Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies

In Transition

Oren Gozlan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351058971
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies introduces new thinking on non-conforming gender representation, addressing transsexuality as a subjective experience that highlights universal dilemmas related to how we conceive identity and exploring universal questions related to gender: its objects, objections, and obstacles. This book seeks to disassemble prejudicial orientations to the challenges and the everydayness of transsexuality and build new understanding and responses to issues including: medical biases, the problem of authenticity, and the agency of the child.

Oren Gozlen leads an examination of three central pressures: transformation of a medical model, the social experience of becoming transgender, and the question of self-representation through popular culture. The chapters reframe several contemporary dilemmas, such as: authenticity, pathology, normativity, creativity, the place of the clinic as a problem of authority, the unpredictability of sexuality, the struggle with limits of knowledge, a demand for intelligibility and desire for certainty. The contributors consider sociocultural, theoretical, therapeutic, and legal approaches to transsexuality that reveal its inherent instability and fluidity both as concept and as experience. They place transsexuality in tension and transition as a concept, as a subject position, and as a subjectivity.

The book also reflects the way in which political and cultural change affects self and other representations of the transsexual person and their others, asking: how does the subject metabolize the anxieties that relate to these transformations and facilitations? How can the subject respond in contexts of hostility and prohibition? Offering a much-needed interdisciplinary exploration, Current Critical Debates in the Field of Transsexual Studies will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychotherapist as well as psychologists and scholars of gender studies, cultural studies and sociology.

Part I
Aesthetic tensions

1
Revisiting the Friends of the Place Blanche

The transgender imaginary through the photographs of Christer Strömholm

David Dorenbaum

Incomprehensible body, penetrable and opaque body, open and closed body, in one sense. I know very well what it is to be looked over by someone else from head to toe. I know what it is to be spied from behind, watched over the shoulder, caught off guard when I least expect it. I know what it is to be naked. And yet this same body, which is so visible, is also withdrawn, captured by a kind of invisibility from which I can never really detach it. This skull, the back of my skull, I can feel it, right there, with my fingers. But see it? Never. This back, which I can feel leaning against the pressure of the mattress, against the couch when I am lying down, and which I might catch but only by the ruse of the mirror. And what is this shoulder, whose movements and positions I know with precision, but that I will never be able to see without dreadfully contorting myself? The body—phantom that only appears in the mirage of the mirror, and then only in fragmentary fashion—do I really need genies and fairies, and death and the soul, in order to be, at the same time, both visible and invisible?

Foucault, 2006, pp. 229–234

What is at stake as the image traverses the body? How can we understand the capability of visual language to render the body legible, but also to make gender take place through the body, as a discourse inscribed in it, through lived experience? From a Lacanian perspective, the subject is an effect of language and does not hold the discursive power of the performative (Lacan, 1973). In other words, the subject is not in charge: rather than addressing gender, the subject is addressed, indeed revealed by the performative power of gender.

Inspired by Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm’s work from the 1950s in Paris, I will approach the meaning of the term transgender performativity from a Lacanian angle, specifically its register of the imaginary. How is it possible that, in the face of the un-representable experience of transgender subjectivity, which defies any stable representation, Strömholm’s photographs have attained such levels of extreme visibility? We find in them a rare equilibrium that permits us to read their performativity in spite of their incomprehensibility.

This essay looks historically at the creative process behind the narration and transition of the members of a particular transgender community. It considers their transgender subjectivity as a form of kinship, a mode of connection. The methodology employed by the photographer in this instance engaged not just his gaze but his literal corporeality, too. Everything is presented on the surface. Without hierarchy, Strömholm makes bodily essence perceptible and affecting, expressing the entirety of its human qualities. I maintain that whatever ethic we attribute to Strömholm’s practice, his photographs celebrate the human body as it appears to us in those images: both material and transparent.¹

Having moved to Paris in the 1950s, Strömholm found himself at the heart of the district inhabited by a transgender community. Strömholm’s first contact with this community, according to Örjan Kristenson, Strömholm’s assistant and a photographer himself, followed an evening photographic session with a model. When Strömholm delivered the finished material the next day to the address in Paris that had been given to him, a man he had not previously met opened the door and said: “Perhaps you won’t recognize me. Yesterday I was Dolly.” According to Kristenson, this encounter awakened Strömholm’s curiosity (Orjan, 1999, p. 63).² “It was because I didn’t understand it myself,” Strömholm recounted, half a century later.

I hadn’t given it a thought until I met them. We met by chance and I realized very soon, that as soon as you ask yourself why their lives are the way they are, it becomes difficult not to take pictures. After fifty years of photographing I still don’t know exactly what I do when I pick up my camera. I know when I sit down and think about it. But it isn’t one picture in particular I’m looking for, but many. I often get pictures that are not necessarily visible on the surface. The picture isn’t obvious. This way of seeing and taking photos appears gradually.

Knape, 2001, p. 5

In photographing the transgender people he encountered at Place Blanche, Strömholm immersed himself not only in their lived experiences, in their interactions with others and with the world—some had prostituted themselves, for instance, to finance their surgeries in Casablanca—but also in their inner lives and internal conflicts. He was by no means the passive witness of their own narrative. Instead he propelled himself and his protagonists into spaces that initially seemed protected, tapping into the realm of their imaginary and, needless to say, into his own as well. His camera served as a device that provided him the possibility of addressing the performative power of gender. As Kendall Gerdes (2014) writes, this power works not merely to “make bodies legible” from having gendered characteristics but to make “gender itself take place” through bodies (p. 149). Gender is “performative,” she points out, “because it inscribes itself as a discourse each time it inscribes itself on a body, as a lived experience.”

Strömholm quickly dispels the widespread notion, as decried by Diane Arbus and others, that an image is stolen by a photographer, that a photograph taken of a subject is actually taken from that subject (Arbus, 2003, p. 147). On the contrary, in Strömholm’s work we can see the complexity of the drama unfolding and moving toward the unfamiliar on both sides of the lens. The gaze takes on a mimetic quality. Photography here, as Sara Davidmann (2014) puts it, operates as “an interactive social process with a dynamic potential for envisioning the transsexual intimate partnerships beyond the authority of textual representation” (pp. 636–653). We can think of Julia Kristeva’s term interactive subjectivity that captures the essence as the expression of what is not accounted for by the “active–passive dichotomy” (Kristeva, 2005, p. 44). Incidentally, by transcending the elementary active–passive opposition between photographer and photographed, and by operating as the reflector of every other participant, Strömholm arrives at his own self-portrait.

The following are excerpts from the text that Christian Caujolle, then director of the Vu agency in Paris that represented Strömholm, wrote as part of the publication produced by the Hasselblad Center, on the occasion of Strömholm’s being presented with the prestigious Hasselblad Award in 1997:

Because I am French and interested in photography, his work, “Place Blanche,” was one of my reference books. I had been fascinated by his lack of voyeurism on a tricky theme that is normally dealt with in a spectacular way in order to please the grubby watcher who is hungry for “shock” pictures; by his respect and complicity shown towards transvestites and transsexuals in Paris by night; by an absence of anecdotes, or, to be more precise, by a rejection of anecdotal stories; by the profound humanity of his expression; by his dark yet not despaired vision that showed tenderness and smiles; by his mix of conspicuousness and mystery that underlay pictures which wanted to fool us or at least raise questions under their “report” style; I considered this a tremendous documentary work. I was completely ignorant.

Caujolle, 1998, p. 6

The people of the world who are not a majority do not live or populate it. They are here, they have no specific occupation, they are not in agreement with space. With the significant exception of the “birds of the night” on Place Blanche that foster between themselves and their own body readable relationships which often undergo identity questionings. Male and female face features that we meet are often impossible to define.

Kristeva, 2005, p. 44

This remarkable body of work that Strömholm produced over ten years for Place Blanche constitutes, if not the first, at least one of the earliest attempts to portray the singularity of the individual’s experience of transgender subjectivity (Strömholm, 1983). The consistency, the body, and the flesh of these photographs release an eroticism, which in turn infuses the images with an astonishing flexibility and freedom of movement. They incite us, in Nikki Sullivan’s (2006) terms, to rethink the ways in which bodies are entwined in (un)becoming, rather than presuming that they are simply mired in being unless they undergo explicit, visible, and identifiable transformational procedures (p. 561). We feel the wind blowing, and it blows from all directions. In these portraits the photographer has located the site of the transgender experience in a personal space of indeterminacy and decisions linked to existence. This site is not just a surface but also a space of potentiality, infused with a psychological relationship to time, in which the future emerges from a dialectical reconfiguring of the past.

Strömholm’s photographs of transgender subjects could be viewed as anachronistic montages, a term coined by the art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman (1997) to describe images structured by many layers that resist forming part of the “great chronologic discourse” (p. 114). He suggests that their dialectic presentation is meant neither to resolve contradictions nor to transcend the opposition between the visible and the legible. On the contrary, according to Didi-Huberman there is a play of figuration which constantly activates the contradiction, exposes it, dramatizes it. We are left suspecting that something remains yet to be seen, something that imposes itself on the exercise of our gaze, which belongs to the private dimension and therefore remains opaque. We are left in doubt, which contravenes the certainty that “what you see is what you see,” the certainty of “being in front of the thing itself” (Didi-Huberman, 1997, pp. 78–79).

The estrangement and intensity of these images derive from their temporal paradoxes, from their anachronisms. They are charged with a formidable dialectic capability, a tremendous evocative power with a “poetic effect,” to paraphrase Lacan. Strömholm’s images disrupt the temporal stability of photographs. The progression of the sequence, as is our reading of the presentation of transgender, does not seem to unfold in chronological, linear time. Instead, we are presented with the experience of a “temporal augmentation,” to take up an expression by art historian Adrian Stokes (1978, p. 22). It is evident that these images result from a confluence of multiple time relations that would never have appeared to us under ordinary circumstances. As the product of an inherently creative act, however, the photograph is capable of capturing the essential creativity embedded in the individual’s experience of transgender subjectivity (Gozlan, 2015, p. 1). In seizing the instability and the complexity that characterizes the time interval of the expected arrival of the transformative event, “transitioning,” Strömholm manages to hold in suspense the disclosure of an enigma (Carter, 2014, p. 149). The photographs of Place Blanche are splashed with enigmatic traces.

How can we understand the enigmatic quality of these images? In a June 7, 1961 lecture from the seminar The Clinic of Transference, Lacan refers to a primordial image derived from his theory of the function of the mirror:

as something . . . suddenly proposed to him in which he does not simply receive the field of something in which he recognizes himself, but of something which already presents itself as an Urbild-ideal, as something which will always be, something which subsists of itself, as something before which he essentially experiences his own fissures as a premature being, as a being who experiences himself as not yet even—at the moment that the image comes to his perception—sufficiently coordinated to respond to this image in its totality.

For Lacan, the Urbild-ideal is a very particular kind of image formation that operates outside of time. The notion can be linked with what would later become for Piera Castoriadis-Aulagnier the concept of the “pictogram,” which she describes as a “pre-mirror stage formation” constituted by the earliest representations of heterogeneous stimuli that reach the mind. According to Castoriadis-Aulagnier (2014), the “pictographic representation” consists of metabolizing this heterogeneous information into homogeneous material capable of embodying experience (pp. 47, 51). The pictogram acts as a bridge to one’s own representation of the body in its totality, which is fundamental to achieving a sense of integration of the body as a unit. However, in its un-integrated state, the pictogram can also be the cause of disintegration, giving way to fragmentation anxieties. Although Strömholm’s photographs pose an intriguing synthetic quality, it is not surprising that, given their pictographic overload, in approaching these images one is also faced with many inevitable cracks, the cracks that speak of the body’s exposure to the real.

A few years after his seminar on The Clinic of Transference, near the conclusion of his January 9, 1963 lecture from the seminar On Transference, Lacan proposed to add to his theory of the mirror stage:

something comparable to the Moebius strip, something which does not have a specular image, the object a, [which causes the mirror image] to become the strange and invasive image of the double, becomes that which happens little by little at the end of the life of Maupassant when he begins by no longer seeing himself in the mirror, or when he perceives in a room something which turns its back on him and regarding which he immediately knows that he is not without some relationship to this ghost, when the ghost turns back, he sees that it is himself.

Lacan’s shift from the mirror image to the image of the double puts into question the presupposed idea of the stability of the mirror image itself, stability understood here as the capacity of the image to encompass in itself all the visible elements constituting the object, without any one of them missing. In other words, an image derives its stability from being capable of reflecting the object without anything interfering with the totality of its imprint.

The Lacanian double constitutive of the transgender imaginary is ubiquitous in Strömholm’s images. In them we experience how the introduction of the object a—in not being interchangeable, compatible, or visible with the mirror image—disturbs the stability of the mirror image and unveils the lack of stability in the image of the body. As a consequence, in Strömholm’s photographs the mirror image is bound to remain linked to the uncanny, described by Freud as the unfamiliar in the familiar (Melenotte, 2005, p. 136). As Lacan puts it, if psychoanalysis did not exist one would still know it, from the fact that there exist moments of the object’s appearance which throw us into a completely different dimension. Since it is given by experience, this alternative dimension merits detachment from the primal, which is the dimension of the strange, of something which can in no way allow itself to be grasped (Lacan, 1962).

At the same time, but operating in yet another dimension, alternative even to Lacan’s alternative—a third dimension, then—in Strömholm’s photographs we can see that the incorporation of the object a into the mirror image endows this transfiguration with the full scope of its erotic capability. The object a, in tying the knot of the un-interpretable, favors the intermittent cascading of a sexual force, as highlighted by Lacan:

The intermittent springing forth of its force, is what everything that I could call a series of images, that are easy to put before your eyes, of an eroto-propaedeutics, indeed even properly speaking of an erotics, gives a quite easy access to. A crowd of images of this type, Chinese, Japanese and others and, I imagine[,] ones that are not difficult to find either in our culture, will bear witness to it for you.

Lacan, 1963b

George Bataille’s (1986) notion of eroticism, as “the disequilibrium in which the being consc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• About the editor and contributors
• Introduction
• PART I Aesthetic tensions
• PART II Diagnostic phantasies in the (failed) quest for authenticity
• PART III Cultural montage
• Index