American film director
Catherine Crouch is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, cinematographer, and actor. She has been active in independent film-making for over two decades. Most of her work explores gender, race, and class in lesbian and queer lives. She is known for "Stranger Inside" (2001), "Stray Dogs" (2002), and "The Gendercator" (2007).
"The Gendercator" controversy.
"The Gendercator" is a 2007 short film described as "a satirical take on surgical body modification and gender. The story uses the 'Rip Van Winkle' model to extrapolate from the feminist 1970s to a frightening 2048 where politics and technology have conspired to mandate two gender 'choices': Macho male or Barbie babe. In this dystopian future, those whose gender presentation does not comply will be GENDERCATED." It is set in a future dystopic world where gender non-conformance is intolerable and genderqueerness is resolved with sex-change operations that align gender attributes with outer appearance; wherein masculinity is conformed with a male body and femininity with a female body.
It was scheduled to screen in the OUTer Limits section of the 2007 Frameline Film Festival, along with other futuristic and experimental films, but it was pulled from the program after several members and supporters of the transgender community criticized it as "transphobic" and took issue with its being included in the festival. Frameline yielded to an online petition published by the website "Left on SF" that described "The Gendercator" as a "hateful movie". Protesters complained about the use of the word "tranny" in the dialogue; they also objected to the director's statement in which Crouch spoke against body modification as a solution for all gender dissonance.
Crouch was invited to screen her film in San Francisco in the fall of 2007 by Ondine Kilker, co-chair of community initiative Center Women Present (CWP). In a 2008 interview for "Sinister Wisdom", Crouch stated that her film spoke to an intracommunity queer issue where an over-reliance on gender norms was fast becoming a popular and too narrow way to interpret the vast diversity of queer gender and sex expressions.
"The Gendercator" is the first film pulled by Frameline from its festival due to controversy. Crouch maintains that gender pluralism was the core gender message, and that she was representing a lesbian and queer perspective about binary gender roles rather than a phobic response to the lived experiences of transgender and transsexual people. Aside from "The Gendercator", other films by Crouch have been shown at the Frameline Film Festival.
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