two gay men); and by anticipating or experiencing transphobic, homophobic, sex work-related, and/or HIV/AIDS-related stigma during the mourning process. In the context of grief, many experiences of disenfranchisement are in fact violent. Updating Doka’s original definition (1989, 2002), Corr (2002) argues that the losses, mourners and grief that are overlooked by society are disenfranchised because the bereaved is aware of their loss. In another sense, the passivity of Doka’s definition does not encapsulate the violence of disenfranchisement. Taken together, forced detransitioning after the death of a loved one, in life, disenfranchises the grieving styles and rituals, the experience of loss in a police state, and the humanity of trans grievers.
Love and Violence: Conceptualizing Transgender Experiences of Loss, So Far
Yes, transphobia shapes the bereavement responses of birth families who believe they experience shame and disenfranchisement if the dead are referred to with their chosen name, not their birth name. Transphobia also shapes our current understanding of trans bereavement and disenfranchisement. Although scholars have begun attending to the violence against trans women of color in the United States and other sites of gender colonialism (Lugones, 2008; Menon, 2020), I do not believe that this epidemic has been adequately framed as cause for communal bereavement (Bryant and Peck, 2009). Communal bereavement can be seen after traumatic or sudden, large-scale deaths, such as the September 11th terrorist attack on New York City or the gun violence and child deaths at Sandy Hook Elementary. Communal bereavement has been shown to facilitate widespread solidarity –– say, displays of American flags or donations to bereaved families –– but it can also mark whose losses are “grievable” (Butler, 2004, as cited by Alasuutari, 2021) on a cultural scale. An encyclopedic entry on communal bereavement names Hurricane Katrina as a natural disaster that triggered national outpourings of grief and subsequent aid (Bryant and Peck, 2009). But communal bereavement of Hurricane Katrina has dried up, leaving majority-poor, majority-Black communities to memorialize their own losses without continued national-scale legal, economic, and political responses to this traumatic loss. Unlike these examples, the epidemic of violence against trans women of color does not trigger much, if any, communal bereavement on change-making scales, even if it drives trans activists and allies to metabolize their pain and profess their humanity over and over (Tiffe, 2017). A possible aftereffect of this ungrieved communal loss may be seen in the very emphasis of research “on” transgender people to be focused solely on psychosocial losses (e.g., transition as death, as in Talusan, 2019), instead of meaning-making, reconstruction, and resilience strategies (Matsuno & Israel, 2018).
As mentioned earlier, much of queer death and bereavement studies hone on Judith Butler’s definition of grievability. Every death triggers rules around who grieves whom and how (Doka & Martin, 2002; Bryant & Peck, 2009); put simply, all grief is contextual. Taking this a step further, these contextual, culture-specific rules elicit definitions of the human. Whose deaths are worthy of grief? Which forms of grief and mourning are in line with Westernized notions of rationality? If we take the absence of communal bereavement around transgender women as any indication, trans people are not grievable in a cisnormative, neocolonial society (Alasuutari, et al., 2021).
Whitestone, Giles, and Linz (2020) interviewed 32 self-identified transgender participants about their wishes for memorialization after death as a proxy for self-perceived grievability. Participants varied in their responses to questions about their hopes for gender-affirming memorialization. Some were certain that they would be remembered as they lived after socially transitioning and had begun end-of-life conversations for affirming burials, obituaries, and other matters. Other participants avoided end-of-life conversations altogether due to financial concerns, estrangement from family, or a dismissive attitude towards postmortem memorialization. Fourteen participants wanted to be remembered with both their gender assigned at birth and their trans identity. This said, the authors suggest that despite this interest, most participants had not thought about leaving directions for this kind of memorial.
This study contributes much to understanding the anticipated transphobia –– and possibly, postmortem detransitioning –– that trans people know they may face after death. When asked about their reactions to postmortem detransitioning, many participants were outspoken, naming violence as appropriate retribution. Competing claims to disenfranchised loss also shape bereavement experiences of other trans people, who may witness the postmortem disenfranchisement of loved ones by the deceased’s family. However, the skepticism evident in this article by Whitestone, et al. (2020) around postmortem memorialization is troubling because it reinstates the hold that Western, largely Abrahamic mourning rituals have on legal, medical, and financial proceedings after death. In a co-authored article, Alasuutari writes, “culturally established death rituals that follow a religious protocol may be strongly centered on a heteronormative family which leaves little or no space for variation and respect for other kinds of intimacies” (Alasuutari, et al., 2021, p. 600). The few studies on LGBT-specific bereavement position grief and mourning in relation to heteronormative families, largely because the family is legally, economically, and socially legitimated (Wojick, 2009). The family also functions as a barometer for what types of grief and grievers are disenfranchised (Bryant and Peck, 2009b) through workplace policies including bereavement leave and offerings such as social support.
If grievability after death determines human value, what value does trans bereavement and grief carry, especially if it takes place outside of a biologically-bonded family unit? I see the dearth of research on trans-specific bereavement as a possible answer to this question. Queer death studies is a young field that, for example, theorizes continuing bonds that arise without state and sociocultural legitimacy (e.g., shared grave plots, Alasuutari, 2021), and the handful of studies that do exist are conducted with majority-White, majority-cisgender populations. Queer death studies, as a multidisciplinary field, seeks to bring queer relationality and ritual to the fore, rather than let them remain disenfranchised. As has been the case in queer and feminist studies, however, the emphasis on the biological family reveals White (Christian) supremacy and transphobia. Perhaps as remedy, Alasuutari (2021), Clarke (2017), Tiffe (2017), and Doletskaya (in Alasuutari, et al., 2021) underscore the role of continuing bonds in the grief work of queer persons, so that systemic, epistemic, and ontological pushout of queer grievability can be replaced with life-giving relationships between the living and the dead.
A Fantastic Woman: A Case Study of Disenfranchised Losses and Trans Grief
After her partner Orlando dies at the hospital, Marina, the main character in A Fantastic Woman (2017), is immediately forced to defend her grief to doctors and detectives. Orlando’s death triggers affective responses in Marina, causing her to run from the hospital after alerting Orlando’s brother of his death. Her impulse to flee activates suspicion from the attending doctor, who pressures Marina to reveal her birth name against her wishes when he learns she was not married to Orlando; and who then alerts police of potential foul play. Assumptions of Marina’s criminality lead a detective working in a sexual crimes unit to question Marina’s involvement with Orlando, claiming it was transactional and possibly nonconsensual sex work. The detective then coerces Marina into a medical examination in which she is made to disrobe without prior communication. None of these figures, the doctors, police, or detective, ask Marina about her grief and instead make assumptions about her relationship with Orlando. Her loss, her grief, and her identity as Orlando’s romantic partner are subsumed by forced detransitioning.
Marina further descends into disenfranchisement –– never disenfranchising herself, to be sure –– as Orlando’s family demands that she return his apartment and car. Although Marina relinquishes these objects without much pressure from the family, she is determined to attend Orlando’s wake and funeral and learns the location of the services through indirect means. The film depicts the degree to which the family intends to disenfranchise Marina’s grief and love for Orlando: Orlando’s son, driving a pickup truck with two friends, kidnaps and mutilates Marina’s face with tape. Questions about “bottom” surgery and other microaggressions indicate that this disenfranchisement occurs not because she is the new love interest, but because Marina is transgender.
Despite each of these violent acts and attempts to “detransition” Marina, the ultimate blow arrives when Orlando’s son steals her dog, Diabla. After Diabla is stolen, viewers find out that Orlando gave Diabla to Marina as a welcoming gift when they moved in together. Diabla represents a continuing bond between Orlando and Marina that cannot be replicated in objects (Worden, 2018). This is not to say that Marina does not affix to object-reminders of Orlando. Towards the end of the film, viewers see Marina discover a locker Orlando used when he visited the spa. To her dismay, the locker has been cleaned out. Stunned at her inability to connect with Orlando through mementos, Marina realizes that she must remember him through other immaterial means. The film concludes with two key scenes, one of which shows Marina running above Santiago proper, reconnected with Diabla. Viewers do not know the means through which Marina reconnects with Diabla, but Diabla clearly plays a significant role in relocating her grief (Worden, 2018).
Diabla’s return occurs immediately after Marina follows a hallucination of Orlando through a crematorium, to the room in which she says a final goodbye. By positioning Marina’s hallucinatory descent into the crematorium alongside her reunion with Diabla, viewers understand that Marina has not only found a continuing bond with Orlando, but has re-enfranchised her grief by listening to, and literally following visions of, Orlando. Diabla also symbolizes the re-enfranchisement of Marina’s gender identity. Throughout the film, Marina never confronts the neon lights, electricity, and reflective darkness that characterize Santiago. After Orlando’s cremation, Marina runs with Diabla, who keeps her company as she separates herself from Santiago’s reflectivity (Figure 1, 1:34:16).
Figure 1. Marina looks over Santiago with Diabla at her side. Still from A Fantastic Woman (2017). Prod. J Larraín & P. Larraín, dir. S. Lelio. Participant Media; Sony Pictures Classics. Retrieved from Alexander Street Media.
The film then shows Marina lying in bed, naked, with Diabla at her feet (Figure 2, 1:34:22) and a hand mirror covering her genitals (Figure 3, 1:34:40).
Figure 2. Marina and Diabla resting after a run. Still from A Fantastic Woman (2017). Prod. J Larraín & P. Larraín, dir. S. Lelio. Participant Media; Sony Pictures Classics. Retrieved from Alexander Street Media.
Figure 3. Marina looks at herself with Diabla in frame. Still from A Fantastic Woman (2017). Prod. J Larraín & P. Larraín, dir. S. Lelio. Participant Media; Sony Pictures Classics. Retrieved from Alexander Street Media.
Because Diabla remains in frame while Marina looks at herself, the dog serves as a continuing bond with Orlando that also facilitates gender affirmation and self-actualization. Looking at the horizon (Tiffe, 2017) of a transgender woman’s grief, A Fantastic Woman professes the grievability, or the value, of Marina’s life by professing the humanity of her life and her grief.
Transgender Experiences of Coping: Where Resilience Models Fall Short
Psychologists Matsuno and Israel (2018) draw from minority stress theory to conceptualize the facilitators and inhibitors of mental health in transgender persons. Minority stress theory, proposed by Meyer (2003), identifies environmental/systemic and immediate stressors that exacerbate adverse health outcomes such as depression, suicide, and substance misuse. Among trans populations, institutionalized transphobia and enacted gender-related stigma give rise to concealment, anticipated stigma, and internalized transphobia. Gender-affirming therapies and services, social/family support, and engagement in LGBT and trans-specific activism are named as group-level factors that promote resilience. Trans individuals are encouraged to pursue therapy and different forms of transition (medical, social, legal, etc.) to fortify resilience as well.
As with all theoretical models, the Transgender Resilience Intervention Model (TRIM; Matsuno & Israel, 2018) contains a number of assumptions about access to social support and therapeutic/counseling services. Pathways between group and individual resilience identify birth family acceptance as a central tenet of trans wellness. Education and political advocacy about institutionalized transphobia are named as facilitators of community-based (and presumably non-trans-led) interventions. While none of these recommendations are misguided, the film case study described above does not contain several core assumptions of the model, thus putting the reliability of this model into question for me. Marina seeks social support and receives some from her sister and employer, yet most of Marina’s grief work takes place at her own hands, on her own terms. Marina’s resilience does not take a similar shape to the resilience proposed by the TRIM. The film does not place Marina within a community or sisterhood of trans women, nor does it show Marina consulting counseling services. It does not even suggest that Marina belongs to a community anywhere in Santiago. Instead, Marina’s strongest relationship is with herself.
The TRIM does not concern grief specifically, yet it makes recommendations on the assumption that transgender people are connected to social support, psychoeducation, counseling services, and a gender-affirming community. A Fantastic Woman says nearly the opposite: that Marina succeeds because she recognizes and applies the tools to survive forced detransitioning in life and in grief. A nightclub and opera singer, Marina gravitates towards music to affirm her gender identity in a world destined to make her life “unlivable” (Goret-Hansen, 2021, p. 608, in Alasuutari, et al., 2021). When returning Orlando’s car to his ex-wife, Marina sees another hallucination of Orlando in the backseat. She blasts “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” by Aretha Franklin to ground and soothe herself after this episode. The film establishes a musical connection between Orlando and Marina early on; it is fitting, then, that Marina grieves and relocates her grief through music and performance. In the last scene, Marina gives a performance of Ombra mai fu, an aria from an Italian opera by George Frideric Handel, to a full audience at an opera house. She stands and sings alone. The lyrics are thus: “May thunder, lightning, and storms/ never bother your dear peace,/ Nor may you by blowing winds be profaned” (Glaubitz, 1999). For transgender grievers, resilience can emerge through existing practices of creative expression and meaning-making instead of the resource-heavy strategies prioritized in the TRIM.
Although grief studies attempt to normalize hallucinations, anger, and reactions otherwise considered “irrational,” the tendency to pathologize transgender people (Alasuutari, et al., 2021) has been carved into responses to trans grief and loss. Pathologizing loss is one way of disenfranchising loss. For example, Marina’s hallucinations culminate in a sensory experience with, or visitation from, Orlando (Figure 4, 1:30:17). Bathed in red light, they kiss as he leads her down a hall to the cremator.
Appearing throughout Marina’s grief, hallucinations of Orlando are always characterized by colored lights flashing over both partners. Hallucinations are normal experiences in grief (Worden, 2018; Zisook & Shear, 2009), and just as visions of Orlando appear shortly after his death, Marina’s hallucinations resolve. She is no longer bathed in –– and consumed by –– his light. Yet it is possible for transgender people, pathologized and criminalized, to have their hallucinatory and sensory grief disenfranchised further by counselors, family, and friends who are not aware that hallucinations after death are quite normal.
While I recommend that this film is used as a case study in trans loss and grief, counselors and educators must legitimate the hallucinations, anger, and other grief responses of trans people that may be labeled “irrational” or otherwise “crazy.” Transgender people grieve in human ways (Alasuutari, et al., 2021; Bristowe, Marshall, & Harding, 2016). Living histories of forced detransition and disenfranchisement in life and death, trans pathology, and criminalization (Wojick, 2009) intend to make grief unliveable. However, A Fantastic Woman illustrates the unique challenges of grief work for transgender women in neocolonial, hyper-individualistic police states.
To understand trans grief, we must look at the mechanisms of dehumanization that inhibit collective mourning for trans death, perhaps more so than we look at singular cases of trans grief. This film, beautiful in its depiction of trans humanity and resilience, also critiques the many channels through which transgender life is discounted, dismantled, and dismembered. The aria Marina sings asks viewers, how do you profrane trans death, trans life, and trans grief? Let us, those who must steward safer waters and calmer winds for trans life, count the ways.
