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Outing Hybridity: Polymorphism, Identity, And Desire In Monika Trent's Virgin Machine, Kathrin M. Bower

Languages, Literatures, and Cultures Faculty Publications

Monika Treut's 1988 film, Virgin Machine, offers a playful, self-ironizing look at the construction of sexual identities, utilizing the techniques specific to the filmic medium to create cuts and bridges between concepts, characters, and locations. In its portrayal of the passage and passages of the story's central character, Dorothe Muller, the film takes the viewer on a voyage of self-exploration and self-discovery that moves from one harbor city, Hamburg, and ends in another, San Francisco. The move between harbor cities carries associations of commerce and exchange, arrivals and departures, as well as the potential for import and export of …