No more trans portraits please

actualsasori:

queeranarchism:

I really hate how transgender experiences are
individualized

whenever they’re made visible. We’re always represented through portraits and biographies, dozens and dozens of them, but all individual. Everytime someone wants to do something for transgender people you can be damn sure they’re going to do more portraits.

The goal is always to ‘humanize’ us, but I’m very sceptical about that. Again and again we see that people are perfectly capable of appreciating an individual member of a minority while continuing to support the systematic violence against that minority. Individual humanizing just doesn’t translate to structural improvement or real change.

And then there’s the claim that portraits provide ‘rolemodels’. But how depressing is it that whenevery you see your rolemodels they are always alone? We’re not presented as part of a community, a group of friends, a family. It’s just us. That doesn’t feel good.
In fact, it’s isolating.

And then there’s the claim that these portraits and biographies show our struggles. They really don’t. What they do is individualize our struggles, turn them into just our personal experiences and obscure the scale and connectedness of all the violence against us. The truth is that we share this struggle with millions of others. Our struggles are a collective struggle. Our enemy isn’t the person that misgendered us, it’s the whole system of transphobia and the other systems of oppression that work in concert with it.

Show me that system in all its darkness. Show me our collective resistance. Show me the struggle that brings us together.
Show me our community.

Reveal the beauty of our solidarity, the rage just behind our collective grief, the worlds we can build when we rise up. Inspire us. Or better yet, ditch the cissaviour complex, drop your pen and your camera and actually join our fight.

not to mention how many of those portraits focus on extremes and actually manage to other us further, and how often there’s a focus on the grotesque.

I’m an Art Ed masters student, my program focuses on art for social justice. Just recently I and two others led an interactive critique centred on queer and disability studies (why they grouped those is beyond me but that’s another post). I was the only one that cared about disability activism, so I chose a piece for that, but I helped my classmate choose the trans one, and this topic specifically came up.

they were choosing from a bunch of portraits, asking for input on which. they were leaning toward a post op transmasculine person, poorly bandaged and bloody from recent surgery. and I brought this up: what are you saying about trans activism through presenting this piece? the thing about portraits is that you either “look trans” or you don’t. if you do, you push that that’s what trans people look like. if you don’t, people miss the point because you’re presumed cis. there is very little activist value in that, and like you said, portraits don’t have relatability the way other art does. I can’t see a portrait of someone else and see myself. and grotesque works like the one I mentioned tend to push away viewers with false representations of what our bodies are like, what our surgeries are like, how we take care of ourselves. the strong medicalisation of trans portraiture and trans art in general is its own problem we should be speaking about too.

I’ll cut it off there, I just have a lot of feelings about this.

That is a particularily gross example, yeah. And the medicalisation and with that internalisation of our struggles is a big issue. Trans people are presented as being defined by their transition and by their suffering, which makes suffering something inherent to trans people, when the truth is that transphobia is the thing that causes suffering and it is inherent to the systems of oppression that are used to control society.

And then there’s the fact that representation that is seen as ‘positive’ by most trans people themselves still tends to celebrate our invisibility, the positivity mostly being derived from a lack of transness. To be a ‘positive’ trans story means to be ‘normal’ (’just like cis people’), to be ‘attractive’ (according to cis standards of beauty) or ‘ succesful’ (meaning succesfully integrated into an oppressive system’).

Oh, and then there’s the ‘positive’ representation that does show our ‘otherness’ but as a trip to progressive wonderland for the cis audience. When the camera captures us as shapeshifters and androgynous David Bowie imitations purely so the cis audience can marvel at our ambiguity, get a rush out of our mysteriousness, feel hip and woke for engaging superficially with our thrilling existence.

But even if we could create representation that avoids the tragic trans story, the ‘just like us’ assimilation story AND the voyeurism, and even if ever photographer was trans, the isolation of the portrait would still be a problem. We still become a single person seperated in the frame from the systems of our oppression, from our relationships, from out collective struggle. The portrait is an inherently individualising liberal medium. We are so much more than that.