CURRENT ISSUE
‘New Work in Transgender Art and Visual Culture Studies’
In this issue:
Prismatic views: a look at the growing field of transgender art and visual culture studies
Guest editors Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg provide context, language and ‘instruments’ to engage with the diverse approaches to Transgender Art and Visual Culture offered by the contributors to this themed issue.
The wavering line of foreground and background: a proposal for the schematic analysis of trans visual culture
Eliza Steinbock borrows Susan Stryker’s language of trans emerging to the foreground against a set background of normative conditions to develop a language and a set of categories to engage trans visual culture and escape the visual essentialism that characterizes more traditional analysis.
Marie Høeg’s worldmaking photography: a photo essay
K.J. Rawson and Nicole Tantum present a photo-led essay on the work of Marie Høeg, seeking to uncover important considerations of visibility, privacy, and the ethics of circulation that they elicit.
Familiar grammars of loss and belonging: curating trans kinship in post-dictatorship Argentina
Cole Rizki examines the archival exhibition Esta se fue, a esta la mataron, esta murió (2017), which installs trans subjects in the context of the Argentine dictatorship and the social and activist movement of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo that emerged from that period.
The diversity of the middle: mythology in intersectional trans representation
Exploring the intersectionality that is inherent to trans culture analysis, Sascha Crasnow looks into the use of mythological hybrid figures in works by two non-binary queer contemporary artists of color, to challenge the notion of the hybrid as a composite of oftentimes irreconcilable parts.
Decolonizing objecthood through 2SQ Indigenous art: Dayna Danger and Jeneen Frei Njootli’s performance, ‘Chases and Tacks’
Sebastian De Line looks into Dayna Danger and Jeneen Frei Njootli’s performance, ‘Chases and Tacks’, inviting an analysis based on Indigenous ways of knowing, as means to escape the essentialist binaries (of gender) all too common in Western epistemologies.
Pretty in pink: David Antonio Cruz’s portrait of the florida girls
Robb Hernández looks into the ways in which the work of artist David Antonio Cruz intervenes and critiques the inaccurate depictions of transgender image in media.
‘I’m a person who loves beautiful things’: Potassa de Lafayette as model and muse
Kara Carmack considers Potassa de Lafayette’s strategies of self-presentation as a case of color trans bodies’ empowering and negotiating difference.
Trans men’s stealth aesthetics: navigating penile prosthetics and ‘gender fraud’
Chris Straayer examines trans commercial production of penile prosthetics, the efficacy of such products in personal and sex-segregated spaces, and their negative valence in the public sphere.
On Jesse Darling
Heather Holmes highlights a recent exhibition of the work of Jesse Darling, in which the depiction of the body as unruly, unpredictable and prone to change, makes for an outstanding case for presenting an alternative to the more common analysis of the non-conforming body as erasing its marks of specificity.
Surviving in the shadow of the un/seen: on the paradoxical in/visibility of El Kazovsky
Susan Stryker explores the paradox of Russian-Hungarian, trans-identified artist El Kazovsky’s visibility as a nationally celebrated artist in a moment of extreme state-sanctioned queer-phobia in Hungary, and the illegibility of his transness.
‘I do not want to pass’: embodiment, metaphor, and world-making in Patrick Staff’s Weed Killer
KJ Cerankowski collates archival object encounters into a transgender ‘ghost story’ that marks the impossibility of a straightforward history of the subject, relying instead on embodied encounters with archive objects, or the remnants (ghostly and tangible) of archival subjects.
Reviews include books by Dominic Johnson, Joan Kee, Tom Rice, and Jenny Odell.