Jay Prosser and St. Pelagius the Penitent at the Transgender Film Festival, or What Happened to Trans British Art?

This article returns to the First International Transgender Film and Video Festival (TFF) in 1997 to historicise transgender artistic production and its relation to queer theory and aesthetics at a time when the categories "transgender" and "queer" were being formed. Identifying the twin discursive sites of cinema and scholarship as forums for claims about definition, the article tracks the self-conscious production of transgender studies and its objects of study in proximity to queer. By moving through the writing of the festival panellist and academic Jay Prosser and Jason Barker's *St. Pelagius the Penitent* (1997), one of TFF's programmed films, the article situates the field of transgender studies in a British context. The article brings a humorous attitude to the various promises and limitations offered by queer and trans thinking at this historical juncture in the 1990s, which accommodates a material approach to transgender studies not limited by appeals to the real.