Non-cisgender lives in virtual reality documentary: visibility, power and agency

In the past three years, virtual reality (VR) production and consumption has become more accessible to documentary producers and audiences, building on a medium that Ivan Sutherland pioneered five decades ago. While VR has been used for studies of empathy and gender 'body-swapping' experiments, how can VR makers push the medium further for non-fiction storytelling on the topic of gender, especially going beyond binary categories? Just as gender is enacted and embodied, so too does VR give a sense of embodiment, and increasingly with more responsive and interactive technology, users can have more agency over their experience.

With trans* stories becoming increasingly visible in documentaries and the media in recent years, the contributors themselves rarely have any power in the telling of their stories. Films on non-cisgender lives exploit and exoticise the body of the person to fascinate and entertain a cisgender audience. Cisgender documentary filmmakers and broadcasters often omit the nuances of genderqueer and trans experiences for a mainstream audience, simplifying the trans experience to medical and aesthetic transition narratives and featuring close-up shots of surgeries.

This project will employ non-fiction VR with other forms of immersive and interactive media to provide new possibilities for complicity, collaboration and imagination in translating non-cisgender stories that asserts agency both for the contributors in translating their stories to an immersive experience and for the user in making choices where they look and how they move. As VR and interactive media offer a more active experience than watching traditional flat films, both the creation and the resulting interactive work will raise questions for how to tell stories that focus on complexities around embodiment and non-cisgender subjectivities. This research will explore the potential of VR to create a more ethical and collaborative approach in telling non-fiction stories, as well as how the grammar and technology of VR can change the audience experience.

As in Foucault's analysis of the clinique, the cisgender-controlled media employ vision (via the film-maker's lens) and language to describe, categorise and reinforce gender binaries, thereby perpetuating power roles and assumptions of categories. The complexities of non-cisgender subjectivities are often erased by such institutions, particularly contributors for whom gender can be a process of changing, mixing, playing with or intentionally blurring the perceived socially-constructed expression of one's assigned gender. A collaborative approach to media creation can subvert the control of the filmmaker through what Jean Rouch termed 'shared anthropology', whereby filmmaker and contributors co-create scenarios. Not only more ethical and complicit for the contributor, this method has the possibility to create a more intimate experience for the user.

Bringing together nuanced representations of gendered subjectivities with an examination of VR allows for a rich crossover of the nature of the 'gaze' as interpreted by Jacques Lacan, Foucault and Laura Mulvey. In acknowledging gendered ways of acting, being and seeing, how can this translate in representing genderqueer and non-binary subjectivities in non-fiction, immersive media? How can immersive media like VR produce a different experience in this regard than flat documentary film? Immersive media, in its creation and its experience, can offer a space for play and imagination that, rather than making us 'less human', more cut off from the world can in fact provide space for imagination and an experience not possible outside of the virtual space.