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Research Scope and Motivations
In a predominantly sighted society, identity tends to describe how one sees oneself and how one is seen by others. Visual art not only records those identities, it also produces hierarchies that render some more visible—and therefore more powerful—than others. Thus, my broader research investigates how marginalized identities—especially those of transgender, intersex, and disabled people—have been made to appear (or disappear) in Western art. I rely heavily on methods of transgender, intersex, and disability studies to not only interrogate why some figures are more difficult to see than others, but also to investigate the stakes of being seen or not seen in works of art throughout history. My specific focus on transgender and disability history in art are rooted in my lived experience of gender transition and disability. However, I am also invested in using interdisciplinary research methods to center objects that constitute an array of racial and class-based identities that are often rendered invisible by traditional art history. After all, no identity can be fully understood in art through visual information alone.
Current Research
My dissertation asks: what happens to traditional narratives of gender in the history of American art when we consider transgender artists and works that specifically illuminate transgender embodiment? This project contends that works by and featuring Forrest Bess (1911-1974), Candy Darling (1944-1974), Greer Lankton (1958-1996), and Cassils (b. 1971) do at least three things: first, they demonstrate why sex and gender cannot be determined through visual information alone; second, they show how social and scientific histories can be interwoven to carefully assess the appearance of sex and gender transformation in art; and third, they highlight the subtleties of sex and gender that can emerge throughout art history when “male” and “female” are seen as just two of many categories of identity. Works of art made in the United States after WWII are the focus of this dissertation because the US became a springboard for contemporary global movements in art and transgender medicine after Nazi occupation forced the centers of both modern art and transsexual medicine to move from Europe to the US. Each chapter in this dissertation progresses chronologically to follow charged shifts away from terms like “transsexuality” and “hermaphroditism” in the twentieth century and toward “transgender” and “intersex” in the twenty-first.
My first chapter addresses how Forrest Bess uses abstract symbolism in his paintings from the 1950s and 1960s in ways that draw new and potent connections between contemporary transgender medicine, early twentieth-century sexual science, and medieval alchemy. The next chapter in this project examines how nude images of Darling signal intersecting histories of drag and transsexuality as well as conflicts between her expressed desire to be seen as a woman and the celebrity her transsexuality engendered within the American avant garde of the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter three contends that Greer Lankton’s dolls, sculptures, and drawings from the 1980s and 1990s picture the artist’s otherwise invisible traumatic experiences of “sexual reassignment” in ways that rhyme with the aesthetics of AIDS and addiction produced by her close friends David Wojnarowicz and Nan Goldin. The last chapter of this dissertation shows how Cassils’s performance works from the early 2000s through the present question the medicalization of gender transition while also troubling the very notion of visibility in light of pervasive violence committed against contemporary transgender people.
By focusing on how these works of art undermine strict divisions between categories of “man” and “woman,” this dissertation constructs a more comprehensive picture of gender in American art of the second half of the twentieth century than has been presented thus far. For instance, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution from 2007—the first and largest survey of feminist art to date—frames gender as a matter of anatomy rather than identity making it impossible to discuss, or even acknowledge, transgender artists. The 2017 exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon is the first exhibition to overtly challenge binary gender categories; however, none of its works specifically address how American medical definitions of male and female have eclipsed historical accounts of transgender identity in art. As works by Bess, Darling, Lankton, and Cassils all refuse to abide by conventional logics applied to images of men and women, this dissertation also challenges art history to address the insufficiency of these two categories of sexed and gendered figuration in art across all temporal, geographic, and material categories.
My methods are anchored by direct engagement with the works that Bess, Darling, Lankton, and Cassils produced and supplemented by research in archives, oral histories, and interviews with artists, their associates and people who have lived through and produced transgender history. Critiques of biopolitical power that drive transgender, intersex, and disability studies also guide my analysis of these materials. Works of art made in the United States after WWII are at the center of this dissertation because Nazi occupation forced the centers of both modern art and transsexual medicine to move from Europe to the US after the war. This placed the US at the center of both fields for the rest of the twentieth century and made the US a springboard for contemporary global movements in art and transgender medicine. This dissertation unfolds through American artists to explore how these concurrent histories shaped art that came after it in the US.
Publication Plan and History
The first chapter of this dissertation has been invited for revision with Archives of American Art Journal. Elizabeth Ault at Duke University Press has also expressed interest in transforming this dissertation into a book. This process will include drafting a fifth chapter that addresses how artist Chris E. Vargas’s Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art (MOTHA) reimagines transgender object archives and reconsiders how to preserve transgender visual history and culture when it is still evolving and often contested. This chapter will expand on my article, “Chris Vargas’s Consciousness Razing: From Forgetting to Futurity” which was published in Transgender Studies Quarterly in February 2020 and considers how Vargas reimagined George Segal’s Gay Liberation Monument (1980) to reflect forgotten histories of participation in the Stonewall Rebellion by transgender people of color.
Concurrent with my dissertation, I co-edited the August 2020 issue of the Journal of Visual Culture: New Work in Transgender Art and Visual Culture Studies with Dr. Kirstin Ringelberg. In our co-authored introduction, “Prismatic Views: A Look at the Growing Field of Transgender Art and Visual Culture Studies,” I assert that the visual is central to transgender history, and therefore art objects are key to the mining the depths that the most important texts in trans studies address. This project was born out of the 2018 College Art Association panel called “Keeping Up Appearances: Historicizing Transgender Art,” which was the first in the conference’s history to focus entirely on transgender art history. For the second edition of the book Art and Queer Culture (Phaidon, 2019), I also increased the representation of international transgender and intersex artists in one of the defining volumes of queer art history through entries for Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Vaginal Davis, Giuseppe Campuzano, and others.
Future Research
In addition to this work, I am also researching for an article that will address fingerspelling cards in Martin Wong’s paintings in relation to Deaf culture and twentieth-century histories of deafness in New York and a book project focused on disability in American art. This project transforms the methods I use in my investigation of how binary logics of sex and gender eclipse transgender history in art to ask how and to what end disability is seen—or not seen—in American art. Historians of American art and culture have investigated how individual experiences of disability are portrayed in works of art like Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World or how disability history and culture manifests in American material culture. Yet, much remains to be said about how and to what end the very distinction of ability from disability has been made in the visual field. The materials through which I am exploring this question for this project include: portraits of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) that disguise the effects polio had on his figure; performances, paintings, and poetry by Frank Moore (1946-2013), a non-verbal artist with cerebral palsy who created San Francisco’s Outrageous Body Revue cabaret in the late 1970s and was later targeted by Jesse Helms for obscenity; documentation of the protest event Capitol Crawl that was pivotal to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990; sculptures by Judith Scott (1943-2005)—the reception of which raises questions about the limits of formalism in addressing works by neurodivergent artists; and drawings and installations by Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980) that explores her experiences of sound, language, and space as a deaf artist in New York and Berlin.
In a predominantly sighted society, identity tends to describe how one sees oneself and how one is seen by others. Visual art not only records those identities, it also produces hierarchies that render some more visible—and therefore more powerful—than others. Thus, my broader research investigates how marginalized identities—especially those of transgender, intersex, and disabled people—have been made to appear (or disappear) in Western art. I rely heavily on methods of transgender, intersex, and disability studies to not only interrogate why some figures are more difficult to see than others, but also to investigate the stakes of being seen or not seen in works of art throughout history. My specific focus on transgender and disability history in art are rooted in my lived experience of gender transition and disability. However, I am also invested in using interdisciplinary research methods to center objects that constitute an array of racial and class-based identities that are often rendered invisible by traditional art history. After all, no identity can be fully understood in art through visual information alone.
Current Research
My dissertation asks: what happens to traditional narratives of gender in the history of American art when we consider transgender artists and works that specifically illuminate transgender embodiment? This project contends that works by and featuring Forrest Bess (1911-1974), Candy Darling (1944-1974), Greer Lankton (1958-1996), and Cassils (b. 1971) do at least three things: first, they demonstrate why sex and gender cannot be determined through visual information alone; second, they show how social and scientific histories can be interwoven to carefully assess the appearance of sex and gender transformation in art; and third, they highlight the subtleties of sex and gender that can emerge throughout art history when “male” and “female” are seen as just two of many categories of identity. Works of art made in the United States after WWII are the focus of this dissertation because the US became a springboard for contemporary global movements in art and transgender medicine after Nazi occupation forced the centers of both modern art and transsexual medicine to move from Europe to the US. Each chapter in this dissertation progresses chronologically to follow charged shifts away from terms like “transsexuality” and “hermaphroditism” in the twentieth century and toward “transgender” and “intersex” in the twenty-first.
My first chapter addresses how Forrest Bess uses abstract symbolism in his paintings from the 1950s and 1960s in ways that draw new and potent connections between contemporary transgender medicine, early twentieth-century sexual science, and medieval alchemy. The next chapter in this project examines how nude images of Darling signal intersecting histories of drag and transsexuality as well as conflicts between her expressed desire to be seen as a woman and the celebrity her transsexuality engendered within the American avant garde of the 1960s and 1970s. Chapter three contends that Greer Lankton’s dolls, sculptures, and drawings from the 1980s and 1990s picture the artist’s otherwise invisible traumatic experiences of “sexual reassignment” in ways that rhyme with the aesthetics of AIDS and addiction produced by her close friends David Wojnarowicz and Nan Goldin. The last chapter of this dissertation shows how Cassils’s performance works from the early 2000s through the present question the medicalization of gender transition while also troubling the very notion of visibility in light of pervasive violence committed against contemporary transgender people.
By focusing on how these works of art undermine strict divisions between categories of “man” and “woman,” this dissertation constructs a more comprehensive picture of gender in American art of the second half of the twentieth century than has been presented thus far. For instance, WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution from 2007—the first and largest survey of feminist art to date—frames gender as a matter of anatomy rather than identity making it impossible to discuss, or even acknowledge, transgender artists. The 2017 exhibition Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon is the first exhibition to overtly challenge binary gender categories; however, none of its works specifically address how American medical definitions of male and female have eclipsed historical accounts of transgender identity in art. As works by Bess, Darling, Lankton, and Cassils all refuse to abide by conventional logics applied to images of men and women, this dissertation also challenges art history to address the insufficiency of these two categories of sexed and gendered figuration in art across all temporal, geographic, and material categories.
My methods are anchored by direct engagement with the works that Bess, Darling, Lankton, and Cassils produced and supplemented by research in archives, oral histories, and interviews with artists, their associates and people who have lived through and produced transgender history. Critiques of biopolitical power that drive transgender, intersex, and disability studies also guide my analysis of these materials. Works of art made in the United States after WWII are at the center of this dissertation because Nazi occupation forced the centers of both modern art and transsexual medicine to move from Europe to the US after the war. This placed the US at the center of both fields for the rest of the twentieth century and made the US a springboard for contemporary global movements in art and transgender medicine. This dissertation unfolds through American artists to explore how these concurrent histories shaped art that came after it in the US.
Publication Plan and History
The first chapter of this dissertation has been invited for revision with Archives of American Art Journal. Elizabeth Ault at Duke University Press has also expressed interest in transforming this dissertation into a book. This process will include drafting a fifth chapter that addresses how artist Chris E. Vargas’s Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art (MOTHA) reimagines transgender object archives and reconsiders how to preserve transgender visual history and culture when it is still evolving and often contested. This chapter will expand on my article, “Chris Vargas’s Consciousness Razing: From Forgetting to Futurity” which was published in Transgender Studies Quarterly in February 2020 and considers how Vargas reimagined George Segal’s Gay Liberation Monument (1980) to reflect forgotten histories of participation in the Stonewall Rebellion by transgender people of color.
Concurrent with my dissertation, I co-edited the August 2020 issue of the Journal of Visual Culture: New Work in Transgender Art and Visual Culture Studies with Dr. Kirstin Ringelberg. In our co-authored introduction, “Prismatic Views: A Look at the Growing Field of Transgender Art and Visual Culture Studies,” I assert that the visual is central to transgender history, and therefore art objects are key to the mining the depths that the most important texts in trans studies address. This project was born out of the 2018 College Art Association panel called “Keeping Up Appearances: Historicizing Transgender Art,” which was the first in the conference’s history to focus entirely on transgender art history. For the second edition of the book Art and Queer Culture (Phaidon, 2019), I also increased the representation of international transgender and intersex artists in one of the defining volumes of queer art history through entries for Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Vaginal Davis, Giuseppe Campuzano, and others.
Future Research
In addition to this work, I am also researching for an article that will address fingerspelling cards in Martin Wong’s paintings in relation to Deaf culture and twentieth-century histories of deafness in New York and a book project focused on disability in American art. This project transforms the methods I use in my investigation of how binary logics of sex and gender eclipse transgender history in art to ask how and to what end disability is seen—or not seen—in American art. Historians of American art and culture have investigated how individual experiences of disability are portrayed in works of art like Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World or how disability history and culture manifests in American material culture. Yet, much remains to be said about how and to what end the very distinction of ability from disability has been made in the visual field. The materials through which I am exploring this question for this project include: portraits of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945) that disguise the effects polio had on his figure; performances, paintings, and poetry by Frank Moore (1946-2013), a non-verbal artist with cerebral palsy who created San Francisco’s Outrageous Body Revue cabaret in the late 1970s and was later targeted by Jesse Helms for obscenity; documentation of the protest event Capitol Crawl that was pivotal to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990; sculptures by Judith Scott (1943-2005)—the reception of which raises questions about the limits of formalism in addressing works by neurodivergent artists; and drawings and installations by Christine Sun Kim (b. 1980) that explores her experiences of sound, language, and space as a deaf artist in New York and Berlin.