Women and Queerness in Horror: “Singularity”

Warning: This article contains mentions of transphobia and mentions of self-harm.

Most of this series to date has been focused on movies — whether short or long — and has been centered on the sexual identities of queer women as expressed through horror. I’m not done talking about those, but for a handful of reasons, I’m changing things up a little this week.

By which I mean I’m feeling some type of way about my gender, both in general and in response to certain spikes in transphobic rhetoric encouraged by certain public figures we won’t name. My partner astutely described what I’ve been feeling as “gender: fighty.” To make a long story short, it led me down a frustratingly long rabbit hole trying to find any kind of horror media centering a trans character that was neither exploitative torture porn nor a “trans killer” shock reveal.

Enter Vera Miao’s “Singularity,” one segment of Two Sentence Horror Stories’ three-part season 1 finale. With it came a much-welcomed sigh of relief. While this anthology was originally released on the now-defunct go90 platform, it has since been picked up by the CW, with a second season slated to arrive sometime this fall, and a third season to look forward to in the future. Each episode to date has also been uploaded by creator and director Vera Miao to her Vimeo account, for those watching from outside the US.

Each installment to date is both diverse and intimate, using genre stylings to tell deeply personal and confronting (and delightful) stories that reflect both the universality of fear and the specific ways it translates for people who rarely get to be the protagonist in this kind of genre work. I can’t recommend it enough. That’s my plug. That’s my bit. Now let’s dive into “Singularity” proper, shall we?

“Singularity” takes off from the idea of biohacking and transhumanism. It follows Nala, played by the spectacular Jen Richards, as her pursuit of connection, self-actualization, and establishment of open-source communication technologies through biohacking take a dark turn.

Transhumanism in fiction is frequently seen wrestling with concepts of classism and the ideal body. For instance, the muscular, nominally cishet, white, heavily augmented Adam Jensen (Deus Ex) comes to mind. “Singularity,” meanwhile, reframes these ideas to grapple with communication, isolation, and in many ways the challenges and perils of trying to express an identity. Particularly the challenge of expressing an experience to people who don’t share it and are either unable or unwilling to understand.

Nala does insist, (rightly so) that her biohacking has nothing to do with her transition, when her cis-gendered emergency contact-slash-ex suggests as much. Still, there’s something about the desire for a physical, embodied self-actualization that is so integral to Nala’s desire to share, communicate, and be understood that resonates on a trans frequency.

Equally significant is that Nala’s experience as a trans woman is both consistently and yet casually present in the text. It informs her relationships, her confrontations of horror and threat, and her building of community. It is never played for shock, comedy, or a particularly and cruelly targeted brutality.

Admittedly, there are aspects of “Singularity” that are left in some ways unresolved, but such is the nature of the two-sentence horror story. This unsettling incompleteness is a lot of what makes this episode so effective. Its themes don’t resolve tidily because they can’t. In fact, without getting into spoilers, since I strongly feel watching it works best without them; I’m going to be thinking about those climax scenes for a good long while.

Now, I love horror (obviously) but I have to concede that finding something that scares me in the right ways is difficult. Finding things that are scary in ways that are enjoyably chilling, emotionally meaningful, and not just brutal for the sake of brutality, can be a hard sell. “Singularity” is certainly bloody and some of its biohacking elements resemble self-harm, but it still ticked all of those boxes for me, and I’m about to go watch it again. I hope you’re feeling the warmth of my suggestion and you do likewise. Catch you all next week!