Eliza Steinbock

‘Sexing Up’ Bodily Aesthetics: Notes towards Theorizing Trans Sexuality

In this chapter we suggest that the organizing medical concept of ‘transsexuality’ either overtly represses and denies sexuality as a factor in trans experience, or explicitly understands transitioning as originating in a hypersexuality. We track this representation of trans embodiment as a form of excessive sexuality in the pornographic imagination, particularly with regard to the mythic figure of the ‘she-male’ that overshadows the ‘he-female’. Raven Kaldera and Hanne Blank suggest that the damaging impact of medical representations of hypersexuality on the cultural representation of transfolk, results in them being ‘pictured as cardboard cut-outs with improbable anatomy who will fuck and be fucked by anyone, anything, anytime, in any way’ (Blank and Kaldera, 2002: 7). Yet, until recently, erotic material featuring FtMs was non-existent, suggesting an apparent lack of sexual interest. At issue is the dearth of adequate erotic role models in sexually explicit representations as well as the lack of theoretical responsibility towards incorporating analyses of trans sexuality that begin from the transitioning body itself.

Photographic Flashes: On Imaging Trans Violence in Heather Cassils' Durational Art

ABSTRACT This article examines the aesthetic strategy of flash photography to visualize everyday violence against trans people in the visual art of Heather Cassils (2011–14). In addition to using photographic flashes to blind audiences, these works reference violence on multiple levels: institutional discrimination through the location in an empty archive room, killings through martial arts choreographies, and microaggressions in aesthetics of defacement. However, the rigorous physical training undergone for his body art also suggests a productive mode of violence in that muscles must fail in order to grow. I trace the recurrence of the spasm across these different forms of embodied violence to show its generative as well as destructive property. This body of work opens up questions about the historiography of photography: What is the temporality of photographic violence? How can the bodys resiliency be pictured? Does a trans body experienced as a punctum indicate queer anxieties?

On the Affective Force of “Nasty Love”

Tackling the mimetic logic of sex-gender that limits the transsexual subject’s sexuality into seeming a poor representation, the author argues that trans pornography and autoethnographic accounts from trans scholars emphasize the affective dimension of trans sex, a material remainder absent from mimetic theories of sexuality. Developing concepts from Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, in tandem with Morty Diamond’s film Trans Entities: The Nasty Love of Papí and Wil (2007) and a selection of trans theorists, this article elaborates on the horizon of affective potential opened by transgender, brown, kinky, and pornographic “nastiness.” The event of “nasty love” solicits a differential becoming, growing the edge of self.

Introduction: What ‘body’ works and what bodies do not fit

For this special issue of parallax we proposed thinking about how the body functions as a kind of apparatus or dispositif in the divergent disciplines of dance studies, installation art and cinema studies. We envisioned the suggested task of reflecting on not what a body can do, but what ‘the body’ has done as a way to get a critical grip on the burgeoning bulk of body theories. Over the past thirty-five years, many versions of such theory have established ‘the body’ with a certain prestige in a variety of fields of theoretical, artistic and other inquiry. Now that the body has been set into a ‘ready-for-use’ position, installed as it were, this issue of parallax sought scholars and practitioners willing to evaluate the collective job. Our proposal, which did admittedly include an invitation to perverse routes, garnered instead the attention of theorists who slice the current edge of ‘body theory’. Rather than assess body theories and the desires invested in using the concept of the body at all, the texts we selected further specialize and specify the body apparatus that they manufacture in the factory of their disciplinary field. Except that it is not easy to place with certainty any one text into a single field. Each text benefits from the successful installation of ‘the body’ as a central theoretical issue that brings into view the relational aspects of experience and meaning making. But, in their hands, the body becomes something else: an apparatus for political tinkering, a means of movement, a condense archive, choreography, resistance, a way out. What differentiates these texts from the bodies that regularly appear to veil the author’s conceptual programmes is their reflexive, dare I say knowing, use of the body for other ends – they need the body, not just any body, but one that is carefully distinguished from a generally normative and vague container.

On not really being there: trans* presence/absence in Dallas Buyers Club

Abstract Recently more trans characters, even as main protagonists, star in film and media representations, perhaps in tandem with an increased recognition of trans rights globally. In this article we argue that the visual and aural grammars of cinema perform a double movement of inclusion and elision, making for a fascinating if utterly frustrating uptake of trans presence that is at once, perforce, also an absence. Our case study of the Rayon character in Dallas Buyers Club is an example of a recent sexualized representation of trans femininity. Our textual analysis will deconstruct this character’s presence and absence on the level of the film’s aesthetical and technical aspects demonstrating how cinematic grammar implicates cisgenderism.

CATTIES AND T-SELFIES: on the “i” and the “we” in trans-animal cute aesthetics

Abstract This article responds to the phenomenon of Internet cats becoming pervasive in Web 2.0, while at the same time digitally shared self-portraits, commonly called “selfies,” also circulate with extremely high frequency. The author tracks the efficacy of sharing selfies for trans/Two Spirit individuals such as artist Kiley May and in trans-centric hashtag campaigns. It shows that trans-animality in digital life can offer sovereign forms of subjectivity and engages response patterns that locate a trans point of regard. Further, it seeks to explain why so many different kinds of cuteness are shared in the intimate superpublics of online trans* communities. Building on classic texts in philosophical cat studies, such as from Jacques Derrida, the concept of the “inappropriate/d other,” and contemporary cuteness theories, the article argues that cute aesthetics provide a sentimental shield, can counter sexual indifference, and often enact a mode of resilience crucial for surviving in cultures that erase the existence of trans people of color.

INTER*me: An Inter-Locution on the Body in Photography

Photographer, ‘part time gender terrorist’, and now, as twice-parent (‘Ma-Pa’), Del LaGrace Volcano engages in conversation with friends and fellow gender travelers on herm’s latest photographic series, titled INTER*me. Their ‘inter-locution’ interleaves herm’s most recent images with some of herm’s earlier iconic photographs, as the discussion reflects on various interstices: between the body, aging and cultural ideals of beauty; between self-imaging, community representation, and familial connections; and between the technologies of gender and those of photography. The conversation reveals how the patterns in the INTER*me series interlock with those in Volcano’s oeuvre and ultimately also with the interwoven patterns of birth, life and death.

Taking It Lying Down: On the Labour of Gender Non-Compliance in Doran George’s Live Art

On 9 June 2001, Doran George spent a workday in a large emptied store within a shopping centre located at the heart of London’s Elephant and Castle district in the UK. This area south of London city proper usually has the connotation of being an undesirable area; it has been largely a run-down working-class and immigrant neighbourhood, although also an historical site of theatres. On a global scale, this moment is shortly pre-9/11, less than a decade before the world recession, and, more locally, 50 years post-renewal following the district’s destruction during the Second World War. In the intervening years the locale had changed its notoriety from a consumerist space of prostitution to a massive shopping centre, the first of its kind in the UK. The commercial space George took over for the day was converted into a performance space, shifting the register from buying and selling to enacting. My approach to this performance is to ask in what ways do its various components make concrete, or localise, the time and place of its actions, affects and political gestures within the ever-expanding space of neoliberal economic orders? Against the backdrop of globalising tendencies that leverage the masses into the precariat, what can this performance teach us about shifting registers and political allegiances? During the eight-hour performance, titled Remnants of the Original, George’s body became encased into three standing brick sculptures, with gaps just large enough for a hand to fit in-between the sections of the enclosed head and torso, and the torso and legs. 1 In effect, George spent a workday lying down while others laboured to keep hir both confined, and safe in these risky confines. 2 This high-risk performance meant that George could only be released by demolition. Eight ‘keystone’ bricks