Vantage Points: On Media as Trans Memoir

A provocative book by an acclaimed writer-filmmaker that combines memoir and media as seen through a trans lens. Following the death of the family patriarch, a box of newly procured family documents reveals writer-filmmaker Chase Joynt's previously unknown connection to Canadian media maverick Marshall McLuhan. Vantage Points takes up the surprising appearance of McLuhan in Joynt's family archive as a way to think about legacies of childhood sexual abuse and how we might process and represent them. To do so, Joynt stages a series of vignettes that place memoir in the context of other sources, media, and stories to create a tapestry a montage-like experience of reading with surprising and revealing juxtapositions. Joynt writes about difficult pasts and connects them to contemporary politics and ways of being, employing McLuhan's seminal Understanding Media as an inciting framework. Vantage Points is a kaleidoscopic reckoning with the impact of media and masculinity on the stories we tell about ourselves and our families, a unique and highly visual approach to trans life writing, and an experimental move between gender and genre.

About the Author :
Chase Joynt is a director and writer whose films have won more than twenty-five jury and audience awards internationally. His latest documentary feature, Framing Agnes, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the NEXT Innovator Award and the NEXT Audience Award. Joynt is the author of the Lambda Literary Award finalist You Only Live Twice (co-authored with Mike Hoolboom) and Boys Don't Cry (co-authored with Morgan M. Page).

Review :
"Joynt delivers an original meditation on trauma and transitioning. Drawing on the media theorist Marshall McLuhan's writings to reflect on surviving childhood sexual abuse, Joynt juxtaposes episodes from his life with McLuhan's insights, creating meaning through literary montage ... Enigmatic yet evocative, this demands to be read on its own terms." --Publishers Weekly "In this impossible-to-classify work of nonfiction, trans writer, filmmaker, and critic Chase Joynt uses text and images to explore memory, masculinity, forms of language, archival violence and memory, the history of media, pop culture, and more ... If you're looking for something unusual and beautiful, thought-provoking and funny, tender and smart, and, most of all, if you love a book that feels like a work of art--this unconventional memoir is for you." --Book Riot "Chase Joynt has created a truly unique text of 'media as trans memoir.' He presents his personal narratives only within the context of other sources, media, and stories, such as the writing of well-known Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan with whom Joynt discovers he has a previously unknown connection. The result is a book that brazenly flouts conventions of both genre and form. It's a bold experiment that is as visual as it is textual, as intellectually challenging as it is artistically triumphant." ―Autostraddle ("Best Queer Books of the Year") "Vantage Points defies genre conventions. It is a meta-reckoning with the work of famed Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, whose edict 'the medium is the message' Joynt prods, ponders, and explodes to exciting effect throughout. The work also serves as an arresting family memoir about the long tail of childhood trauma. It presents itself as an exciting formal experiment while offering a moving reckoning of normative masculinity with a trans lens." --Thomas McBee, for BOMB "An effective experiment in form, and a moving exploration of how context colours interpretation--and how both affect the nature of truth." --The Walrus ("Best Books of Fall 2024") "Vantage Points is a stunning work that offers new ideas, compassion, and hope for a kinder, egalitarian future that may let us all heal, breathe, and truly be." --Elliot Page, author of Pageboy: A Memoir "Genre and form defying, Vantage Points is a remarkably subversive book by one of our generation's most brilliant trans media-makers. At once a vigorous intellectual engagement with the work of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, a lyrical family counter-history, a formal experiment, and a powerful reckoning with inherited trauma, violence, and (relatedly) normative masculinity, Vantage Points is an absolutely unprecedented non-fiction project that's as inventive as it is deeply moving. I loved this book." --Thomas Page McBee, author of Amateur and Man Alive "I'm not sure anyone has ever encountered a media theory as moving as this. Vantage Points realizes the profound possibility of media theory to operate itself like a technology and mechanism of survival." --Sarah Sharma, co-editor of Re-Understanding Media: Feminist Extensions of Marshall McLuhan