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Camera Obscura 19.2 (2004) iv, 1-45


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Peter (A Young English Girl) :

Visualizing Transgender Masculinities

Melanie Taylor


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
Romaine Brooks, Una, Lady Troubridge (1924). Courtesy Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Artist
[End Page iv]
"To be myself ... I need the illumination of other people's eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self."
—Bernard from Virginia Woolf's The Waves

In 1992-93, an exhibition titled Visualising Masculinities was featured at the Tate Gallery in London. The declared aim of the exhibition was to examine "the display and meanings of the male body in art since the mid-nineteenth century." In doing this, the brochure informs us, the exhibition "recognises the important role that visual culture has played in circulating, often in a celebratory way, images of male power and the norms of manliness." Indeed, one of the assumptions on which the exhibition was based was the view that masculinity "is a historical construct changing from period to period, and as a category is neither 'natural' nor culturally innocent."1

This article focuses on two artists who, from their opposite ends of the twentieth century, have produced portraits that visualize [End Page 1] and celebrate their subjects' own particular styles of self- (and other-) fashioned masculinity. The works of both artists recycle "images of male power" and could be said to reinstate culturally specific "norms of manliness." They also demonstrate that masculinity is neither natural nor fixed. And yet Romaine Brooks's portraits of cross-dressed females (1920-24) and Loren Cameron's photographic studies of transsexual men (1993-98) would severely test the boundaries of an exhibition of this kind, because they do not—or at least not in any simple sense—display "the male body," which, unlike masculinity, continues to be viewed as a stable and constant referent. Although the masculinity being "visualized" in the Tate exhibition has seemingly unlimited possibilities, there would almost certainly have been an underlying, tacit agreement that the biological origin of the masculine subjects should be unquestionably male. Such fixed interpretations reflect an approach to identity that is institutionalized; in Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam underlines the enduring trend for academic discussions of masculinity to display "absolutely no interest in masculinity without men."2 Like Halberstam's study, my analysis of Brooks's and Cameron's portraits seeks to challenge the continuing association of masculinity with exclusively biologically male subjects while at the same time recognizing the vulnerabilities of such a project.

The potentially dissident visual effects of Brooks's and Cameron's portraits are apparent. On the one hand, the juxtaposition of a masculinity that appears "real" with a body that is not seen as biologically male might disturb dominant views that uphold a relationship between a gender that is constructed and a sexed body that is natural. Moreover, the forms of identification and desire provoked and solicited by these images may also have a disruptive impact on spectators. On the other hand, such familiar images of masculinity may serve simply to recall and reinforce hegemonic norms rather than revise or transgress them. The visual impact and cultural significance of these portraits thus depend on the existence of certain tensions among the gendered pose, the sexed subject, and conventional notions of "real" gender. A close analysis of Brooks's and Cameron's works will reveal a [End Page 2] number of ways in which such tensions are produced and highlight areas for comparison between these two very different artists.

Of course, both contextually and in personal terms, there are very important distinctions to be made between Brooks's and Cameron's images. The dissimilarities of artworks produced at unique stages in the developing histories of sexual and gender identities clearly need to be addressed and kept in sight if any discussion of their possible affinities is not to be critically undermined. Brooks and Cameron are working in culturally very different times and spaces, as well as from crucially divergent positions with regard to their own sexual and social identifications, and any formalist analysis...

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