Define Frenzy: Coming-of-Self
The last in a series of weekly essays throughout June attempting to explore new queer readings or underseen queer films.

“Define Frenzy” is a series of weekly essays for Pride Month attempting to explore new queer readings or underseen queer films as a way to show the expansiveness of what queerness can be on screen.
Check out the first entry here, the second here, the third here and last week’s here.
Sophie Hyde’s 52 Tuesdays (2013)—in which a young woman explores her identity while her parent transitions after coming out as a trans man—is about time. It is as interested in the impact time has on 16-year-old Billie (Tilda Cobham-Harvey) and who she is as it is on her aforementioned parent, James (Del Herbert-Jane), and who he is. They are both, literally and metaphorically, in a state of transition, and though the film is primarily told from Billie’s perspective, James’s point of view and experience is not sacrificed in the process.
52 Tuesdays uses time and queerness to reinvent the “coming-of-age” story, even arguing for the necessity that such a subgenre’s name be discarded in favor of something more accurate. The coming-of-age narrative is usually specified by that very thing: Age—focusing on teenagers or kids, that narrative rarely considers characters outside of that age parameter within such transitional terms. 52 Tuesdays asks for something broader, a term or a subgenre name that doesn’t feel as compressed or constrictive. The “coming-of-self,” as it were.
That it’s filmed over the course of a year in real time is crucial: Time shapes these people’s identities in real, discernible ways. Flashes of the news pass before the text on screen, indicating at which Tuesday we’ve arrived. That context is everything and nothing, both showing the push and pull of the outside world on everyone in the film, as well as indicating the impenetrable bubble in which Billie and James live. The dynamic between them is contingent on time as a representation of expansiveness within identity.
Other films that could be seen as coming-of-self stories include Laurence Anyways, Tomboy, Carol and Beginners—films are about trans women, gender nonconforming kids, lesbians and older gay men, respectively. They present a larger spectrum of identity, a deeper relationship between temporality and oneself, than many more conventional “gay” movies. Sean Baker’s 2015 Tangerine would fall into this mix too, because, as fully realized as SinDee (Kitana Kiki Rodriguez) and Alexandra (Mya Taylor) are, and however cognizant they are of their place in the world, there’s still an aspect of exploration on their minds. What do they mean to each other? What impact does that have on their own life? Tangerine as a rollicking neo-screwball comedy about trans women on the search for a philandering boyfriend presents its more explicit genre hat as a magic trick and a distraction: Over the course of a day, SinDee and Alexandra still learn some transformational things about themselves and each other.