CURRENT RESEARCH
My forthcoming book, Deep Cuts: Transgender History in American Art after World War II engages histories of gender transformation in American art since the end of the Second World War. This book project demonstrates that transgender artists and artists who transgress binary gender ideologies are not peripheral actors in the history of American art but have been part of some of its most recognized modern and contemporary moments, movements, and collections. Furthermore, because gender is so often understood and produced through the appearance of the body, its form, and the materials used to adorn it, this book also contends that methods of art history have a particularly potent potential to support growing discourse on the capacities and stakes of transgender embodiment. Using close visual analysis, I showcase the ways in which gender operates outside of normative distinctions between male and female in American art from the postwar period through the end of the twentieth century through paintings by Forrest Bess (b. 1911), photographs and prints featuring Candy Darling (1944–1974), and sculptures by Greer Lankton (1958–1996). This book also surveys some of the most pressing themes in transgender art in the United States in the twenty-first century through performances by Cassils (b. 1971), films and photographs by Tourmaline (b. 1983), ceramics by Nicki Green (b. 1986), figurative paintings by Nash Glynn (b. 1992), multidisciplinary work by Juliana Huxtable (b. 1987), and playfully critical archival projects by Chris E. Vargas (b. 1979). The project begins after World War II because this was a unique moment when major centers of both modern art and sexual science had shifted from Europe to the United States. Beginning in 1919, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld operated an innovative and thriving research institution in Berlin that was dedicated to the support of homosexual and gender-variant people. During the same period, figures such as Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and Salvador Dalí had made Paris the axis mundi for modern art. However, in 1933, Nazis burned Hirschfeld’s institute, and by 1937 they mounted the degenerate art show that argued that modern art was evidence of societal decline. This and the 1939 Nazi occupation of Paris generated massive efforts to deliver works of art and artists out of Europe, often to New York City. With its infrastructure untouched by war and the economy relatively strong, New York became the new center for Western art in the 1940s. By 1949, Dr. Harry Benjamin reignited Hirschfeld’s work in the States after a patient of Dr. Alfred Kinsey asked him to help her “change sex.” By December of 1952, Christine Jorgensen, one of Dr. Benjamin’s most famous patients, was featured on the front page of the New York Post with the headline “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty: Operations Transform Bronx Youth.” This announcement was one of the earliest introductions of gender transformation to popular American consciousness, allowing the contemporary differentiation of sex from gender to begin taking root in the years that followed. The concept of gender transformation scrambled the nineteenth-century idea that same-sex desire was a sign of gender inversion—a misalignment of the sex or gender of the body and the mind—giving rise to distinctions between the categories homosexual and heterosexual and creating conditions that facilitated contemporary distinctions between transgender and cisgender modes of existence. Chapter one explores how the abstract symbolism in paintings by Forrest Bess (1911-1977) allowed the artist to stealthily present his controversial theory of gender transformation and forge links between modern sexology and contemporary transgender medicine. The next chapter frames photographs of Warhol Superstar Candy Darling (1944-1974) by Richard Avedon, Richard Bernstein, and Peter Hujar as uniquely important tools for producing and preserving transgender ingenuity amidst the transphobia of the 1960s and 1970s. In chapter three, I demonstrate the capacity for figurative sculptures and art installations by Greer Lankton (1958-1996) to not only represent transgender experiences in the 1980s and 1990s, but also trouble definitions of womanhood and give value to aesthetic and material production within transgender histories. In my fourth chapter, I focus on not just one artist from the recent past of transgender history in American art, but six artists who are bringing an array of critical themes, questions, and insights into field of contemporary transgender art, as well as wider popular consciousness during a period that is proving to be quite hostile and therefore vital, not just to transgender civil rights, but to our very existence. (A version of chapter one was published as an article in the Archives of American Art Journal in the Spring of 2021 and a version of my third chapter will be published in the journal American Art in September 2024). My research contributes to a growing body of scholarship that puts pressure on feminist and queer discourses in art history, film, performance, and digital media studies, as well as the humanities and humanistic social sciences to disavow limiting—and in a very real sense harmful—inflexible binary logics of male and female genders. As such, the historical commitments that anchor this book do more than bring transgender and gender-transgressive artists and art to light: they implore historians of art to question whether gender across time periods and geographies is as stable as existing scholarship would have it seem. By linking careful visual and material analysis with research in artist archives and archives of transgender history, this project also encourages transgender people and scholars to consider aesthetics and practices of making as not just ways of documenting transgender history, but as tools for expanding how we understand the emergence of gender for everyone, trans- and cisgender alike. PAST RESEARCH My article “Chris Vargas’s Consciousness Razing: From Forgetting to Futurity” published in Transgender Studies Quarterly in February 2020, broadly considers how 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 and specifically reimagines George Segal’s Gay Liberation Monument (1980) to reflect forgotten histories of participation in the Stonewall Rebellion by transgender people of color. My co-edited (with Dr. Kirstin Ringelberg of Elon University) August 2020 issue of the Journal of Visual Culture was dedicated to transgender visual culture. In our 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 of trans experiences that the most important texts in trans studies address. This journal issue 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 by adding entries for Evelyn Taocheng Wang, Vaginal Davis, Giuseppe Campuzano, and others. FUTURE RESEARCH I am also conducting preliminary research for a second book project focused on disability in American art. This project adapts 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, why, by whom, and to what end the very idea of disability has been created in the visual field. A social model of disability posits that the limitations that the word “disability”often signifies are rooted not in disabled people, but in the spaces between them and the worlds they inhabit. The worlds that disabled people inhabit are almost always designed to accommodate bodies that can walk, talk, see, hear, read, write, and otherwise operate in a range of idealized ways that are considered “normative.” These worlds assume a human capacity that no single body fully realizes. All bodies fall short of its unreachable standards in one way or another. Nevertheless, when disabled people fall too short of those standards, they (we) are left out of those worlds altogether. Thus, a social model of disability de-centers the bodies/minds of disabled people to highlight instead that limits to disabled life are the result of incongruities between the needs of disabled people and the normative physical environments and the cultural ideologies within which disabled people live. The guiding principle in this project is that the lives of disabled people are limited, not by the conditions of their bodies/minds, but by the ableist attitudes of others and the inaccessible environments that emerge from those attitudes. Many of the works in this exhibition demonstrate the ingenuity, innovation, and hustle that disabled people so often have no choice but to muster to make their way in worlds not built for them (us). Some of the works that this project attends to address their (our) residual exhaustion and isolation. In many instances, works by artists in this project can also be characterized as strategies of resistance to confining conditions and arguments for more humane systems of care. In other instances, artists in this project freely indulge in disabled joy, love, sensuousness, and pleasure. The aim of bringing these artists and works together in a single, far reaching project is to disavow viewers of disability narratives that center dependency and diagnosis and expose them to the nuances of disabled life and culture from disabled people directly, without translation, pity, or hesitation. This project is divided into several categories designed to reflect the experiences that disabled artists are addressing in their work. These categories are as follows: Physical Infrastructure (art engaging wheelchair users, mobility aid users); Synthetic Bodies & Corporeal Extension (art engaging prostheses, limb difference); Visual Supremacy (art engaging blindness and visual impairment in art); Language Access (art engaging Deaf culture, deafness, sign language users, users of communication devices, stutters); Sickness and “Cure” (art engaging chronic illness). Eros and Desire (art engaging disability and sexuality/intimacy); Affective Normativity (art engaging emotional expression within autism spectrum disorder and/or mental illness); “Reality” / Sensorial / Perceptual Policing (art engaging ideas of “reality” and normative sensorial perception within intellectual disability and/or mental illness); Capitalism, Productivity and Individualism (art engaging how disability complicates notions of capitalist productivity and value); Exhaustion, Rest, and Care (art engaging often undervalued habits of mutual aid, caregiving, and rest); Hypervisibility & Invisibility (art engaging what are often simultaneous experiences). These categories and their titles are meant to guide my research and understanding of these artists, as well as a method for organizing the artists currently known to this disabled historian and who inspired this project. These categories overlap with each other, demonstrating the complexity and nuance to disabled existence and art. Finally, they are neither self-contained nor rigid, as these categories often overlap, run into, and play with each other and as new categories of experience are continuously being born out of disabled experiences within disabled communities and adaptation to ableist worlds. |