Does it go without saying that Jake’s experience of congruence - which follows the first transfer of his consciousness into his new avatar body is not at all unlike the experience that transsexuals share. Far beyond labels of “male" or “female,” I suspect we are each made fundamentally whole by this transition. Jake’s human body is broken yet his avatar body is metaphorically powerful and whole in every sense being ideally suited to his new life on Pandora . . .
Has this film given us a powerful visual vocabulary by which to understand, and communicate to the cisgendered, the fundamental experience of becoming entirely congruent?
Are we now each ideally suited to the brave new world that our earliest consciousness always knew was there?
Yet, based upon what I recently read at Helen Boyd's blog - My Husband Betty, and with respect to the “Avatar as feminist empowerment thread,” it seems you have to work quite hard to miss the metaphorical implications for transition via bio-medical technology.
But if all we’re looking for from gender transition is “heehaw!! I’m a girl (or a boy) now” then I guess we get precisely what we settle for, no?
Renee Thomas ©2009 All Rights Reserved
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