- The Transgender Touch:On the Handmade Sculptures of Frankie Toan
"Feel free to touch," said artist FRANKIE TOAN as I entered their Denver studio.1 The first work to catch my attention was the eight-foot-long plush sculpture Big Ass Arm (2017) (Fig. 1), which loomed large overhead, cradled by a shelf. In exhibitions, TOAN explained, Big Ass Arm is strapped to the wall by twine, restrained and elevated to make it appear to defy gravity. The oversized appendage is meant to be wild and menacing yet playful and approachable, with the bulges, folds, and flaps conveying the gendered body's horrors and ingenuity.
At various points during our discussion, I sensed the presence of Big Ass Arm out of the corner of my eye, and it seemed like it could reach out and touch me, like a monster emerging from under the bed. However, this ominous feeling was countered by whimsical and welcoming elements that promised a warm embrace: the repurposed duvet cover that makes up the arm and hand had a decorative blue and white floral pattern, and the neon pink piping and fringe made the sculpture likeable, appealing, huggable. The sculpture's material and decorative elements conjured fiber art's gendered associations with domesticity and interiorities.2 In Big Ass Arm, I had my first inkling of how Toan's work [End Page 171] evokes the tensions identified by Sonny Nordmarken who, in building on the work of trans theorist Susan Stryker, presents monstrosity as "a tool of resistance and reconnection that can help us build connections across difference."3 As I explore in this essay, Toan's handcrafted sculptures demonstrate how contemporary trans cultural production can offer an "alternate ending to a story about monstrosity" that provides new forms of "selfhood, love, and resistance, and hope for justice."4
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Monstrosity has been a key concept animating debates in transgender studies, appearing early in the formation of the field in the 1990s, most notably in Susan Stryker's essay "My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage."5 In this canonical work, Stryker explores the transsexual body's technological construction and medical production, which render these bodies unnatural for some feminists and for mainstream lesbian and gay subjects invested in identitarian movements grounded in fixed genders. Given the portrayal of "unnatural" bodies as mutations and perversions, Stryker locates a "deep affinity between myself as a transsexual woman and the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein":
Like the monster, I am too often perceived as less than fully human due to the means of my embodiment; like the monster's as well, my exclusion from human community fuels a deep and abiding rage in me that I, like the monster, direct against the conditions in which I must struggle to exist.6
In building on Stryker's efforts to reimagine "monster" and "creature" as words to be reclaimed, numerous artists, activists, scholars, and cultural critics have [End Page 172] taken up projects to mobilize the resistant and subversive potential of transsexual monstrosity.7 Situated in this broader historical context, Toan's monstrous queer and trans forms belong to a longstanding challenge to a politics of legibility and respectability that restrict the types of trans stories that could be told. I am drawn to the potential of these monstrous forms, precisely because they swerve from normative expectations and conventional storytelling, providing not only an alternative ending but also an alternative beginning. They provide a way to stay in touch with feelings.
In focusing on the monstrous, especially hands, fingers, and body parts in various states of formation and deformation, Toan's practice helps reimagine the contours of trans visual and material culture by foregrounding touch as a trans analytic that engages the potentialities of feeling and being felt. This element of touch is made explicit in the hand, a recurring thematic element in Toan's oeuvre, especially in relation to art historical discussions about the handmade as a technical...