I don’t think I have gone to the same film twice in a week since the 1970s when I was living on Sunset Blvd with a girl friend who was also a film freak.
Yet after seeing Avatar on Tuesday, Tina and I went and saw it a second time on Thursday.
Along with it being a stunningly beautiful film it has a lot of subtexts.
Today over on Queerity I discovered a bit of strangeness. It seems that a self described trans liberationist in San Francisco considers the film to be “transphobic”.
Now I thought I had heard all the politically correct criticisms and had answered them to my personal satisfaction so this one puzzled me.
I saw the story as one of transforming from one person to another being in a way that could be seen as similar to what people with transsexualism go through. Taking on a new body and learning/becoming socialized in a world of expectations placed on a being that has that sort of body.
In the final confrontation with the evil mercenary thug, John Wayne type figure, Col. Miles Quaritch asks Jake Sully who has become Na’vi, “How does it feel to betray your race?”
I sometimes think that part of the hostility towards WBTs is that we are seen as having not just betrayed our sex as class but in doing so have called into question the whole ideology of male supremacy.
Women Born Transsexual 