CURRENT MANUSCRIPT

Deep Cuts: Transgender Histories in American Art after World War II (my current manuscript slated for publication with the Duke University Press series, ASTERISK) demonstrates the interdependence of art history and trans studies. It argues that, because gender is itself an abstract idea applied to the body, transgender art history dissolves distinctions between abstraction and figuration that have limited the study of gender and art for so long. For art history, this means recognizing that gender is not located in the visible or material body because it is produced via actions that gender subjects according to the codes of specific cultural contexts. This idea is new to art history, and it will require art historians to disavow the pervasive notion that perceiving the shape of a body can tell you anything about gender in a work of art, design object, or artifact. For trans studies, this positions art, design objects, and artifacts as the very material that makes trans existence possible. Therefore, it introduces iconography—the process of formal analysis (description), identification of material and visual signifiers, and interpretation of what these signifiers might suggest about the meaning of an object—as critical to generating new insights into the ways gender manifests in visual and material worlds beyond fixed and binary distinctions of male and female. Uniting these disciplines will expand the capacity of both fields to explore strategies for living within the persistent crisis of visibility and materiality—or the unrelenting tension between dependence on material and visual signifiers to produce gender and the perilous conditions that reactions to those signifiers create for transgender people.

I support these assertions through several case studies of artists in the United States who take expansive approaches to gender in their work after World War II because major centers of both modern art and sexual science shifted from Europe to the United States during this period. In 1933, Nazis burned Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s innovative and thriving Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, sending him and other sexologists into what often became permanent exile and ending a period of robust research of gender and sexuality in Europe. By 1937, Nazis mounted the “Degenerate Art Show” and argued that modern art was evidence of societal decline. This and the 1939 occupation of Paris sent scores of European artist refugees to New York City which transformed the city into a new center for Western art in the 1940s. By 1949, physician named Dr. Harry Benjamin also reignited Hirschfeld’s work in New York City after a patient of Dr. Alfred Kinsey asked him to help her “change sex”. Dr. Benjamin eventually became a resource for others seeking the same. His most famous patient, Christine Jorgensen, was featured on the front page of the New York Post in 1952 with the headline “Ex-GI Becomes Blonde Beauty: Operations Transform Bronx Youth” and was one of the first people to introduce the concept of gender transformation to popular American consciousness. Coverage of Jorgensen also fostered distinctions between sex and gender for the first time in the U.S. and 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. This fundamentally altered the meaning of the categories homosexual and heterosexual and facilitated contemporary distinctions between transgender and cisgender modes of existence. These effects were evident particularly in the U.S., but their impact would shape global histories of gender transformation. This book demonstrates how the convergence of these specific histories of art and gender transformation in the U.S. gave rise to several American artists whose work upends existing discourses on gender, not just in Modern and Contemporary art, but across art history.

My first chapter argues that, because gender is abstract, figuration alone is insufficient for addressing gender and its mutability in art through paintings by Forrest Bess produced the decade following WWII. Forrest Bess (1911-1974) was an artist, fisherman, and ex-GI who showed paintings at the renowned Betty Parsons Gallery starting in 1952 alongside some of the best-known figures of American postwar abstraction. However, unlike many of these artists, his shapes and colors were not related to the movement of his body or concerned with distilling painting to its most essential elements. Rather, his paintings were composed of symbols with meanings that constructed an elaborate theory of spiritual and psychological transformation that he saw as rooted in unifying masculinity and femininity in a single body. Bess’s paintings advanced his belief that “hermaphroditism” is an ideal state of human embodiment and outlined the methods supporting his theory, which he called his “Thesis”. The pages of this extensive document are filled with pseudoscientific speculation and are misguided in several ways; yet, I assert in this chapter that we should not disregard how his paintings anticipated changes in trans and intersex healthcare in the US in the late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century and introduced innovative ways for addressing the body in art beyond figuration. 

Chapter two argues that images of Candy Darling are evidence of the complex web of erotic desire, fear, and fantasy that has encircled trans women in the American imagination since at least the 1960s. Darling appeared nude in Richard Avedon’s Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory, October 30, 1969, which critics have called this image “exceedingly cruel” and “aggressive.” However, I contend that these readings deny Darling’s deliberate conjuring of erotic desire to both subvert normative notions of what it means to be a woman and to challenge viewers to confront the anxieties about gender (their own and hers) and sexual desire that women like her provoke. I also contend that Richard Bernstein’s use of collage in his image Candy Darling (1970) demonstrates a preoccupation with the shape of her body that persisted because of the stigma that surrounds the very idea of gender transition and erotic desire for trans women. My analysis of Peter Hujar’s Candy Darling on her Death Bed (1974) suggests that Darling used these tensions to construct a final image of herself on her own terms. Foregrounding the choices Darling made to display her body demonstrates the capacity for trans subjects to manipulate the appearance of their bodies as meaningful objects, as well as the problem of relying solely on the visible body to draw conclusions about gender in art and how interdisciplinary methods change the meaning of what we see.

Chapter three centers artist Greer Lankton’s work as evidence that to change one’s gender or to transition is to produce a kind of corporeal sculpture and refuse long standing assumptions about the fixity of gender and the meaning of the material body. Lankton was a trans woman. Through dolls such as Sissy and Princess Pamela Lankton deployed, manipulated, and exaggerated the vestiges of womanhood freely without having to answer to transphobic challenges to her own gender. Their expressive faces and world-weary poses produce disorienting combinations of pathos, excess, detritus, and glamor that exemplify art in New York’s East Village in the early 1980s and destabilize the very foundation of socially constructed and presumedly stable standards for what it means to be living in gendered human bodies. Lankton’s continuous and often theatrical revision of her dolls infuses them with mutability and produces objects that put pressure on the discipline’s reliance on binaries of all sorts, not just male/female but also examples like art and craft and the sharp boundaries between drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, etc. Lankton’s dolls further show us how these rhetorical structures—and art history’s tendencies to see them as unchanging and universally applicable—limit our understanding of not only transgender artists and subjects but also our ability to approach gendered signifiers as tools for investigating layered histories that live within complex aesthetic and material objects.

The fourth and final chapter in this project includes several short studies of currently working artists who are bringing an array of critical themes, questions, and insights into the field of contemporary transgender art history. For instance, by comparing a series of photographs from 2012 called Alchemic by multidisciplinary artist Cassils with Paul Cadmus’s Gilding the Acrobats (1934)—two remarkably similar images of gilded figures standing nude though views of their genitals obstructed— I demonstrate that concealing the genitals can be an assertion of personal agency and identity within a trans visual analytic. I point out that Tourmaline’s Pleasure Garden photographs promote Robin D.G. Kelley’s “freedom dreaming” as a methodological strategy for resisting violence within a longer narrative of transgender history in American art. I also address the ways in which sculptures by Nicki Green link transgender embodiment with Judaic tradition through the fleshy mutability of clay in ways that demonstrate how broader cultural identities shape the forms, colors, and textures that our bodies take. In my discussion of paintings by Nash Glynn, I argue that even within figurative painting, gender is still an abstract idea applied to the shape of the body. I also demonstrate how Juliana Huxtable’s work launches a sardonic attack on anti-trans rhetoric using its own gender essentialist language to call out its absurdity and hypocrisy. Finally, I assert that artist Chris E. Vargas and his Museum of Transgender Hirstory and Art simultaneously promotes the burgeoning field of transgender art history yet highlights how the very identification of transgender art history risks perpetuating the limitations that come with categorization. I frame each of these examples as critical to wider popular consciousness about trans people. This is important because we are in a period in trans history that is proving to be quite hostile and therefore vital, not just to transgender civil rights but to the public existence of trans people in the U.S..

This book brings overdue attention to these artists who centralize gender transformation, but it is more than just a recovery project. It redirects art historical discourse away from essentialist approaches to gender that defined feminist art history in the 1970s starting with Linda Nochlin’s essay “Why have there Been No Great Women Artists?” and that have guided many of the most formative works of queer art history—defined here as projects concerning queer sexual desire—since the 1990s from scholars such as Douglas Crimp and Richard Meyer. Distinguishing between queer sexual desire and transgender experience in this project, I also contend that art-making and aesthetic practices are imperative for understanding transgender history because the very construction of gender is rooted in the visual and material world. I frame our bodies (trans or cis) as shaped via gendered signifiers that we inherit through the cultures around us. I argue that working and reworking the material of our bodies through attire, hormones, and surgeries allows us to explore the possibilities of our physical existence and our place in gendered societies. Furthermore, I posit that art gives many of us sites to experiment with ways to escape gendered social structures and create new frameworks that stretch the limits of corporeal significance and meaning. Thus, this book demonstrates that art history and transgender studies need each other and that histories of objects are also histories of gender and its capacity for transformation. 
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PAST RESEARCH

Other publications listed on my CV contribute to the burgeoning field of transgender visual studies and art history. For instance, my co-edited August 2020 issue of the Journal of Visual Culture: New Work in Transgender Art and Visual Culture Studies is known as one of the first scholarly considerations of the methods and stakes of the emerging field of transgender art and visual culture studies. This issue was celebrated by JVC in November 2021 with a panel discussion and a roundtable in the August 2022 issue. My article, “Cut and Sew: Gender Expansion through Greer Lankton’s Dolls” (forthcoming, November 2024, Smithsonian American Art Museum journal American Art) uses Lankton’s figurative sculptures to encourage Art History to dislocate gender from the body in art. My 2021 essay “Envisioning Non Binary Gender in the Art of Forrest Bess,” was used by curators at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in preparation for the exhibition “Vital Signs: Artists and the Body” (November 3, 2024-February 22, 2025), and I provided recorded commentary on works by Bess, Lankton, and Peter Hujar’s “Candy Darling on Her Deathbed” that will be available to visitors in the galleries, online, and in the MoMA archives for posterity. My 2020 Transgender Studies article “Chris Vargas’s Consciousness Razing: From Forgetting to Futurity” prompted an invitation from Vargas, Christina Linden, and David Evans Franz to contribute to their 2023 book Trans Hirstory in 99 Objects. My work on Vargas, Bess, and my co-authored introduction to the JVC issue dedicated to transgender art and visual culture are all included in Dr. David Getsy and Dr. Che Gossett’s “A Syllabus on Transgender and Nonbinary Methods for Art in Art History” that was published in Art Journal in 2021.  
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FUTURE RESEARCH
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My second book is a collaboration with Dr. Jason Weems of the University of California, Riverside. It builds on the significance of material embodiment and corporeal visibility in transgender history that I assert in Deep Cuts, my and Dr. Weems’s expertise in the history of American art, and our shared investment in investigating how state intervention in disabled life since the 19th Century has shaped disabled visual and material histories. This book will correct art historical tendencies to treat disability as a matter of isolated defective bodies rather than a product of social, political, and environmental conditions and to reverse the ways in which art history has rendered disabled people historical objects rather than subjects with their own personal and cultural histories. My research so far has enabled me to co-curate the 2024 exhibition Robert Andy Coombs: No Content Warning with Dr. Alexis Bard Johnson at the ONE Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries, which explores the intersection of disability, masculinity, and queer sexuality.