!SMILEYFACEHEART

! :) <3 !SMILEYFACEHEART (2009) (5 min. 57 sec.)

!smileyfaceheart is a short experimental film that navigates trans-faggotry through femme drag and junior high school diary crushes, in an effort to access desires that have been culturally silenced, erased, and denied.

Costume Design and Art Direction: Iraya Robles
Camera Operator: Ami Puri
Screenings: TRANNY FEST, San Francisco, November 7, 2009

!SMILEYFACEHEART grew out of the sense of empowerment I experienced when I donned femme drag last summer, an experience so radically different from my previous relationship to femininity. Long associated with weakness and the hopeless inability to escape destructive situations and patterns, I feared exposing my femininity to others and coming into proximity with this place inside myself. I worked hard to push it down as far as possible and created strategies to conceal it.

During this time I was also re-reading my diaries from age 13, when I began to write about crushes on white junior high school boys. These desires, while expressed in the sense that I wrote about them, were systematically encrypted, crossed out, whited-out and erased from memory. I had no sense of empowerment then about my sexual desire, and did not believe that it was even something I was allowed to feel.

Femme drag opened up a space in which I felt it could be possible to access and reclaim my sexual desire. Performing my diary entries, my desires, from the place of empowered, unashamed femme drag became a way to claim trans-faggotry and my desire for and eroticization of masculinity.

I made this film for other trans and genderqueer folks of color or of mixed race who are caught up in the struggle between desire and shame, who struggle with determining what we want, how we feel, and that we deserve it–processes that are so drastically counter to how we were brought up to think about our bodies.