æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil, PhD, MFA
Ja'Tovia Gary's "The Giverny Document (Single Channel)" (2019), and Marlon Riggs' "Tongues Untied" (1989).
æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil teaches at the intersections of film theory, Black studies, and queer and trans studies. Her courses examine how visual media—from cinema and documentary to digital platforms and contemporary art—participate in shaping the conditions through which race, gender, sexuality, and social life become perceptible and intelligible.
Her pedagogy emphasizes close attention to aesthetic form alongside sustained engagement with critical theory and historical context. Through screenings, discussion-based seminars, and research-driven assignments, students develop tools for analyzing how images produce knowledge about bodies, identities, and histories. hollis o’neil approaches teaching as a collaborative intellectual practice, encouraging students to think carefully about the ethical and political stakes of representation while cultivating their own critical and creative modes of inquiry.
Courses Taught
Undergraduate
Annually:
- Intro to Trans Studies (Next Offered Fall 2026)
- Trans Cinema & Media (Next Offered Winter 2027)
Rather than approaching representation as a simple question of presence or absence, the course treats cinema as a field of power in which bodies, identities, and histories are rendered legible through particular aesthetic and institutional frameworks. How have filmmakers, artists, and activists intervened in these frameworks? What cinematic strategies emerge when trans makers reclaim the image and rework the archive?
Through close engagement with films, theoretical texts, and archival materials, we will examine topics such as documentary truth and fabrication, the politics of casting and embodiment, archival reconstruction, the relationship between spectatorship and trans publics, and the role of film festivals, media infrastructures, and distribution networks in shaping the circulation of trans images.
By situating contemporary works alongside earlier cinematic traditions, the course asks how trans cinema participates in broader histories of visual culture while also transforming the possibilities of the moving image itself.
Non-Repeating:
- Queer & Trans Digital Media Studies (Winter 2026)
- Non-Binary Media: Trans Genres, Trans Forms (Winter 2026)
Rather than assuming genre as a stable or neutral framework, we examine how film and media practices reveal genre’s limits, failures, and internal contradictions. Across documentary, experimental film, narrative cinema, and digital media, students will explore how genre conventions organize what counts as realism, authenticity, coherence, and even humanity itself. At the same time, the course foregrounds how trans and gender-nonconforming media practices unsettle these logics through formal experimentation, including fragmentation, montage, archival re-staging, affective excess, and refusals of narrative closure. In this sense, non-binary media names not only identities beyond the binary, but also genre-nonconforming forms that destabilize the categories through which cinema is commonly understood.
Screenings by Ja’Tovia Gary, Tourmaline, Kahlil Joseph, Dee Rees, Coralie Fargeat, David Cronenberg, Angelo Minax, Chase Joynt, Marlon Riggs, Arthur Jafa, and others are paired with critical texts by Christina Sharpe, Rizvana Bradley, Cáel Keegan, Kadji Amin, Eva Hayward, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, C. Riley Snorton, Fred Moten, Alexander Weheliye, and related thinkers. Together, these works position genre as both an aesthetic problem and a political technology, inseparable from histories of racialization, gender regulation, and colonial knowledge production.
Through close formal analysis, sustained discussion, and creative engagement, students will investigate how genre-nonconforming media reconfigure the relations between form and content, visibility and refusal, narration and embodiment. The course invites students to think of cinema and media not simply as representational tools, but as active sites where gender, sexuality, and racialized power are produced, contested, and reimagined through form itself.
Graduate
What does adaptation demand, and from whom? This graduate seminar treats adaptation not as a question of fidelity or influence, but as a political technology and an ethical problem. To adapt is to translate across regimes of power. It is to render forms, bodies, and histories legible within systems that regulate what counts as coherent, credible, or human. Central to this process is genre: the classificatory logic through which legibility is organized in the first place. At the same time, adaptation names the pressure exerted on those systems by what does not fully translate, what lingers between categories, what reconfigures the terms of capture itself. Rather than treating genre as a neutral scheme of aesthetic taxonomy, the seminar approaches it as an adaptive infrastructure: a historically sedimented system that organizes expectation, coherence, and intelligibility. Genres do not simply shape stories; they discipline perception. They establish the conditions under which realism, authenticity, confession, documentary truth, or narrative closure become thinkable. Adaptation, in this sense, is inseparable from genre’s ongoing revision, enforcement, and breakdown.
Drawing from cinema studies, Black studies, trans and queer theory, and political philosophy, the course examines how moving image media adapt not only texts but social categories, aesthetic conventions, and political antagonisms. Remakes, biopics, archival re-stagings, documentary truth claims, and algorithmic circulation operate as sites where identities are revised and incorporated into governance. Genre functions within these processes as a mechanism of stabilization, but also as a site of fracture. When a figure appears between fiction and nonfiction, between realism and experiment, between social categories, genre itself becomes unstable. These moments of instability are not merely failures of classification. They are intervals where aesthetic form mediates the relation between antagonism and collectivity. We will ask: How does adaptation consolidate governing logics and institutional power, and how might it also reconfigure the terms of relation? When does translation reinforce genre’s normative authority, and when does it expose its limits? What forms cannot be cleanly translated? How do Black and trans aesthetic practices inhabit the space between categories in ways that unsettle regimes of legibility while opening alternative scenes of address and configurations of proximity?
Throughout the seminar, adaptation is understood as both constraint and improvisation: a recursive process through which images and subjects adjust to the pressures of recognition and misrecognition. In this adaptive interval, form becomes relational—not by resolving antagonism, but by staging new conditions of encounter within and against dominant orders of sense. Positioning adaptation as inseparable from racial capitalism, colonial administration, and gender regulation, the seminar foregrounds the political life of form. Through rigorous theoretical engagement and close analysis of moving image works, students will investigate how cinema and media participate in the ongoing production, management, and transformation of social worlds—and how, in moments of breakdown and opacity, genre and adaptation alike become sites of ethical encounter as well as political struggle.
© æryka jourdaine hollis o’neil — 2026 — all rights reserved.