Trans visibility and trans viability: a Roundtable

Hello, welcome everyone. It’s so great to see so many familiar faces, and folks tuning in from so many different places, in every sense of that word. And we really appreciate everyone making time on a Saturday, particularly after the news yesterday that Kyle Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges brought against him. We’ve been protesting today, and pre-protesting yesterday; you’ll remember Rittenhouse killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, and wounded Gaige Grosskreutz during anti-racism protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, following the police shooting in August 2020 of a Black man, Jacob S Blake, by a white Kenosha police officer.

So thank you again for making time to be here in conversation with us to celebrate the Journal of Visual Culture’s 20th anniversary, and also and especially the journal’s recent themed issue on new work in Transgender Art and Visual Culture Studies, guest edited by Cyle Metzger and Kirstin Ringelberg. Today’s event takes that themed issue as a crucial springboard for critical trans-versal trans-imaginings of the variant world to be unfolded by undoing the lock of the gender binary and its settler colonial and white supremacist violences. We come here together, then, to share our thoughts on trans visual culture now, and consider what it is to write trans visual culture as well as live in relation to trans-ness. As this event happens to fall on Transgender Day of Remembrance, and given the fraught, ambivalent, difficult feelings that many of us have about such a day, we will also take the occasion of this gathering to talk about ways of untethering trans visibility from what is lethal to trans viability.

Good morning, afternoon, evening, wherever you happen to be. I’m in a house called mine, but it is of course sitting on land stolen from the Sappony, Shakori, and Eno people. The Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation has its tribal grounds and office quite nearby and I’m going to drop the link to that in the Chat (https://obsn.org/) and I encourage you to show material support for them if you are able, or do the same for those whose land you are currently on, as we work towards land repatriation and tribal sovereignty. As a white person living in North Carolina, I’m also in a place where the land was of course worked for white profit by kidnapped enslaved West Africans and their descendants. I believe we all have a duty to enact real reparations for enslavement on the systemic level, by all the means available to us.

I had also wanted to emphasize that critical figure, the idea of the crystalline structure–unstructure of the prism, and speak of how in your Introduction you give it a particular trans-ing turn in order to frame not just how you understand the contributions to be working together, but also how you’d like us to not just read the issue but actually to do things with it; almost treating it as a means to open onto altering ways of making and unmaking the very terms of visibility. So, yes, the Introduction is called ‘prismatic views’, but that also seems to be not just a way of characterizing the contributions but also an activation that’s asking us to do something particular with it.

You put it better than I could have, Jill. That is just what we were after with this issue. We wanted to cultivate a sense of what art objects do and what visual materials do in particular when addressing transness. We were thinking about the real visual stakes and the relationship between visibility and invisibility, but also materiality, bodily materiality that we are always forced to contend with. I think that makes the Journal of Visual Culture a particularly useful and important place to have these conversations because of these material and visual questions that we’re always coming up against, both in our scholarship but also in our lived experiences of being gendered, however we identify or relate to that.

Well, I think it’s beautiful the way the prism becomes for you a rather attractive figure for what could also be understood as a shattering, splitting, or cutting conflict. And then, even if it’s not reparative per se, it nonetheless becomes a site that you can activate for some possibility besides just stuck-ness or wounding.

Today is Transgender Day of Remembrance, which, at least in years past, has had a real somber memorial quality. This, of course, is warranted in many respects, but I’m seeing more and more of these community events be about celebrating trans life, and I think that’s a really important turn. Your words about embracing the split that can come with the violence and the breaking of trans existence, I think it’s a fantastic element of transness: you’ve pinpointed that there’s this deliberate and invited splitting of the rhetorics that we’re born into and socialized into. I think that’s a really wonderful addition to the idea of prism in terms of trans existence more broadly.

One of the things that I like about that metaphor, that visual image, is it’s a visual image from a material thing. I also like the idea of all the ways that the refracted light can be everywhere in different ways, and does so without a focus on the center, without a focus on a normative structural system. Cáel Keegan was really influential on my thinking early on about Trans Visual Studies. There’s a particular quote from Cáel that I think aligns with what Cyle was just saying:

In the meantime, trans studies belongs exclusively to no one and nowhere, and perhaps this condition is the hidden advantage of but. To be except, apart from, other than is a condition of mourning only for those who value and expect arrival. (Keegan, 2020: 394).

I think connecting to that idea of the way that transness has always been capacious in not creating centers and avoiding those normative structures is what I hope Cyle and I maintain in our Introduction to the themed issue of Journal of Visual Culture.

The invitation to participate in the Journal of Visual Culture’s 20th-anniversary programming with this Roundtable gave us the opportunity to expand this aim even further than we were able to in the issue itself. Kirstin, Jill, and I invited contributors to the issue to reflect on their aims for their articles, their thoughts on their piece and the journal as a whole, now that some time has passed since we finished it. We also welcomed anything else that came to mind as they considered our invitation to participate in the anniversary event. Kara Carmack and Sascha Crasnow started us off with presentations that recapped their articles. Stamatina Gregory began our reflective conversation on the issue with generously personal comments on writing about Patrick Staff’s ‘Weed Killer’ which we have retained in their entirety as they extend well beyond what was published in the themed issue.

From Lenapehoking, the ancestral territory of the Lenape and the Canarsee, I want to thank Kirstin, Cyle, and Jill. So, very briefly, my article in the issue discusses Patrick Staff’s video, ‘Weed Killer’, which I first encountered when it was shown in 2017 at the New Museum exhibition entitled ‘Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon’ organized by Johanna Burton. I had such an emotional response to this video that I knew I needed to write about it; put very briefly, I posit the unruly bodies of ‘Weed Killer’ as refusing to uphold a falsely unassailable binary between the sick and the well, and between gender normativity and gender pathology.

It is a joyful honor to introduce the force that is Jack Halberstam, the public intellectual whose restless and ongoingly provocative praxis has done so much to animate the critical possibilities of trans* bodies as an under-construction coalitional project and imaginative projection for undoing lethal forms of embodiment and relation, kin and kind. Halberstam does this by reformulating and resituating the question of representing trans bodies to make not just apprehensible or necessary but boldly desirable trans* as an art of bodily becoming in – to quote the phrase that opens out the end of his interventionist handbook for activating the haptics and handmade, the crafting, the somatechnics, the alter temporalities signaled and amplified by the as yet crucially unnameable and unknowable of the opening and connective and wilding asterixing of Trans*: the ‘fleshly insistence of transitivity’. An advocate for what alternative histories can do in mapping the potentialities of bewilderment, Halberstam’s Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (2020) bends us toward the feral, the incipient and the otherwise. For their magnificent essay, ‘Unbuilding Gender: Trans* Anarchitectures In and Beyond the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark, Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the built environment. Halberstam is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse. Halberstam was recently the subject of a short film ‘So We Moved’ by Adam Pendleton (MoMA, 2022) and I hope we’ll have a chance to speak to what it does to the museum institution as well as to Jack’s inimitable ways of mobilizing the anarchitectures of undoing of gender as part of a means of blowing down the master’s house. To quote Jack:

We are living in an ideological bouncy house, where a few large white Americans jump for joy and at each bounce we lose more people down the edges of the whole grotesque, imploding structure. It is time to tear the bouncy house down, with or without the master’s tools, and to turn to the language of unmaking, unbuilding, undoing, refusing capital’s vertiginous techniques of litigious accusation and criminalization (Trans*Anarchitectures In and Beyond the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark Places Journal, October 2018).

I just want to say some things about the way in which the transgender body and transgender experience over time have presented all kinds of problems for visual representation. And I’ll start with Jill’s provocation there by saying that finding myself the subject of visual representation in this film that Adam Pendleton made was a really terrifying and brutal experience. And it gave me just so much respect for the way in which so many trans people have allowed themselves to become subject to these cinematic inquiries in ways that are exposing, they lay you bare. And yet they’re so necessary, just in terms of disrupting the protocols of representation that keep returning us to the gender binary. And so, just for an example, in this film, I undress in a changing room to get ready to go swimming and talk about my top surgery. And, that’s the kind of thing, I don’t know, probably 20 years ago, that would’ve been a nightmare for me to do, not at all something that I wanted. And I still don’t think it’s something that I wanted, but it gave me a different appreciation, if you like, of the terror of facing the camera as a gender nonconforming subject. So I’ll just start with that.

I for one have been trying for the last 20 years to write about transness, separate from the figure. The early work on trans that was pioneered by Chris Straayer and Kara Keeling, and others, gave us the formal grammar for how trans bodies might come into visibility, but still focused upon the figure. I want to think about transing as a visual method that can also come apart from the figure. Can trans be abstract for example? This is something I asked way back in my book In a Queer Time and Place (2005), in which I had a kooky chapter on abstract representations of the trans body that then were taken up a little bit by David Getsy (Getsy, 2015), but I’m still asking that question in my new work on collapse (Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse, in progress).

Well, amazing all. I know that we at least have one person in the house who is writing on queer abstraction. Lex, are you interested in saying something?

Yes, my work is really committed to abstraction and non-representational strategies that refuse the visual regimes Jack Halberstam just discussed where the figure is always the central privileged figure of desire and gendered experience. For example, in my forthcoming book (Dragging Away: Queer Abstraction in Contemporary Art, 2022) I write about the hard edge that would seem to define a figure or form as a strategy of revolt against such containment, and that revolt happens especially through the work’s unruly materiality. I often write about the excessive materiality of objects, and this relates to the trans experience of physical incoherence that exceeds predetermined codes – the risk of relating this to my trans experience is that my analysis may be (and has been) dismissed as mere personal projection.

I was thinking too, Lex, about your article on Sadie Benning (Lancaster, 2017), and the startling move from autobiographical, auto theoretical video to abstract painting, and much of the way that you analyzed Benning’s work, I think, touches on what you were doing with haptics in relation to the work of Jeanne Vaccaro, which has also been so important for many of the contributions to this issue. Maybe I’m especially thinking of Cole Rizki’s essay, where haptics is also not just a mode of making, but a different relation of the viewer. And I think that maybe that’s also an aspect of the question: not just who shows up, but what disorientation, in terms of what we’ve so clumsily continued to call spectatorship, and that’s assuming a particular sensory and corporeal appearing. And yet to think the other way that is not just about what architectures may do to shift embodiment and perception, but what installation and even tiny paintings can do in calling up a rather different mode of being in the space, that perception rather than any sort of given might be understood to be choreographed by the work.

I just want to jump in to say that when you receive your copy of our issue of Journal of Visual Culture, you’ll see that the first article after our Introduction is by Eliza [Steinbock]. And they talk explicitly about this notion that comes into play in shimmering images, as well as their idea of the wavering line of foreground and background. I think that also links to what Lex was saying, of ways to think about the way that trans figuration gets foregrounded in certain cases, backgrounded in other cases, always against something that it’s going to be read as ‘wrong’ in comparison to something else, even if it’s ‘right’. That line not being a hard one, that line being wavering, I think is a really crucial part of Eliza’s argument that I really appreciate. Cyle and I decided to start with that article as a reminder to think about the way that figuration was operating as you move through the following contributions as well. So thank you for raising that, and, yes, let’s open up this question of moving beyond the figure, and figuration, and what is or may be lost, but also what is gained, of course . . .

A couple of thoughts. First in relation to my article in the issue, I wanted to mention Staff’s use of the heat camera, which even when it was deployed against the figure, it turned the figure into a kind of topography that did not differentiate between foreground and background. Also, he appears in the video as they dance as a tiny figure . . . and they’re really dwarfed by this enormous cement mixer, which is also filmed with the heat camera, and so this idea that the figure is actually dwarfed by the built environment. This is the environment in which we live. We live in a world of human architecture, which is always going to shape our subjectivities. Also . . . and I appreciate, Lex, what you said about an important space for painting in terms of the disappearance between figure and ground to not-trans artists, but thinking about, for example, Cristina Coral’s work, Leasho Johnson’s work thinking about this inability to differentiate the figure or to disentangle one figure from another. And, also, thinking about a new acquisition by Leslie Lohman of Cassils’ piece, PISSED (2017), which is a 400-gallon tank of the artist’s urine collected over almost a year. It’s a kind of glowing cube, which really belongs squarely in the history of abstract minimalism, deployed as a work of protest that is intimately connected to the body and to transness.

Potassa offered me, for my research published in Journal of Visual Culture, and since, a case study that led me in hindsight to contemplate such a multistable approach. Like so many others, Potassa has existed in history’s ‘ground’, the hazy landscape taken for granted in histories of notable figures like Grace Jones and Andy Warhol, places like Studio 54, and cultural moments like the dazzling disco era. To write a history of a trans diasporic woman of color is to not simply move her from the background to the foreground, from the ground to the figure. Rather, it provides opportunities to rethink the relationship between the two in art historical and trans studies, to complicate and problematize the figure/ground dichotomy, and to craft a methodology that doesn’t merely vacillate between the two, but that holds multitudinous possibilities at the same time.

While I would not want to conflate background, landscape, and public, nor foreground, figure, and individual body, in whichever combination, their analysis enables the study of surface tension. A case demonstrating the artistic research of surface tension in crisis is the narrative writing and videographic works of Ada Marcia Patterson, whose aesthetics derive from their home island of Barbados, including its tidal pools, hurricanes, and sexual/gender discretion as a condition that Patterson says feels like ‘bobbing up and down’ just below the surface. The crisis of such surface tensions relates to turbulence in bodily, racial, and ecological modes then. Sections from their short speculative fiction essay ‘Broken from the Colony’ (https://grist.org/fix/imagine-2200-climate-fiction-broken-from-the-colony/) are used as spoken word in the 2min30sec video ‘An Affirmation’ that shares an experience of receiving gender-affirming care, by way of HRT, which is likened to the ability of breathing underwater, and never shows their body as a whole, erring on the opaque side of thing to avoid questions and scrutiny. Through underwater filming, looking up to the ceiling of water, we see the ‘surface world’ changing and rippling, forming a distorted looking glass and showing us that the world can change too. The work of Patterson that examines the surface tension between bodyscapes and worldscapes, expands our inquiry into the relationship of figure to (watery) ground.

I second that emotion regarding the need to pay as much attention to landscape as to figure, and to attend to non-figural and non-representational dimensions of trans art. I was trying to do that in my article on El Kazovsky for the themed issue. As noted, much of his work is about enacting and documenting a repetitive process of elaborating identification and desire without landing on a particular idealized self-image. There is a reciprocal relationship in his paintings between the unstable symbolic figurations of psychodynamic processes and the landscapes on which these shifting figures cast their shadows, between the organization of space and the possibilities for psychical and physical movement and presence within it. At the end of the day, I take a pretty orthodox Deleuzoguattarian stance on ‘dividuation’ versus ‘individuation’, and see embodiment (and hence figuration) as a reconfigurable element within a given milieu. What counts as figure or foreground versus environment or background depends on how you slice and dice the arrangement of parts that are made to cohere into molar aggregates that become available as surfaces for identificatory attachment through the operation of historically and culturally specific ‘somatechnics’, or materio-discursive practices of constituting embodied subjectivities. Part of what intrigues me about El Kazovsky is precisely that he obsessively stages and restages the reconfigurability of figure and ground, in an infinite loop of projecting desire onto an ever-shifting molecular substrate that returns to unsettle every provisional act of identification.

Obviously in the context of Palestine, the ground, the land is of supreme importance! As a scholar of Palestine, the relationship to the landscape is paramount for many of the artists I discuss. In my contribution to the Journal of Visual Culture issue, I discuss the work of Raafat Hattab. As a Palestinian citizen of Israel, he is inherently in a state of ‘inbetween-ness’ with regard to his relationship to the land. He lives on the physical land of historic Palestine, but it is a land governed by Israel, and which continuously rejects and denies his ownership of and historic and intimate relationship to that land. An assertion of this connection to the land is embodied in the tattoo he receives (from a Jewish–Israeli tattooer) in the video, a marking of the landscape of his body with an assertion of his own ties to the physical landscape of Palestine. It’s a transgressive space in both Jewish and Muslim religions, and the tattoo that he’s getting says, ‘Jaffa, Bride of Palestine’, which is a character he plays. He dresses in drag in a bridal gown and plays Jaffa, Bride of Palestine, but is also a feminized name that is used to talk about the city of Jaffa. So, you have this infliction of pain on the body, but there’re also, through this figural representation, a subversive assertion of Palestinian ownership of the land by an Israeli through the tattoo. And so, even when the land per se, is sort of the body, it nonetheless becomes the land. And so the difference between the two kind of blurs in a lot of ways as well, which I really appreciate.

I actually spent time in Jaffa as a kid and was really surprised as an adult to come back and find that that city was gone. It was no longer this Arab city. It had been completely taken over, and so that figure on the beach, I think it is doing an enormous amount of work visually and politically.

I’m just going to say really fast that I’m thinking, also, about where we started with the prism as a way of thinking within the site of what for so long has been talked about as the medium of photography and the medium of cinema, but of course now we’re in a moment in which that’s no longer the case, and compulsory visualization is the sea that we’re swimming in and the camera, of course, has an especially violent, but also adoring relationship to ‘the body’, but also, that spectacularization of the trans body and that particular foregrounding of it that we’ve heard about today.

Thank you all for that generative conversation. I’m a cultural geographer, and this has been such a beautiful counterpoint to my own line of research. Throughout the conversation, I kept coming back to this question about visuality and its privileged epistemic position, especially within the Academy. Jack mentioned that some things are able to be rendered visually, but others can never become visual. I was wondering about how, methodologically – I’m thinking about landscapes in particular – we can think the visual alongside and through the olfactory, the auditory, and the proprioperceptive in order to trouble that hierarchy and, perhaps, integrate these different multisensory experiences into our knowledge. Or to put it another way: if the prism focuses the world into these shimmers or beams of light, what does the shimmer feel like on the body? How can we comprehend that in dialogue with the visual?

I’d like to jump in. I really love the attention to, the pointing towards sound as something that is perhaps in an incongruous or difficult relationship with the visual. And I’ve been thinking myself – and perhaps this is based on personal experience – but I’m not always clocked as trans until I open my mouth and my voice is heard. That makes me think about this incongruous relationship, or this difficulty, because when something is seen, the sound itself is not always present. Conversely, there’s the sound of the voice that cannot ever be pictured or represented, despite the fact that is such a part of my own lived trans experience. So it leaves this question of how to account for that, how to engage with that. For me, that gives rise to tensions between picturing the figure and the abandonment or ignoring of the figure. Thus, as Wiley suggested, sound could perhaps be one of these places that troubles the relationship between the figure and ground because it is the body that produces the sound that extends beyond the body and into the ground. The ground can also signify the absence of the body or the context that shapes how the body is understood. In either case, sound has a capacity to move away from or ‘de-visualize’, if we can use that term, the body in trans work. So I love your point, that was a long way of saying that!

Just to build on that in terms of sound, especially in Raafat Hattab’s work, so much of how that work’s articulations are made manifest is through sound. So when he’s lying on the beach, the only sounds you hear, except for occasionally his aunt’s voice telling the narrative, which overlays a lot of the scenes, is the sound of the waves crashing, and there’s an individual who’s wrapped in a fishing net playing an old Arabic tune on the violin, this mournful traditional song. And so again, there’s a reasserting of the Arab nature of this land through this song and the trapped-ness, and references to the Little Mermaid story, which was very much an inspiration for the work. And then in the scenes with the tattoo, the buzzing of the tattoo pen is the thing that carries on throughout, it’s the only thing you hear. There’s no conversation between the individuals, and so much of what’s going on is purely activated through sound.

Perhaps to have another counter question in relation to whether or not to end on abandoning the figure: I have been thinking about the artist, Nash Glynn; many of her paintings are all about the portrayal of a trans feminine body in its full capacity, as it is lived for Nash, who still has a penis and genitals and has breasts. I’ve been really struck by those paintings because they prize figuration in a way that I haven’t seen before, in a way that speaks to histories of figuration in art that are far more traditional. It pulls on these strings of traditional art history, which are, in and of themselves, really, really troubling and really difficult. Nash’s work presents us with an honorific opportunity to engage with such histories of art that have made issues of embodiment in a culture more broadly so fraught.

I really appreciate those works because they give us an opportunity to perhaps continue to build on Keeling’s and Chris Straayer’s work to think: what more is there to say about figuration? I think that the move to expand beyond figuration is incredibly important, however, for me, it feels like there’s more to be said about figuration in order to continue to broaden the capacity of trans art and visual studies because trans bodies continue to be the sites of anti-trans violence.

Linking together issues raised in both the previous section of the conversation and this one, the approach I take to thinking about the visual, figuration, and representation is necessarily inflected by geopolitics and the particular national, regional, and hemispheric histories that condition trans life and death beyond the confines of US liberal democracy. In writing trans visual culture and in elaborating trans studies, more broadly, what are the inherent assumptions structuring the theoretical frameworks we mobilize to sense and to interpret trans visual culture? Do we read trans visual culture through the imperatives of trans studies? If so, trans studies has developed within the US academy and its critiques of state violence and power assume democratic state formation as the central organizing mode of governance through which sex, gender, racial, and class formations emerge and become knowable as such. This singular focus of trans studies on the liberal democratic state and, indeed, on US democracy itself does not adequately address democracy’s absence or the forms of illiberal state violence and state formation that occur outside the US nation-state and that contour the relationship between trans visibility and politics. Indeed, in the absence of democracy, we might reconsider how the correspondence between trans visibility and trans viability has been theorized to account for illiberal structures of governance and power. In my contribution to this themed issue, as in my other published work and monograph in progress, I suggest that, rather than liberal bids for inclusion, in the context of illiberalism and its legacies, trans activists’ negotiations of existing historical discourses through visual culture production are in fact history-making practices that actively reinterpret the aims and scope of illiberal and authoritarian modes of power, forms of governance, and national histories. Attention to geopolitics can reshape how we theorize the correlations (or lack thereof) between trans visibility and viability.

Long have I been obsessed, truly, with figurative impossibility and the paraontological, which might be briefly (un)defined as a desedimentation of the very grapples that index distinction between subjects, or a critical relation to that which predicates distinctions between things. In short, I have long been obsessed with how and where we choose to find distinctions between things such that they are different things. Who decided on these things as important in distinguishing this from that; why not those things? Or, why anything at all? And this seems to me one of the things trans offers: a skepticism regarding the anatomy, literal and proverbial, of normativity and departures from normativity. Trans emerges, then, as not a specific figure; indeed, it might emerge as the name for, exactly, the impossibility of delimiting a figuration for a certain kind of subject, always attentive to that which had to be excluded in order for the limning of the figure to take place. Perhaps we might shift toward understanding trans as a quotidian practice of reading, of relating, of posturing (which is not a body), of dis/positioning, or of engendering (how lovely that there is a sonic resonance of the Spillersian ungendering here). Doing this, we could note trans through how things relate to one another and how things shift or topple and emerge; we emphasize practice and groove, movement and unfixing, rather than trying to find a proper figuration which necessarily deems certain figurations improper and invalid.

In relation to trans experience and the position from which I write and make, I’d say that my own work doesn’t so much write about the specificities of trans visual culture (though there is, of course, an element of it insofar as I write about transness in relation to visuality or being seen [and, though again, there is a critique of this sentiment in all I write]). But what I do write about is what it might be to experience trans, both of these terms – experience and trans – under a kind of generative interrogation. So, I understand myself through nonbinariness, which is, in my estimation, not androgyny or falling visually in between ‘man’ and ‘woman’ but, more acutely and iconoclastically I think, the refusal of gender as an apparatus of subjectivation; nonbinariness as a modality of subjectivating oneself precisely outside of gender, such that gender is, and I mean this, abolished in its course. To write about that, that kind of transness, let’s say, is to write, as I do, about the nega-experiential and the unrealistic because it is trying to move through experience’s fractures – experiences that consistently say ‘You are still perceived as a man; you still have male privilege even if you are nonbinary’ or ‘Nonbinariness is just an attempt to not acknowledge your privilege’ – and find a way to exist in such a way that glimpses what life might be were it not for the violatory, circumscriptive regime of gender. To be sure, I am not dissing my trans kinfolk and their experiential livelihood. I wish only to suggest that ‘trans’ could be gifting us not simply the playing with and mixing and matching of gender but, further and more liberatory than this, gifting us what we could be were it not for gender.

This conversation on ‘Trans’ is a challenge no less to the figural and representational norms of syntax – that is, not just an investment in the performativity or deformativity or dispositioning and engendering potentials of language but in the potentials of living in and by an almost subjectless language of verbs or doings becoming or taking the place of nouns and pronouns. For example, there’s an I and a we here but also one that’s performed or done as much by verbs becoming subject – an I or a we that doesn’t just grapple with the potential for the abolition of the binary gender system but that refuses to cede any total power or final being to something like the law and, instead, portrays its incomplete, in-process effort or fight, its terms become grapples.

My approach to the question of trans visibility has been to expand and redirect analytical focus from the body and its signposting of gender. I do this to avoid that the trans body becomes submitted to scrutiny and is found dangerous, deficient, or deviant compared to gender essentialist standards operative in the dominant ‘visual essentialism’ regime. Instead, I cast my investigative attention to the technologies of light (‘visibilities’ in Deleuze’s vocabulary), which I have called the shimmer (Steinbock, 2019), to the conditions for the emergence of shimmerings, and how they create a particular relationship to the figured body that we can call trans. In my contribution to the themed issue of Journal of Visual Culture, I lay out a trans visual method that insists too on analyzing the cisnormative, ambient background as the schema that in fact presses out into the foreground a trans, conspicuous figure. Without losing sight of the figure’s expressiveness that may exceed their shape, movement, mass, I would add that C Riley Snorton’s (2017) method for reading ‘countermythologies’ of race and gender arrangements in a trans figure’s form created through the play of light and dark, in the shadow or in a silhouette, is vital for the analysis of the racial bias in technologies that cast light. I would advocate also for following Lieke Hettinga’s (2021) doctoral research that shifts from a vocabulary of ‘visibility’ to one of ‘appearing’, which vexes the naturalness of visibility for doing politics, and emphasizes the coordinates for generating a space of appearance, and a public.

Those of us who live out the real stakes of our work are usually required to choose one tone that is either general (the seemingly more objective and academically preferred) or personal (easily disregarded). I end up writing my experiences from a distance, in the more general language of something broadly shared, like what it means to ‘feel abstract’ as a non-binary person. There is an underlying understanding that trans scholars who produce work in trans studies are writing from personal experience, but the professional risk of claiming our lived expertise is often too great.

I think that if trans visibility is indeed a trap, it is in no small part because the visual is fraught with uneven power relations. Western thought privileges sight over the other senses in what Donncha Kavanagh (2004: 447) calls an ocularcentric epistemology: the dialectic between ‘the eyes on one’s head . . . and the eye in one’s mind’. It associates the distance of sight with the rational and the objective, in contradistinction to the proximity, ambiguity, and subjectivity of sound, smell, and touch. Trans visibility, then, is a trap insofar as it promises complete knowing while it delivers a partial, distanced apprehension at best – and a nullifying, violent objectification at worst.

Ocularcentrism is totally embedded within the academy: our disciplines, methods, and even casual language reproduce the hegemony of the visual. Yet, as Wu Tsang and Fred Moten (2017: 344) note, we can still speak of a distinction between the visible and the communicable. So, I come back to the question: could asynaesthetic epistemology disarm the trap of visibility and engender other ways of understanding the being of trans? Or, as Eliza puts it, ‘What if we skipped asking what trans looks like to consider what trans sounds like, or texturally feels like?’ (Steinbock, 2020: 176). To do so would be – and I’m paraphrasing Susan here – to disrupt, denaturalize, and rearticulate the connections between our senses and our understanding. In short: I think turning toward these other senses could help us feel our way around the trap of visibility.

Thinking together about the realm of the visual, the role of lived experience, and the question about the limitations of the figure, I want to return to the phenomenological emphasis of my contribution to the themed issue of Journal of Visual Culture. Visual culture is not limited to the visual: the acts of seeing and looking are not limited to the eyes. The visual engagement is an embodied one. It can be haptic and affective. It is a relational orientation to the objects, spaces (including landscapes), figures, and temporalities we engage with and move through. Visual culture can be experienced through a sensorium, a concert of image, sound, and touch – a synesthetic embrace. This approach demands an intimate and porous encounter with the image or archive object, an exchange that will necessarily be informed by lived experience and that will inform one’s experiences.

What could such a full-bodied technique mean for trans visual culture in particular? Trans visual culture goes beyond mere visibility; it invokes a sense of trans-relationality that is part of the embodied encounter. What I mean by trans-relationality is a way to see or feel through a sense of being trans or being in relation to trans – as identity or as prefixial, as flesh or as philosophy. Trans visual culture, then, is not exceptional but is differently inflected by trans ways of knowing, desiring, being, thinking, and feeling. It is to live in relation to the in-between, to live and move in the betweens, a way of life, a way to live in futures possible.

What a beautiful way to bring our conversation to a close, even just for today. Thanks to everyone, and please take care of yourselves and each other. There’s a lot to be in the streets for over the next few days. Deep thanks for making time on a Saturday, and we’re all looking forward to continuing the conversation. And also deeply appreciative for the vulnerability and risks of those contributing today. These are hard questions that we asked you to think about, the ways in which your writing of trans visual culture relates to the ways in which you’re living in varying relation to trans and, in fact, the ways that transing may be varying how you are living your lives. So, yes, very appreciative, and grateful.