The Dallas Buyers Club: who's buying it?

The representation of transgender lives on film is of increasing thematic concern within both mainstream and independent cinema. The ways in which filmmakers represent and depict trans* people communicate to audiences certain views about transgender lives and concerns. Production and exhibition of a film provokes engagement with the subject, inviting reading, interpretation, and misinterpretation. Dallas Buyers Club (dir. Jean-Marc Vallee, 2013) sits uneasily with contemporary transliterate (Ford 2014, 2016) audiences. The trans* body is misrepresented through a narrative of negative affect and economic precarity and as a trope erased in cinematic time, through the central character Rayon (Jared Leto), a trans* woman, and the establishment of an HIV medication “buyers club” in the mid-1980s.