Is That a Puppy in Your Pants or Are You Just Happy to Be You? Gender Nonconformity and the Nonhuman in Early Silent Film Comedy

Contrary to common sense thinking, there is nothing new about gender nonconformity and transness on the film and television screen. We might be living in a “transgender tipping point,” as Time so persuasively put it when they featured Laverne Cox on their cover in June 2014. But TV and film, America’s 20th century media of the masses, was never without tantalizing gender transformations, fantastical male and female impersonators or gender nonconforming camp humor. Recent publications in the burgeoning field of transgender media studies, including Laura Horak’s Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema (2016), Quinlan Miller’s Camp TV: Trans Gender Queer Sitcom History (2019), and Eliza Steinbock’s Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (2019), have revealed even the most popular of TV genres and earliest film forms to be plentiful sites of queer genders. Non-human animals haunt these scholars’ analyses, never quite coming to the fore even as they regularly accompany the queerest of characters. This paper centers on the queer genders forged in the meeting of the human and the non-human in silent film comedy of the 1910s and 20s. Specifically, the paper offers close analysis of two quintessential examples: What’s the World Coming To? (Wallace, 1926), in which a mouse down a dress motivates the most flamboyant of wriggles and screams, and A Dog’s Life (Chaplin, 1918), in which a puppy in the pants forges the friendliest of phallic prosthetics. These two films undoubtedly speak to cultural anxieties around bodily transformation, variant gender expression, and queerness. But, through their comedy involving adorable animals, they also hold the potential to endear audiences to their ridiculous and raunchy trans and queer characters.