In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

5 Technotopias

5 Technotopias Representing Transgender Bodies in Contemporary Art For visual culture, visibility is not so simple. Its object of study is precisely the entities that come into being at the points of intersection of visibility with social power, that is to say, visuality. —Nick Mirzoeff, “The Subject of Visual Culture” Contemporary images of gender-ambiguous bodies by artists like Del LaGrace Volcano, Linda Besemer, and Jenny Saville, when considered in conjunction with the surprising success of the transgender film Boys Don’t Cry and the subcultural popularity of By Hook or by Crook, imply that the transgender body represents something particular about the historical moment within which it suddenly and spectacularly becomes visible. While the transgender body has been theorized as an in-between body, and as the place of the medical and scientific construction of gender, when it comes time to picture the transgender body in the flesh, it nearly always emerges as a transsexual body. In the images I consider here, the transgender body is not reducible to the transsexual body, and it retains the marks of its own ambiguity and ambivalence. If the transsexual body has been deliberately reorganized in order to invite certain gazes and shut down others, the transgender body performs self as gesture not as will, as possibility not as probability , as a relation—a wink, a handshake and as an effect of deliberate misrecognition . In one particularly stunning example of the representation of transgender hybridity by way of faux collage, JA Nicholls’s paintings imagine transgenderism in the form of conglomerate creatures who emerge from the paint itself . In a painting titled in another place, for example, the body is postmodern surface, the very gesture of representation, and it struggles to emerge from the canvas enclosing its form. in another place splits the body into two noncomplementary forms, each one in motion on the road to “another place.” Each figure stands on his or her own path, in his or her own place, and the two exchange a look that can never arrive. The roads that frame each hybrid 97 body lead in different directions and the two separate(d) selves can never meet. The body itself in Nicholls’s painting is a collage form, but the collage is made up of not only different body parts but different perspectives (a side view, full frontal) and different modes of representation. Resisting the traditional form of collage that draws other materials into the sphere of painting , Nicholls creates the effect of collage with paint and canvas alone. She refuses the clear separation of the real and the represented that collage implies , and makes representation into a primary realm of signification. Nicholls’s work lies somewhere between abstraction and figural representation , marking out beautifully the other place of queer embodiment in contemporary aesthetics. Postmodernism and Transgenderism Postmodernism, as I proposed in chapter 1, cannot simply be reduced to the cultural formations that accompany a new mode of capitalism; as Anna Tsing points out, this kind of reductive reading of culture misunderstands the potential for cultural production to exceed and resist economic imperatives (Tsing 2002). Indeed, the assumption that cultural production will always only represent the dominant economic order, erases the multiple disruptions to hegemony that have emerged from subcultural and avant-garde art practices in the past, and it leaves us with a sense of inevitability about our relation to the dominant. Debates about the relationship between the economy and art production, base and superstructure, have a long history in art criticism , and I attempt to revisit some of these debates here in order to refute the return of a Frankfurt school paradigm of cultural capitulations, on the one hand, and to define the political and aesthetic contributions made by “ludic” body artists to oppositional politics in postmodernism, on the other. In this chapter, I define postmodernism as the generative clash between new modes of cultural production and late capitalism. Within postmodernism, subcultural activities are as likely to generate new forms of protest as they are to produce new commodities to be absorbed back into a logic of accumulation; and new sites of opposition or “geographies of resistance” become available even as new modes of domination are formed (Pile 1997). The link between transgenderism and postmodernism has emerged in a number of late-twentieth-century philosophies of embodiment, from Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, to Jean Baudrillard’s essay “Transsexuality,” to Rita Felski’s “Transsexuality, Postmodernism, and the Death of History...