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.

With black-and-white illustrations.

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).

Chase Joynt's profile page

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

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

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