Vantage Points

On Media as Trans Memoir

De: Chase Joynt

Narrado por: Chase Joynt

Finalist, Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction

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.

This audiobook edition includes behind-the-scenes production notes written by the author, detailing the inspiration and meaning behind black-and-white illustrations and archival materials.

©2024 Chase Joynt (P)2025 Bespeak Audio Editions

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Joynt delivers an original meditation on trauma and transitioning. Drawing on the media theorist Marshall McLuhan's writings to reflect on surviving childhood sexual abuse, Joynt juxtaposes episodes from his life with McLuhan's insights, creating meaning through literary montage … Enigmatic yet evocative, this demands to be read on its own terms.”—Publishers Weekly

“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

“Vantage Points defies genre conventions. It is a meta-reckoning with the work of famed Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, whose edict ‘the medium is the message’ Joynt prods, ponders, and explodes to exciting effect throughout. The work also serves as an arresting family memoir about the long tail of childhood trauma. It presents itself as an exciting formal experiment while offering a moving reckoning of normative masculinity with a trans lens.”—Thomas McBee, for BOMB