Crafting the body: The politics of the handmade in Jamie Crewe’s Pastoral Drama

This article examines Jamie Crewe’s Pastoral Drama (2018) as a critical intervention in contemporary debates on trans representation and the ethics of looking. Through a close analysis of the two-channel handmade animation, which reworks the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice alongside Agostino Agazzari’s Eumelio , the article addresses Crewe’s deliberate refusal to visually represent the trans body, reframing trans representation instead as a material, processual and unfinished restructuring of binary visual codes. Drawing on trans and queer theory that emphasizes opacity and withdrawal as survival strategies, I first explore the notion of a ‘Eurydicean methodology’, in which deliberate invisibility functions as a way to resist voyeurism, commodification and normative regimes of legibility. I then examine Crewe’s use of handmade aesthetics and craft, engaging the writings of Jack Halberstam and Jeanne Vaccaro, to foreground material interventions in representational structures as an alternative mode of inscribing transness into visual regimes. Ultimately, I argue that Pastoral Drama offers a counterstrategy to liberal paradigms of visual inclusion, which narrowly render trans lives intelligible on normative terms, advocating instead for an understanding of trans representation as an ongoing and radical reconfiguration of binary representational codes.