Drawing upon the tradition of documentary photography and photojournalism, a number of photographers in the past decade or so have become increasingly interested in affirmative images of marginalized groups as a way of revealing cracks and crevices in the social structures that order our lives. The strategy of using images to de-mystify social life has most recently been employed by members and sympathetic observers of the transgender community. As a consequence of their efforts, transgender photography has quickly become a burgeoning area of artistic activity and academic interest (for other works not covered here,see Bright & Posener, 1996; Fellas, 1997; Kirk & Heath, 1984;Posener, 1994; Sanford, 1995; Soares, 1995; Maricevic & Goldberg,1995).
Post modernism, Photography, and Gender Photography of transgendered people is not a new genre. There are several photographers and artists who have presented works based on challenging ordinary depictions of gender. Most commonly, this genre takes the form of photo-journalism, portrait, or documentary photography. An example of this is a series of photos by Swedish photographer Christer Stromholm. During 1959 to 1962, under the pseudonym of Christer Christian, he photographed the prostitutes and transsexuals of Paris' red light district (Richardson, 1990). Andy Warhol painted some gender blending portraits, and in a photo by Chris Makos, he was its cross-dressing subject. In the 1980's, Robert Maplethorpe appeared in drag for self-portraits, and Diane Arbus photographed many transgendered people. Of course, none of these artists claimed a transgender identity--they were simply playing with images and controversy, destabilizing what its viewers know and assume about gender and sex.
The 1989 photo-montage by Barbara Kruger, "Your Body is a Battleground," illustrates just what is at stake in photography in the post modern age. Among the many wars on the body in the post modern age, including abortion and contraceptive rights, the object of this poster, is the war over the meaning of the body and control over its form. As a contested terrain, the body becomes a site of control and a means to express freedom. I would like to argue that post modern cultural theory reveals that transgender photography speaks with a double voice, articulating two stories about the transgender community's ways of being. In one story, transgender photography communicates a traditional dualistic understanding of gender as bipolar. Gender is either masculine or feminine, and consistent with one's anatomical identification as either male or female. One's gender identity, so the story goes, develops when one is very young and remain sunitary and stable throughout life because it is an expression of one's real or true being. In the other story, however, transgender photography provides the basis for a critique of dualistic gender. Specifically, transgender photography challenges the bipolarity, consistency, unity, stability, and reality of traditional gender identities by presenting viewers with images of people whose bodies, thoughts, and actions blur the lines between masculine and feminine, male and female.
Post modern theory encourages an interpretation of gender as complex and multiple. In post modern gender theory, the phenomenon of cross-dressing can be seen as a challenge to the idea of a "one person, one gender" system. By donning the vestments of the "other" in their quest to develop and express their "second self," cross-dressers publicly transgress the assumed immutable and impermeable boundary between genders. As Marjorie Garber points out, people commonly respond to cross-dressers by looking through the cross-dressing to see the man dressed as a woman or the woman dressed as a man. However, the gender identities of cross-dressers are better understood not as unitary but as multiple (Garber, 1992). Mariette Pathy Allen's (1989) photographs of cross-dressers,for instance, support gender complexity and multiplicity. Acknowledged and acclaimed in the field of transgender photography for the last seventeen years, Allen has shown and published a collection of richly contextualized portrait photographs and biographies of cross-dressers, their lovers, and children. From the perspective of post modern theory, cross-dressing is a system of signification in which signs of gender are received but not all are read: we see the multiplicity of gender, but we read unitary gender. However, when one can be both masculine and feminine, masculine then feminine, or feminine then masculine, dualistic either/or gender thinking quickly becomes both/and thinking. Each of us is not a unitary man or woman but both, partly man and woman, first and second self together. Allen sees cross-dressers as creating their femme side as the better half, finding release from strict masculine rolesby inhabiting either a feminine role or one that represents a synthesis of masculine and feminine. In the collapse of either/or gender identity logic, the"transvestite figure," (p. 16) as Garber (1992) calls it,represents the notion that identities are not either/or but both/and (Derrida, 1967/1976). Cross-dressers represent an additional "space of possibility" (Garber, 1992, p. 11) in which the unity of gender identity becomes multiple. Post modern identity theorist Kenneth Gergen (1991) believes multiplicity is common to post modern identities. Gergen writes that in the post modern context, our selves become saturated with "multiple and disparate potentials for being," (p. 69) as we become laminated with the experience of others and a "cacophony of potentials" (p. 73). These multiple and disparate potentials for being mean that our identities become pastiches or "imitative assemblages of each other" (p. 71). Therefore, we are no longer simply "one person one gender," but all persons and all genders. According to Gergen, one way that we become imitative assemblages of each other is through global communication and information technologies, which provide us with a continuous stream of potential models for being. The infusion of imitative identities into the self is perhaps most evident in photo-documentaries of drag queens and female impersonators. A few years ago, London-born photographer Jeanette Jones published a collection of photographs of cross-dressers, drag queens, and transsexuals she met in clubs in London, Miami, and Spain. Her photos of female impersonators, in particular, show the profound influence that cultural icons, distributed by information technologies, have on our construction of gender identity,reminding us that, while some of the identities we adopt from the media we are bombarded with daily may be "consistent" with our sex, others may not. Madonna is a commonly emulated cultural icon that is distributed world-wide and provides a model for transgender identity. Madonna figures centrally in self-portraits of Japanese photographer Yasumasa Morimura. In Morimura's 1994 Psychoborg series, he poses as Madonna, almost disappearing into her character (Rugoff, 1994). Portrayed against monochromatic backgrounds, his cross-dressing hangs, suspended without reference, a complex and potentially complete performance(Rugoff, 1994). Not only is Morimura blurring of the boundaries between male and female, Japanese and Caucasian, but between image and reality, production and reproduction, and fantasy and reality such that "distinctions between the real, the simulated,and the artificial have already collapsed" (Woodrow, 1995, p.19). Morimura's appropriation of Madonna illustrates that commercially-manufactured identities can serve as a basis for a viewer's own transformation (Woodrow, 1995). There is a sense of humour here, although not necessarily parody, but a critical jibe at society. If Madonna herself is a simulation of gender roles,his "Madonna" image celebrates the flexibility of signifiers and lays claim to his own version of a famous Pop music star, and so Morimura enters the endless loop of gender simulation. Another Madonna is "C," a drag queen from Bangkok, who figures centrally in a photo taken by Nan Goldin. Goldin first started photographing drag queens, gender blenders, and transsexuals almost 20 years ago when she fell in love with queens and hung out with them at "The Other Side," a drag queen bar in Boston. She writes that she began taking her friends' pictures as an homage, in worship of their beauty, but it turned into an interest in the possibilities of gender transcendence(Goldin, 1993). Her book, published a few years ago, is a close and intimate survey of her friends and their day to day life,hanging out in their homes, getting dressed, performing at clubs or parades in New York, Boston, Paris, Manila, and Bangkok. Interestingly, Goldin sees her friends as a third gender. She writes: "I never saw them as men dressing as women, but as something entirely different--a third gender that made more sense than either of the other two" (Goldin, 1993, p. 5). Goldin's use of the term "third gender" tells us dichotomies like man/woman, masculine/feminine can be transcended by "third terms." A third term shows how the "differance"(Derrida, 1967/1976) between the two terms is, in fact, no difference at all. It may be that if all genders are falsely distinct, then third genders--like transgender--may be the third terms that cause the dichotomy to collapse upon itself. While either/or gender logic governs gender in society, and most within the transgender community portray either masculine or feminine genders, transgender presentations also help to deconstruct this binarism. As the queer theorist Stephen Whittle (1996)concludes: "transgendered behaviour not only challenges sexual dimorphism in that boundaries are crossed, but it provides a challenge to the boundaries ever being there" (p. 205). Kate Bornstein (1994) also supports the idea of transgender as a third gender. She writes: "It's when we put gender into play, it's when we question the binary, it's when we break the rules and keep calling attention to the fact that the rules are breakable:that's when we create a Third Space" (Bornstein, 1994, p. 140). Rosamond Norbury, a Vancouver freelance photographer, also documents aspects of female impersonator and drag queen experiences (Norbury & Richardson, 1994). In many of Norbury's photos, drag queens present a highly feminine, glamorous, and stereotypical gender appearance. However, as Judith Butler points out, drag also shows gender identity to be fabricated and sustained by words, acts, gestures, and the display of signs on the surface of the body (Butler, 1990). Although drag performers strive to convey the impression of a singular and stable gender consistent with sex, their anatomical sex, their gender identity,and the gender of their performance may, in fact, not be consistent. Thus, warns Butler, drag is not the performance of gender but the performance of "the sign of gender" (Butler, 1993,p. 237), a sign that can only be appropriated, theatricalized,impersonated, and approximated because "there is no original or primary gender that drag imitates, but gender is a kind of imitation for which there is no original" (Butler, 1991, p. 21).
Post modern theory also emphasizes the illusory, dynamic, and constructed nature of gender. If the phenomenon of cross-dressing produces a crisis in traditional gender categories, then transsexuality carries the potential to sweep them away entirely. Jeanette Jones's (1995) portraits of male-to-female transsexuals,for instance, appear on the surface to depict the unity of identity--the deeply held sense of femininity experienced by her glamorous and alluring male-to-female transsexual subjects, who,by and large, evoke memories of poster pin-ups, a celebration of womanly essence and being. Indeed, many transsexuals themselves do not embrace gender multiplicity or complexity; they view their appearance as a testimony to their gender unity. Jones's subjects, both clothed and nude, invite us to celebrate their unmistakably real and seamless femininity. But as much as Jones's images are about gender realness,they also demonstrate its constructedness, reinforcing the post modernist notion that gender attribution is largely a social process. In other words, as Susan Kessler and Wendy McKenna(1978) point out in their book "Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach," gender attribution is made not on the basis of one's biological sex, because biological sex is not usually observable,but on the basis of adornment, posture, appearance, and role. Although the goal of transsexual transformation is often the realization of what the individual considers to be his or her true gender, this assertion of gender realness is contingent upon the individual's ability to erase the residual effects of a previous gender attribution. From a post modernist point of view,this process of fabrication and re-fabrication clearly emphasizes the illusory and dynamic qualities of gender. Gender becomes a semiotic statement organized by the "hypercode" of sexual difference (Eco, 1976). Since the signs of sexual difference are arbitrary and symbolic, gender is subject to play and change. In the past, signs of sex and gender have been viewed as signifiers of absolute, real truths. In the post modern present, they only signify other signifiers, in an endless chain of significations(Baudrillard, 1972/1981). In this "procession of the simulacra,""The real is no longer real," and everything becomes make-believe(Baudrillard, 1972/1981, p. 66). As much as some transsexuals may see their sex and gender as real, in the post modern world the constructedness and arbitrariness of all gender significations replace true, real, and original genders. Catherine Opie's portraiture also questions traditional assumptions about gender by investigating how leather dykes,cross-dressing lesbians, and female-to-male transsexuals play at being male. Opie's sitters pose with a formality reminiscent of early Enlightenment portraits. Suspended in space against monochrome backgrounds, they gaze confidently back at the viewer(Rugoff, 1994). In "Mike and Sky," the tough and dangerous appearance of the subjects suggests a comfort with the unambiguous display of gender signifiers and a desire to be men,but because Mike and Sky are also linked to womanhood and share a history with women, the portraits suggest a more complex understanding of gender identity (Deva, 1994). Opie's 1991 series, "Being and Having," part of which was included in show called "Fabrications" (Toronto Photographers Workshop, 1995), goes even further towards demonstrating the constructedness of gender and the falseness of unitary and coherent genders (Fullerton, 1995). Opie's portraits of butch lesbians wearing obviously fake moustaches, for instance, not only illustrate societal expectations about gender but also provide a critique of those expectations. Her portraits simultaneously reveal the simple performativity of gender and the resistance to standard interpretations of butch identity. Opie's subjects do not wish to pass as men, nor do they see themselves as men, they simply wish to appropriate the signifiers of masculinity as play and fantasy. And, in this way, they display an understanding of gender identity as fluid and diverse and not simply limited to dualistic categories. Loren Cameron is one of the few professional photographers who identifies as transgendered. First inspired by depression-era photographers Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange,Cameron began his career documenting his own transition to malehood and then began to document the transitions of others. Cameron's first exhibition was an intimate and revealing series of twenty-three photographs of both male-to-female and female-to-male transsexuals called "Our Visions, Our Voices:Transsexual Portraits and Nudes." In these photos, members of Cameron's transsexual community appear in front of wrinkledbed-sheet backdrops. The subjects describe their experiences of gender in texts included below the images. The text for Cameron's 1993 self-portrait reads as follows: I used to read a lot of graphic novels and loved looking at all those masculine archetypes. I always wanted a body like those comic book heroes with their bulging biceps, and firm hard pecs. But it wasn't just about muscles, it was about gender identity. (DeGenevieve, 1994, p. 46) As Barbara DeGenevieve (1994) points out in an article published in "Camerawork," Opie and Cameron both "entice us to engage in the kind of looking that might draw us away from our allegiance to normative considerations of gender" (p. 46), a kind of looking that both validates cultural stereotypes of gender and destabilizes them. Drawing upon the symbolic, but arbitrary,meanings of signifiers, Cameron's images portray gender identity both as a complex product of human biology and as a system of signs that position us in social interaction. A more current collection of Cameron's (1996) photographs,"Body Alchemy: Transsexual Portraits," was published this past winter. This collection focuses on his self-portraits, but also includes photos and autobiographical statements of other men,close-ups of genital and chest reconstruction, before and after pictures of Cameron and other men, and his lover Kayt, who also explores gender fluidity. In the book, Cameron explains that photography began as autobiography, taking pictures of his transformation to document the changes for family and friends,but then he turned to others to validate their experience and show it to the world. One of the overarching narratives in his photography is that of a hero overcoming adversity through strength of will. In fact, the section ironically entitled"God's Will," from which this picture is taken, shows the scalpel, the barbells, and the hormone injections he uses to complete god's will. It shows, in this author's opinion, along with the ever-present shutter bulb he holds in his other hand,that his body is a construction of his own will and medical technology. On more than one level, he is creating his own image.
Transgender photography, at least in the context of postmodern theory, draws attention to the fact that in the contemporary world, the body is a contested terrain, and one of the battles on this terrain is over gender. However, there are two stories in this battle. Gender can be seen as bipolar,unitary, real, stable and natural. And at first glance, much of transgender photography seems to simply replicate these traditional views since its subjects often conform to dualistic genders. But gender can also be seen as multiple, complex,illusory, dynamic, and constructed. A post modern interpretation of transgender photography encourages this kind of polysemic interpretation. There are many different ways of depicting gender, sometimes logically contradictory, just as the transgender community itself is diverse in its gender beliefs. The wide variety of gender positions occupied by people within the transgender community is important to post modern gender theory because it reveals gender as a system of cultural significations open to re-signification. Yet, the post modern understanding of gender as a playful construction is contrary to the lived experience of those who know the pain of living in a body that does not conform to what they feel is their natural gender. Moreover, too much illusion,instability, and multiplicity can lead to an alienating sense of fragmentation and fantasy. Post modern hopes for gender pluralism and freedom are, at this point, simply hopes; for the vast majority of our society, bodies dictate real, stable, unitary,and bipolar gender. Is it possible to step outside the man/woman, male/female dichotomies that dominate our cultural understandings of gender? Can gender be both real and illusory, singular and multiple,natural and constructed? By documenting the transformation from one sex/gender to another, the importance of the body to gender,and the effects of transformative practices on the body,transgender photography shows the possibility of creating a reality beyond ordinary experience. Perhaps this reality will eventually transform the structures of society, challenging and breaking through the boundaries of traditional gender to legitimize a plurality of masculinities, femininities, and other--yet unnamed--genders.
Allen, M. P. (1989). Transformations: Crossdressers and those who love them. New York: E. P. Dutton.
Baudrillard, J. (1972/1981). For a critique of the political economy of the sign (C. Levin, Trans.). St Louis, MO: Telos.
Bornstein, K. (1994). Gender outlaw: On men, women, and the rest of us. New York: Routledge.
Bright, S., & Posener, J. (1996). Nothing but the girl: The blatant lesbian image. New York: Freedom Editions.
Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that matter. New York: Routledge.
Butler, J. (1991). Imitation and gender insubordination. In D. Fuss (Ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian theories, gay theories (pp.13-31). New York: Routledge.
Cameron, L. (1996). Body alchemy: Transsexual portraits. San Francisco: Cleis Press.
DeGenevieve, B. (1994). Letting us look: Scandalous genders or blur baby blur. Camerawork: J Journal of Photographic Arts, Fall/Winter, 46-47.
Derrida, J. (1967/1976). Of grammatology (G. Spivak, Trans.). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Deva. (1994). FTM/Female-to-male: An interview with Mike, Eric, Billy, Sky and Shadow. In L. Burana, Roxxie, & L. Due (Eds.), Dagger: On butch women (pp.154-167). San Francisco: Cleis Press.
Eco, U. (1976). A theory of semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Fellas, T. (1997). Reinventing masculinity. Girlfriends, March/April, 34-37.
Fullerton, K. (1995). The daddy calls my name in a sultry woman's voice. In K. Fullerton (Ed.), Fabrications: Hamish Buchanan, Catherine Opie, David Rasmus (pp. 3-11). Toronto: Toronto Photographers Workshop.
Garber, M. (1992). Vested interests: Cross-dressing and cultural anxiety. New York: HarperPerennial.
Gergen, K. (1991). The saturated self: Dilemmas of identity in contemporary life. New York: Basic Books.
Goldin, N. (1993). The other side. Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications.
Jones, J. (1995). Walk on the wild side. New York: Barricade Books.
Kessler, S., & McKenna, W. (1978). Gender: An ethnomethodological approach. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Kirk, K., & Heath, E. (1984). Men in frocks. London: GMP.
Maricevic, V., & Goldberg, V. (1995). Male to female. Zurich, Switzerland: Edition Stemle.
Norbury, R., & Richardson, B. (1994). Guy to goddess: An intimate look at drag queens. Berkeley, CA: 10 Speed Press.
Posener, J. (1994). Photographing butch. In L. Burana, Roxxi, & L. Due (Eds.), Dagger: On butch women (pp. 43-49). San Francisco: Cleis Press.
Richardson, N. (1990). The mirrors of Christer Stromholm. In M. Harris (Ed.), The body in question (pp. 2-5). New York: Aperture Foundation.
Rugoff, R. (1994). Transformative aesthetics. In R. Rugloff (Ed.), Transformers (pp. 11-58). New York: Independent Curators Incorporated.
Sanford, E. M. (1995). Elise Mitchell Sanford: The stuff of dreams. Syracuse, NY: Robert B. Menschel Photography Gallery.
Soares, M. G. (1995). Images of Butch/Femme. In M. G. Soares (Ed.), Butch/Femme (pp. 5-9). New York: Crown.
Toronto Photographers Workshop. (1995). Fabrications: Hamish Buchanan, Catherine Opie, David Rasmus. Toronto: Author.
Whittle, S. (1996). Gender fucking or fucking gender?: Current cultural contributions to theories of gender blending. In R. Ekins & D. King (Eds.), Blending genders: Social aspects of cross dressing and sex changing (pp.196-214). New York: Routledge.
Woodrow, P. (1995). Caught in the act [Review of Yasumasa Morimura: "Psychoborg"]. Blackflash, 13(1), 18-19