The Shimmering Screen

In 2022, artist and filmmaker J Taylor-Jones started their research surrounding transgender representation in cinema whilst studying at Arts University Bournemouth having become particularly fascinated with the film We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (Schoenbrun, 2021). J encountered the work of film theorist Eliza Steinbock, who merged Barthes’s theory of ‘the shimmer’ (images whose material quality create a sense of concrete ambiguity) from his lecture series The Neutral (1977-1978), with their own analyses of film and video works created by transgender and gender-non-conforming artists prior to the publication of their book Shimmering Images in 2019.

After four more years of research and development and the publication of their dissertation The Construction, Application and History of the Transgender Gaze in Cinema, which sought to pose the aesthetics of the shimmer as defined by Barthes and Steinbock, J felt that their work should be backed up and further explored through the medium that was the subject of their writing: film.

In 2026, J launched The Shimmering Screen as a space to share their research in both film and written form, with hopes to help establish a new way of understanding transgender bodies within the context of the cinema, gallery and the easy-access screens we keep within our homes, such as phones, computers and televisions.