1 Suggested citation: Latham, J.R. (2011) ‘Transgender Trouble: Subversion and/or Death in Queer Portraiture.’ /thirdspace/: a journal of feminist cultural studies. Available at https://unimelb.academia.edu/JRLatham Transgender Trouble: Subversion and / or Death in Queer Portraiture J.R. Latham Figure 1. Jax Sailor Back Vision is always a question of the power to see -- and perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing practices. With whose blood were my eyes crafted? Donna Haraway (192)
Transcript
1
Suggested citation: Latham, J.R. (2011) ‘Transgender Trouble: Subversion and/or Death in Queer Portraiture.’ /thirdspace/: a journal of feminist cultural studies. Available at https://unimelb.academia.edu/JRLatham
Transgender Trouble:
Subversion and / or
Death in Queer Portraiture
J.R. Latham
Figure 1. Jax Sailor Back
Vision is always a question of the power to see -- and
perhaps of the violence implicit in our visualizing
practices. With whose blood were my eyes crafted?
Donna Haraway (192)
2
I look up from the screen to stare at Jax Sailor Back. He hangs
above my desk and so I see it often. I look. And here's a slip: the
image is singular, isolated from the other in its series. I have
spent hours gazing at these bodies, these images; like mine,
unlike mine. I stare at the screen and you at this page. Words.
Fragments. Disembodied. Will you see me? This body matters
(so does yours), but I'm not sure how. I cannot see you. (Don't
worry). The hostility with which gender ambiguous bodies are
stared at, and the actuality of violence against those bodies,
bodies tell (our) stories. That this essay was produced by my
fingertips, burned and blistering from my other job, my
fingernails trimmed and buffed and painted black tap-tap-
tapping the keyboard. My back aching. My head, and heart,
throbbing. (But are you a boy or a girl? you ask, for that is the
question afterall). I sat in three different cities and one small
town to write it, drinking coffee and forgetting to eat. This story
marked my body as my body produced it. Can this text capture
it? And if I showed you my body, my skin, my scars, my furrowed
brow and piercing eyes, would you be convinced? Or is it other
parts of my body you crave to see? What do I lose if I pander to
your curiosity? What does it say if I don't?
Introduction
Photography – as a medium – aims to show; to make visible.
Historically, photography has been seen to capture an 'objective
reality', and portrait photography in particular to assert (an
authentic) identity (see Guthey and Jackson 1067-1070).
Furthermore, “[t]he more fragile our identity,” argues Halla
Beloff, “the more we need to reinforce it. To show that we exist.
3
To show that we can create something, in a photograph” (22).
Given the invisibility of trans subjectivities in most cultural,
political and academic contexts, this need to “show that we
exist” is incredibly pervasive. To transgender studies, the
photographic portrait provides a crucial argument for visibility
and the centrality of corporeality, as Susan Stryker proclaims:
“[Transgender studies] helps correct an all-too-common critical
failure to recognize ‘the body’ not as one (already constituted)
object of knowledge among others, but rather as the contingent
ground of all our knowledge, and of all our knowing” (12).
Transgender bodies disrupt expectations of 'sex' and 'gender',
and their photographic (re)presentations can be seen as
damaging to, and damaged by, the 'proper order of gender'.
Explicit gender ambiguity in queer portraiture troubles
dominant concepts of 'sex' and 'gender' as stable and biologically
determined, challenging the reader to (re)consider the
(im)mutability of their own gender. (Not I, you may think. We'll
see). Photographs are always and only fragments – moments past
(dead) – and this is particularly salient to trans portraiture,
where figurative violence is decidedly more likely to be(come)
literal.
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes described his interpretation of
photography based on two experiences: first the stadium: the
photograph’s narrative content, and second the punctum: a detail
which breaks the narrative continuity of the image. In this
article, I extend Barthes’ theorization of punctum to suggest the
possibility of a queer punctum: the potential for a unifying
moment between transgender and transexual1 – the latter of
1 Distinguishing between what is 'transgender' and what is 'transexual' I find
politically troubling as both can be incredibly broad and incredibly specific, each at times excluding the other (see for example and guidance, Sam Orchard, “But How Do You Go Pee?” in Jez Pez, ed. DUDE:
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which has been continually marked out as decidedly not
transgressive. The figuration of the transgender as powerfully
subversive was asserted by Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, where
she used transgender subjectivities to show how gender is
performatively (re)produced, thus rendering queer a gay and
lesbian overlap through cross-gendered identifications. Butler
went on in Bodies That Matter to suggest that while
transgenderism was queering, it was in transexuality that queer
found its limit: bodily alterations that seek to (re)establish sexed
stability or coherence reinforce gender normativity (137). Jay
Prosser critiques this theorisation of transexual bodies, arguing
that Butler renders invisible transexual ontologies, undermining
the queer potential of 'sex reassignment surgery' (SRS) and
marking out as transgressive that which makes the subject's real
life most unsafe. Judith Jack Halberstam emphasizes the
subversive power of transgender bodies as revealing subjectivity
as fragmentation and dislocation; an “aesthetic of turbulence”
which reflects the “postmodern condition” (“Technotopias”
107). Here, Halberstam finds interesting explicitly those trans
images which represent/show subjectivity to be disorderly. I wish
to return to, and extend, Halberstam’s earlier work (especially in
Female Masculinity) which emphasised the importance of
integrity. By analysing two highly referenced images of gender
ambiguity, used most famously by Halberstam in Female
Masculinity, I examine the implications of glorifying gender
ambiguity and dislocation. I will then refer to a post-surgical
Transmasculinity. Melbourne: The {also} Foundation, 2011: 25-29). However, as one of the aims of this article is to affirm the queer potential of SRS and transexuality, I will differentiate these terms in the way they have been by the theorists to which I refer: 'transgender' meaning explicitly without surgical alteration, and 'transexual' involving at least some kind of SRS. In keeping with common practice in recent trans theorizing, I use ‘transexuality' instead of ‘transsexuality' as a way of refuting the pathologization of trans experiences.
5
portrait in which the subject’s transexuality is made obvious
that, I argue, attempts to reify notions of incompleteness and
ambiguity by presenting a material unity which nevertheless
maintains its queer force.
In this article, I suggest that in queer portraiture of transgender
and transexual bodies, there is the potential to find a queer
moment in common: relationships to technology which mark
the transexed body as complete(d) and nuances of gender on the
ambiguous transgender body. While portraits of gender
ambiguous bodies confront us with the mutability of that which
is supposedly stable, there is a danger in idolising images of
transgender bodies which place subversive power on instability
and fragmentation. Transexual portraits of bodies (re)made
('whole'), I will argue, can emphasize integrity and cohesion
while maintaining subversively queer force in their relation to
technologies and the subject's defiance of expectations of 'gender'
and 'sex' as biologically determined. In order to create nourishing
images of queer ontologies, there needs to be value and pride re-
established on images of queer bodies which emphasize unity
and solidity; a recognition and appreciation of the queer power
of transexed bodies and transgender bodies.
Situated Knowledges, or Between Looks
The common tendency for trans theorists and writers to include
photographic portraits in their work (often as a cover image)
highlights the centrality of the body in trans story-telling,
redressing histories of invisibility and concealment, as well as the
potential violence of 'revelation'.2 The text is, by definition,
2 See, for example, Kate Bornstein, Gender Outlaw; Tom Cho, Look Who’s
6
disembodied and the inclusion of photographs attempts to
rectify this disjuncture. As Prosser argues, portraiture serves to
unify this ambivalent subject and “insist[s] on continuity in spite
of change” (213). Transexuality, afterall, both relies on and defies
calls to visibility. Pictures of 'passing' transexuals require an
indicator of transexual history (a context such as title, series, or
publication). Such images draw attention to the need for
visibility even for those who are invisible (who 'pass'), as Prosser
emphasizes: “The problem of reading the transsexual in the
photograph heightens the tension around reading and passing
that inhabits all transsexual representation” (226). Coming out is
a strategic move, yet by announcing one's transexuality (or trans
history) the person “undoes the realness” that is the 'aim' of
'transition' (Prosser 11). To Prosser, the tension between
“revelation and concealment,” between in/visibility, is complex:
“[the portrait's] primary function is to expose the transsexual
body; yet how to achieve this when transsexuality on the body is
that which by definition is to be concealed?” (207, 209).
However this 'gender realness' (of a 'passing', nontrans
appearance) is not necessarily the aim of all transsexuals. Indeed,
it is increasingly becoming the case that cultural productions
and images of trans people embrace a specifically trans ontology
(see Latham).
Morphing. Melbourne: Giramondo, 2009; Leslie Feinberg, Transgender Warriors: Making History from Joan of Arc to Dennis Rodman. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996; Jamison Green, Becoming a Visible Man. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004; Max Wolf Valerio, The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Change from Female to Male. Emeryville: Seal Press, 2006; Prosser.
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Figure 2. Jake
Catherine Opie's canonical series Being and Having contests the
centrality of the power of the viewer to gaze unscrupulated at the
portrait. Jake (Figure 2) makes up one of the thirteen in the
series, each headshot coloured with a yellow background, glossy
and brightly lit that the eyes shine in some as though with tears.
Jake, though, stares down at us, head tilted back as if to say 'who
the fuck do you think you are to look at me?' Halberstam claims
that Jake confronts us with our own ability to slip out of the
ordered and 'proper' categories of 'man' or 'woman:'
The power of the gaze in an Opie portrait always and
literally rests with the image: the perpetual stare
challenges the spectator's own sense of gender
congruity, and even self, and it does indeed replicate
with a difference the hostile stares that the model
probably faces everyday in the street. (Female Masculinity
35)
Visibility for trans people is desperately important, but the
fetishisation of our bodies is just as concerning. Just as the
objectification of 'women's bodies' in photography has been
analysed as double (by the male gaze and the camera), so too is
8
the transgender body objectified and othered in dominant
discourse (Henning 170). For Halberstam, Jake avoids
objectification as Jake gazes back at the viewer in a somewhat
challenging, if not aggressive, manner. Halberstam argues that
the royal colouring of the backgrounds compels the stare of the
spectator to be “admiring and appreciative rather than simply
objectifying and voyeuristic” (Female Masculinity 35). But really
we can only hope. This image, like many trans or gender
ambiguous portraits, forces the viewer to seek out the curve of
the jawline, the broadness of the shoulders, the thickness of the
neck. As I will argue, these nuances of gender act as queer
punctum.
Prosser asserts that trans portraits always force us to question our
own gendered state of being:
How is our reading of the transsexual invested in and
produced by own gendered and sexual subject
positioning, our own identifications and desires?
Photographs of the transsexual, particularly of the
transsexual in transition, push us up against the limits
of gendered representation: the limits of what gender
we can consign to representation, of what we can
process as identity in the visual. (223)
For Prosser “we can only look at the transsexual, then, if we look
at how we look,” (230) and while the trans portrait may facilitate
consideration to the nuances of gender, it does not necessarily
follow that the reader will focus this attention on themselves.
Sara Davidmann argues that trans portraiture, particularly of
naked bodies, provides a safe visibility for trans people, and that
“photographs of private atypical visualisations of gender taken
into the public realm constitute an intervention that facilitates a
questioning of pre-conceptions of gender and the body, contests
the boundaries of the binaries, and presents a challenge to the
9
gender system.” But what guarantees that the image will provoke
self-reflection? It is painfully possible that it will in fact have the
opposite effect: the reader re-establishing the stability of their
gender and their body in its appropriateness up against the
inappropriate freakishness of the portrait they stare at.
Transexuality and The Not So Queer Moment
In using transgender subjects to theorize gender as performative
and in marking out as limited the subversive potential of
transexuality in comparison, Butler contributes to the de-
privileging of transexual ontologies, and Prosser rightly criticizes
this move. The queering of gender through sexuality which
Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter (and their citation) point
to ('the queer moment') is critically dependent on transgender; it
is cross-gender identification which renders the lesbian and gay
over lap possible. Butler uses transexuality and transgenderism to
map a conceptual space between 'sex' and 'gender'; a
transgendered space, as she defines: “When such categories [man
or woman] come into question, the reality of gender is also put
into crisis” (Gender Trouble xxii). Butler goes on to use the
transgendered subjects in drag as the archetypal examples of
gender performativity, suggesting, as Prosser iterates, that
“gender is not a teleological narrative ontology at all, with the
sexed body (female) as recognizable beginning and gender
identity (woman) as clear-cut ending” (29). Prosser argues that
this formulation of gender performativity sets up a nexus where
The implications of this figuration serve to privilege transgender
as the queer gender.
10
Butler re-evaluates the nexus of transgender/queer/subversive in
Bodies That Matter reaching the conclusion that transgender is
not necessarily or inherently subversive (read queer), and that it
is the transexual who specifically and “most succinctly illustrates
the limitations of the queerness of transgender” (Prosser 35).
Butler's reading of Venus Xtravaganza in Paris is Burning sets up
transexual genders as not inherently or always subversive (126).
Here, transexuality (particularly SRS) is constructed as
reinforcing gender conformity; failing to be subversive and
“transgressive of hegemonic constraints where it ought to be”
(Prosser 48). In Gender Outlaw, trans theorist Kate Bornstein
assumes Butler's position by explicitly excluding 'gender passing'
transexuals from her (otherwise) broad definition of
'transgender,' as she claims “[b]y devaluing the gender left
behind, the transsexual perpetuates the ‘war’ between the
genders” (132, 120). Thus, transgression for Bornstein is
constituted by refuting (either) gendered expectations regardless
of assigned (at birth) 'sex'; singular gender identity is always 'false'
(12-13). Patricia Elliot marks the impact of this delineation:
It seems that for some trans and non-trans queer
theorists, it is not queer enough to demonstrate the fact
that one's gender identity is not biologically determined
by one's sex, as transsexuals surely do. [...] To be queer,
hence politically progressive, transsexuals are expected
to abandon their desire to alter their bodies to better
signify their gender, and to abandon a fundamental
understanding of their own experience of the body. (9)
In Butler's formulation, and Prosser and Bornstein's readings of
it, the transexual is set up in opposition to both nontransgender
gender normativity and transgender gender ambiguity. This
serves to create a clear hierarchy which values transgender
identities more highly and “locates transgressive value in that
which makes the subject's real life most unsafe” (Elliott 10);
11
gender ambiguity. In this way the nontransexed body is
privileged eroding the queer potential of SRS. 3 SRS becomes a
tool of gender conformity and normativity: a not so queer
moment. That is, this juxtaposition and conflation of
transgender as queering gender elides the subversive and queer
potentials of transexuality. As Elliot suggests, it isn't particularly
helpful to relegate transexual desires to alter their bodies as
'gender normative,' rather, we can see in such bodies subversive
potential in the refusal to live in the gender assigned (at birth).
As I will argue later, transexuality – and images representative of
such (especially SRS) disrupt this hierarchy by claiming as
'authentic' transexual bodies, disavowing 'sex' as binary or birth-
determined.
The Transgender Body and an 'aesthetic of turbulence'
Halberstam's appreciation of the transgender body as appealing
to a postmodern fixation with an 'aesthetic of turbulence' also
works to foreclose the queer potential of images of 'sex'-changed
bodies as subversive in their integrity. In “Technotopias,”
Halberstam agrees with Butler's theorisation of the transgender
as queer: “Butler takes the transgender subject seriously and uses
transgenderism to represent the contradictions of being –
3 The tension between transsexual and transgender subjectivities arises, in
part, due to the formulation of SRS as gender normalising espoused in medical discourses of transsexuality, which purport SRS as the 'cure' to the diagnosis of 'transsexual' (originally a cure for homosexuality): bringing the mind (gender) and body (sex) into 'agreement' (see Milton Diamond, “Sex and Gender are Different: Sexual Identity and Gender Identity are Different.” Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry 7/3 (2002): 320-334 (p.329)). This serves to foreclose the possibility of transgendered subjectivity without bodily alterations, homogenising transgender as a pre-condition to SRS. Indeed, it is this homogenisation which leads Halberstam to underscore the queer potential of the transgender body “not reducible to the transsexual body” (“Technotopias” 97).
12
specifically gendered being – in postmodernism” (99). Here
Halberstam asserts the queer/transgender moment as a
universalising symbol of postmodern dislocation and instability.
Halberstam responds to Prosser's objections in his claim that this
use of transgender “[is] not simply an appropriation of the
material body of the transsexual by queer theorists or
postmodernists,” but rather such a move is historically located in
the postmodern tradition of representing “unstable
embodiment” (105). However, one does not preclude the other
and Halberstam seems to draw the same boundaries around
what is subversive/queer as Butler; namely, gender ambiguity.
Halberstam formulates a postmodern 'aesthetic of turbulence'
which has come to appreciate the transgender body as the body
made wrong or incomplete: “Technotopic inventions of the
body resist idealizations of bodily integrity, on the one hand, and
rationalizations of its disintegration, on the other; instead they
represent identity through decay, detachability, and subjectivity”
(124). In its citation by Davidmann in “Border Trouble,” this
'aesthetic of turbulence' is reified as of the highest (queer) value.
Davidmann uses the accounts of two transexual people “who self
identify beyond the binary categories,” along with portraits she
has created with them, to reaffirm Halberstam's position.
Davidmann concludes that images of the disjunctured transexual
body contest the boundaries of 'sex-gender' binaries. Again, this
idealisation of “gender incongruence,” as Elliot notes, “assumes
one has the luxury to take on the gender order” (10). As I will
elaborate later on, the ability to exist in an ambiguously
gendered state is a tenuous one at best, more often it is simply
an impossibility.
13
Figure 3. Jax Revealed
In Female Masculinity, Halberstam goes so far as to mark out this
cohesion even where it may be quite tenuous, such as in Del
LaGrace Volcano’s series Jax Sailor Back (Figure 1) and Jax
Revealed (Figure 3).4 Here, the 'revelation' of Jackie's breasts
forces the viewer to linger and re-consider the apparent
'maleness' of Jax Sailor Back. The gender neutrality offered by the
back as an anatomical structure allows for the subject's integrity
to remain intact; there is nothing to Jax Sailor Back that would
suggest the 'revelation' of 'sex' that takes place in Jax Revealed.
Halberstam claims: “while the breasts are just pronounced
enough to mark Jackie as a ‘woman,’ they are small and
muscular enough to keep her ambiguity intact” (38). While the
sight of the breasts may not disrupt Jackie's masculinity, this
4 In Female Maculinity, Halberstam refers to the images under incorrect titles
(personal correspondence with the artist): Jax Sailor Back Halberstam names “Jack’s Back” (36) and Jax Revealed he labels “Jackie II” (37). While 'Jax' is the title given in both photographs, they are credited with 'Jackie' – the name of the model.
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revelation does dislocate and reconfigure our understanding of
masculinity off 'the male body'. Thus the pictures together are no
longer ambiguous – if they ever were – but rather display
“resolute images of female masculinity” (Female Masculinity 34).
Regardless, these images can be seen in light of Halberstam's
aesthetic of turbulence as the viewer becomes physically caught
between one and the other, glancing back and forth in
(postmodern) confusion; that a body so clearly 'male' could (also)
be 'female.' It is this fragmentation of subjectivity which so
intrigues Halberstam in “Technotopias.” The hardness of the
(rest of the) body and the softness of the breast/s challenges our
understanding of 'sexed gender'. Jackie's 'femaleness' is
overwhelmingly outweighed by the rest of the visible body, yet it
remains intact. Volcano also challenges the significance of
'secondary sex' characteristics in assigning 'sex': Do Jackie's
breasts make/mark her a woman? (as Halberstam tentatively
suggests and dismisses). Do they make her 'female'? How Jackie
feels about his/her 'gender identity' is unknown, only in the
credited name (of the model) do we catch a glimpse of the
possibility of multiplicity. If the pictures were credited to 'Jack',
this would affect our understanding of her/his subjectivity.
Indeed, the name of the model is perhaps more important in
reading/assigning gender than the presence of breasts.
Halberstam differentiates and deprivileges the transexual body as
“sex-changed” and thus remade less, if at all, potentially
subversive. Just like Bornstein's exclusion of gender passing
transexuality in that which is subversive, to Halberstam
transgression lies explicitly in the 'in-between body' of the
transgender subject: “the transgender body is not reducible to the
transsexual body, and it retains the marks of its own ambiguity
and ambivalence” (“Technotopias” 97). For Halberstam, then,
If the transsexual body has been deliberately reorganized
in order to invite certain gazes and shut down others,
the transgender body performs self as gesture not as
will, as possibility not as probability, as a relation – a
wink, a handshake and as an effect of deliberate
misrecognition [original emphasis]. (97)
This marks a substantial move from his earlier work Female
Masculinity, in which Halberstam focussed on the importance of
integrity and wholeness. Female Masculinity's explicit focus on
female-bodied masculinities placed the transgressive potential of
(these) transgender subjectivities precisely in this stability (as he
emphasizes in the use of Jake). Halberstam did not necessarily
consider these subjectivities as 'incongruous' but rather as a
credible and legible gender which is all too often overlooked (xi).
The transgressive is equated with this defiance of 'sexed
expectations'; that is, that 'females' can grow up to embody
masculinity in different (and subversive) ways than those
assigned 'male' (at birth). Subversion, here, is located in
challenging the assumption of 'sex-gender congruity'; and thus,
could include transexuality. However, we do catch a glimpse of
the position Halberstam takes more candidly in “Technotopias”:
“Not all transsexualities, obviously, present a challenge (or want
to) to hegemonic masculinity, and not all butch masculinities
produce subversion. However, transsexuality and transgenderism
do afford unique opportunities to track explicit performances of
nondominant masculinity” (Female Masculinity 40). This
equation of transgender and transexual provides a space in
which to explore the potential commonalities of
transgender/transexual subversion – a space into which
Halberstam does not move, but I will.
16
Image Damage
Using Barthes's distinction of studium and punctum, I wish to
suggest that it is possible to detect a particularly queer punctum in
images of both transgender and transexual bodies. To Barthes, a
photograph's punctum is that which breaks or punctuates its
narrative content (the studium), “it is this element which rises
from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me”
(43). In the consideration of queer portraiture, the perception of
'sex-gender incongruity' is often made visible by a 'detail,' (26) for
example the netting of Jake's moustache. Barthes infers that
punctum is necessarily that which leads to the contemplation of
something else, that cannot be named and makes him linger on
the photograph: “the punctum has, more or less potentially, a
power of expansion. This power is very often metonymic” (45).
To Barthes, the punctum is specific to the personal experience of
the reader (and therefore cannot be generalized). However, I
wish to extend Barthes concept of punctum to theorize the
possibility of a queer punctum.
That is, I wish to suggest that in the context of images of trans
and queer bodies, nuances of gender can be seen as 'details'
which present 'the queer moment' as punctum. For example, the
visible adhesive of Jake's moustache can be seen as such a detail,
as it breaks the narrative continuity (of the expectations and
connections between 'maleness' and facial hair) and forces a re-
reading of the text. The site of the adhesive is powerfully
metonymic as it leads to the consideration of the body outside of
the frame (spectrum) of the photograph, interrupting dominant
understandings of 'sex-gender congruity'. Opie references Butler
as the image declares gender not as 'natural' or causally linked to
17
'sex,' but performatively (re)produced: it is Jake's deliberate
performativity of the 'wrong'5 gender – the gender 'incongruous'
with assigned 'sex' – that is central to the project and piercing to
the reader: a queer punctum. In Jax Sailor Back, we can see this
queer punctum in that which is not there; the absence of 'sexed'
organs or 'secondary “sex” features' characteristic of the back
which are only dwelled on after consideration of Jax Revealed.
A concept of punctum which Barthes does consider universal in
the reading of photographs is the punctum of Time. Each
photograph contains the 'catastrophe' of Time; a tension between
preservation and the coming of death. While the subject of a
photograph may or may not be dead, the moment in which the
picture was captured is past - dead - and draws attention to the
passage of Time as the nearing of death. Barthes names this
figuration the photograph's noeme, the 'that-has-been,' which
interrupts any contemplation of the picture's narrative with the
catastrophe “that is dead and that is going to die,” (96) seizing us
to rethink the text. Here, Time is an ever present punctum.
Prosser argues that to the transitioned transexual, photographs
of the pre-transitioned self can constitute a rather more
devastating 'return of the dead,' harking to the common
description of transition as rebirth (220; see also Bornstein 93-
98). The notion of the image as referencing death renders the
photograph as both damaged and damaging thing, confronting
the reader with hir6 own impending death. This is all the more
poignant in queer portraiture, where the subject's real life is
threatened with the knowledge (or experience) of anti-
trans/queer violence.
5 See Nikki Sullivan, “The Role of Medicine in the (Trans)Formation of
'Wrong' Bodies.” Body and Society, 14/1 (2008): 105-116.
18
The threat of violence is a devastating and constant
consideration in trans lives. By placing subversive value on that
which puts us at the highest risk of violence, we risk idolising an
untenable existence. We are all taught that those of us who are
most visibly different will encounter discrimination, hostility
and violence. As Petra Doan finds “transgendered people are
painfully aware that their visible transgression of gender norms
makes them one of the most vulnerable and least protected
communities in social space” (61, see also Table 3 on 65; Smith).
Furthermore, violence against transgender people is not only
frequent but underreported and anti-trans sentiment is
institutionalized within the system of law enforcement:
Like gay men and lesbian women, transgender persons
are disproportionately victims of discrimination and
violence. Transgender persons are also often reluctant
to report violence directed against them due to a
number of factors including low expectations of arrest,
the trauma of reporting, and a widespread, shared
experience of negative police attitudes. (Supreme Court
Library)
Social sanctioning acts to preserve the boundaries of gender and
cultural pressures are often at the forefront of our internalized
anxieties about gender ambiguity; individuals are punished or
rewarded according to our adhesion to social expectations of
gender (Boswell, 30).7 Bornstein elucidates: “[w]e're taught to pay
attention to humiliation, because it can be enforced by violence”
(Gender Outlaw 88). The US GenderPAC First National Survey of
Transgender Violence reinforces this statistically, finding that over
60% of respondents had experienced assault, and that
6 I think it most appropriate here to use gender neutral pronouns. 7 For a detailed account of how gender is policed through science, law,
religion, education systems, art, pornography and economics, see Kate Bornstein, “Just Say No” in My Gender Workbook. London: Routledge, 1998, 109-157.
19
harassment and violence were often manifested in schools,
churches, police and health care professionals. Furthermore,
Prosser suggests that the risks and hostility one endures whilst
being the most clearly bi- or 'wrongly'- gendered (such as
beginning hormone usage) “often proves a barely liveable zone”
(12). The relationship of queer embodiment to physical violence
and death creates queer and trans portraits as powerfully defiant.
In this way, the presentation of the trans body in photography
lays bare the strength of trans subjects as we face death in
violating the social order of 'gender' and 'sex'.
Integrity and Subversion: A Queer Conundrum?
The queer fixation with transgender ambiguity and disorder has
eroded the appreciation and consideration of transexual bodies
as unified subjectivities and still powerfully subversive. Kael T.
Block's series xx boys resists this postulation by focusing instead
on pride forged through integrity. As its description declares:
“[an xx boy is] F2M, [a] Gender Pirate, [o]ne whose genre
capsizes the binary, one who creates his own beauty and body,
one who created his identity without paying conventions from a
sovereign gender system” (xx boys). Although this gender system
cannot be thrown aside, Block's intentions to capture images of
transmen without stringent, or preconceived, borders of who
that might include presents an interesting contrast to Opie's and
Volcano's portraits of the explicitly transgendered – not
transexed – 'female' body. In this self-portrait, (Figure 4) Block
exhibits (his) 'maleness' not as invisibility but as alterity. His body
is resolutely masculine and 'male': he raises his arms in
supplication, displaying his muscular strength and forming a
triangle (a symbol of the feminine as well as queer); he draws his
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history together with/in the palms of his hands. It is only in the
visibility of his top surgery8 scars – and in the reader's ability to
recognize them as such – that his transexual ontology (and
history) is made apparent; that is, a queer punctum.
Figure 4. Kael T Block
Here, I am arguing that a visible transexuality may present
integrity and remain transgressively powerful. That is,
transexuality presents a refusal to accept 'sex-gender congruity',
and this refusal acts as another unifying (queer) moment, not
between gay and lesbian identification, but between transgender
and transsexual. Rather than mark out transexuality as 'gender
normalising', images referencing SRS portray a specifically
8 'Top surgery' describes the medical intervention which removes breasts to
construct the contours of a 'male-appearing' chest. For more information, see A.J. Simpson and Joshua Goldberg, Trans Care Gender Transition: Surgery: A Guide for FTMs. Vancouver: Transgender Health Program, 2006, 5-12.
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transexual queer punctum. Halberstam suggests that it is this
relationship to technology which is (subversively) significant:
“[the] body situated in an immediate and visceral relation to the
technologies – guns, scalpels, cars, paintbrushes – that have
marked, hurt, changed, imprinted, and brutally reconstructed it”
(“Technotopias” 116). Block’s 'maleness' and masculinity is not
in question or dislocation, but still his relationship to technology
marks/makes his body transgressive. In blending his body into
the background through the matching designs of his tattoos and
the wallpaper, Block presents an unwavering image of wholeness,
strength and integrity. Block represents (his) transexual ontology
as precisely not fragmented, yet the presentation of his surgery
scars mark him explicitly as queer and subversive in his refusal to
be bound by the limitations of his assigned (at birth) 'sex' and the
feminist and queer discourses which dismiss the transgressive
potential of SRS. The series as a whole serves to redress the
delineation of transexual from transgendered, as to Block xx
boys are who they say they are, sometimes with surgery scars and
sometimes without. Indeed, Block's emphasis on beauty through
pride demands a strength and self-esteem of a subject intact:
“From cocky smiles to shy attitudes, beyond the physical, our
beauty comes from our pride, our strength, the variety of our
experiences, and our will to create sweet, strong and sexy
representation[s] of transmen and our culture” (xx boys).
Conclusion
The figuration of the transgender body in photography as the
queer trope marks out the queer moment of cross-gender
identification and subversion as decidedly not transexual.
Transexed bodies are thus rendered 'gender normative,'
displacing the transgressive transexual ontology which defies
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'sexed expectations' of gender conformity. The subversive power
of queer portraiture such as Block’s – that aims at offering an
identifiable integrity to transexual subjectivities – should not be
dismissed. By idolising images of ruptured and dislocated bodies
we risk idealising our own fragmentation and disintegration.
Such an existence is hardly beneficial in a community which
experiences so much violence. Rather, we need images which
point to our potential to stick together, that reaffirm our desires
for our bodies as mutable and whole. The potential of a project
like Block's shows us that queer subversion on the body can be
transexed or transgender. While images of 'gender incongruous'
transgender bodies present queer punctum as the nuances of
gender-crossing, images of transexed bodies are able to interrupt
understandings of 'sex-determined' gender through the
relationships to technology which mark the body.
Epilogue, or A Self Portrait
“These are claims on people's lives,” Haraway elucidates, “the
view from a body, always a complex, contradictory, structuring
and structured body” (195). So can I get away with not showing
you mine? I risk, in failing to show you who I am (what I look
like), passing unseen by you. Of this I am painfully aware. So, I
will give you something to look at. Some piece of me, dark and
grainy as it is (unsatisfying?); a piece/picture of my body,
whatever that means to you. In the hope that caught between a
dialectic of in/visibility I transexual and transgender bodies
have the potential to queer understandings of seeing and being
seen, as well as concepts of 'gender' and the body. But (don't)
look closely.
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J Latham. Self-portrait (barely), 2009.
Acknowledgements
This article was developed with the assistance of Drs JaneMaree
Maher, Steven Angelides, Alison Ross and Sharon Bickle of
Monash University in 2009.
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Images
Figure 1. Del LaGrace Volcano, Jax Sailor Back, 1991. Jackie.
Fiberbased Chlorobromide Print, 20 x 24 inches, Edition of 9.
Suggested citation: Latham, J.R. (2011) ‘Transgender Trouble: Subversion and/or Death in Queer Portraiture.’ /thirdspace/: a journal of feminist cultural studies. Available at https://unimelb.academia.edu/JRLatham
