Intense Encounters: Young Men and Transwomen in Music Videos

Intense Encounters focuses on a series of videos that portray erotically-charged encounters between seemingly-straight men and trans-women. This paper takes a closer look at the following music videos: “Pass This On” by The Knife (2003); “Sing Me Spanish Techno” by The New Pornographers (2005), and Kai Stänicke’s /Tin [A] Din’s “Cold Star” (2010). All three feature intense encounters suffused with latent eros and violence, but they each resolve this tension differently. Most notably, the role of...