Opulent Lives and the Trans Everyday (1880-1930)

This panel responds to Ina Linge’s recent work on ‘queer livability’ to consider the arts of trans livability from the late Victorian to interwar period. We are interested in exploring ways in which trans opulence is forged in the detritus of everyday stuff, and in the experiences of ordinary materiality and embodiment. How is trans* life found in the weighty, fabricated, and ephemeral matter of the everyday? What parts did objects play in the loves, lives, and friends of gender non-conforming people in this period, and what was the role of things in designing paths of liveability? Could a carefully preserved strand of dried seaweed from the beach, or a cheap and bawdy valentines-card shared between lovers become tools to magnify and sensitise historical trans experience? How might examples of trans livability be understood, and new readings made, by drawing attention to the vitality of contingent things between 1880 and 1930?

The panel brings together papers that consider artworks, objects, and things as intimate and embodied mouthpieces for trans lives in local and global contexts. We aim to open space for the consideration of the qualities of matter as producers of knowledge and meaning, the capacity of objects to rethink identitarian models of gender, and the granular and diverse nature of trans subjectivities.

Session Convenors:

Lotte Crawford, University of Exeter

Frankie Dytor, University of Exeter

Speakers:

Rebecca Birrell, St Andrews University

Encounters in the Gluck Archive

A biro drawing of a meal set for one. Studies in navy ink of a cat. Copied onto scraps of paper, quotes from Vincent Van Gogh’s letters and the memoirs of St Teresa of Avila. Pressed flowers. Calculations in red ink. A newspaper cutting of a reproduction of Rembrandt’s drawing of an elephant. These are just some of the objects in the archive of Gluck (1895-1978). Together, what narrative does this private ephemera, an oblique form of life-writing, embody? What might be gleaned from this haphazard, heterogenous collection of material about the subjectivity of Gluck, and their – to use Ina Linge’s phrase – ‘strategies for liveable life’?

These unfinished, spontaneous modes of self-expression have no obvious use. They passed the time; they offered temporary solace or distraction. They also lack an obvious relationship to the art Gluck produced. Indeed, the charged, uncategorisable material could be said to contest the smooth, clean surfaces of the still life paintings (such as Lilies, 1936, and Lords and Ladies, 1936) through which Gluck established their professional identity.

This paper will offer a speculative engagement with Gluck’s archive. Repositories of affect, comprised of doodles and documents of self-fashioning and fantasy, I will suggest that this material constitutes an ‘archive of feelings’ within the artist’s archive. Sketches, note taking, flower pressing and other acts of creativity that emphasise process rather than output provided opportunities for identity practice and pleasure for a trans artist who (according to letters in the archive) frequently found the harsh realities of early twentieth century queer experience difficult to manage. Defiant of the period’s marginalisation of trans people, these artefacts can be read for traces of Gluck’s queer subjectivity, their intimacies with women, and their challenge to heteronormative domesticity.

Ciaran Hervás, University of Cambridge

“L’Anatomie n’existe pas”: Bodily Plasticity in Claude Cahun’s Photography

This paper examines the French surrealist artist Claude Cahun’s photographic exploration of the fusion between the human body and the inanimate world. Cahun employed the camera, I suggest, as a means of rendering the body-as-object and the object-as-body, blurring the boundary between self-portrait and still life. In ‘Prenez garde aux objets domestiques’ (Cahiers d’art 11, 1936), Cahun describes found and manmade objects used to adorn the body as ‘irrational buddings of flesh,’ comparing inanimate ornamentations to the intricacies and excesses of human anatomy, from the indescribable colours of the human iris to the complex root structures of molars, which ‘force a dentist to conclude “anatomy does not exist.”’ The camera’s flattening of animacy and inanimacy to a single register allows Cahun to view their body as contiguous with its adornments, from masks to props to costume, rendering anatomy plastic, and setting the foundation for their manipulations of the sexed body. As Cahun was an avid reader of sexological texts, I contextualise this project within contemporary sexological research into the mutability of the sexed body through glandular manipulation during the early 20th century. While sexology had long used photography to objectify the sexually non-normative body, Cahun’s reconfiguration of the relationship between body and object parodies and subverts this pathologizing dynamic by revealing a liberating plasticity in the conflation of body and object. Attending to the intermediality of Cahun’s work at the intersection of sculpture, photography, and photomontage, I trace a trans* ethos of embodiment in their oeuvre, informed by—yet working against—the sexological narratives of their time.

Alonso Ortega, Universidad Iberoamericana

A Life Onstage: Claudius Modjesko (“The Creole Patti”) and the Performance of Operatic Femininity

This paper examines the onstage career of Claudius Modjesko, known as “The Creole Patti,” by analyzing how she/he crafted an operatic femininity and trans visibility in the early twentieth century, drawing upon the visual and performative legacy of soprano Adelina Patti. The latter, a cultural icon of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, embodied ideals of vocal mastery and feminine allure that defined operatic norms and served as a model of celebrity and femininity. Modjesko’s strategically linked her/his own racialized identity to these celebrated attributes, situating her/him within a lineage of operatic prestige while asserting her/his unique identity. Through a close reading of Modjesko’s 1905 portrait in Rome and the evocative paintings by Kees van Dongen, I analyze how Modjesko used materiality, gesture, and representation to perform a trans-racialized operatic femininity. Thus, this study emphasizes the role of objects and visual representations as tools of gender articulation, racial identity, and self-affirmation. By embracing the cultural symbols associated with Patti, and by embodying them in both photographic and painted form, Modjesko expanded the parameters of gender identity and trans subjectivity. Her/His artistic portrayals thus offer a compelling example of how historical trans identities were not only represented but also reimagined through the combined forces of performance, material culture, and visual art.

G Lori Millon, Psychoanalyst

Turning a Ghost into a Transcestor: Sándor Ferenczi’s Missing Porcupine

This paper takes as an object a gift that the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi gave to Freud in 1917, a bronze porcupine. The porcupine is not in any collection or archive; we only know about the gift because it’s mentioned in the exchange of letters between the two. We may presume that Freud got rid of it as the relationship soured, a traumatic break that Ferenczi considered responsible for a turn in his health that ultimately led to his death. This paper will offer a trans reading of Ferenczi’s relation to Freud, a confusion of tongues in the queerest sense. Contesting Freud’s patriarchal mastery, Ferenczi knowingly took up a feminine position in his clinical practice, eschewing Oedipal interpretation in favour of maternal tenderness. Positioned as womanly, he was abjected by Freud and for many years was excluded from the psychoanalytic canon. Drawing on Derrida, we will think about Ferenczi’s lost porcupine as an exclusion that is constitutive of the psychoanalytic archive. This paper will raise questions of trans embodiment via Ferenczian neoformations and Anzieu’s skin ego, arguing that Ferenczi’s clinical diary was a (doomed) attempt to rend the skin he shared with Freud, and write his way into a new body.

Jeanie Sinclair, Falmouth University, and Nic Aaron, University of Hertfordshire

Jennie Moore’s Handbag: Trans Opulence in the Everyday

A woman’s handbag is arguably the most intimate of everyday objects, and its contents have the potential to reveal much about its owner. What do these quotidian items reveal about a person? This paper explores the story of Jennie Moore, a working-class trans woman who lived in the North East of England in the early twentieth century. For Jennie Moore, much of what we know about her life comes from her entanglements with the law, and the invasive and intrusive newspaper articles that report her appearances in court. In these reports, which not only list the contents of Jennie’s handbag, but detail the contents of her wardrobe and the furnishings in her home, we find the fragments of who Jennie was. In Jennie’s handbag, we find the objects of trans livability in the everyday luxuries of shoplifted cosmetics. In the description of Jennie’s home, we see trans opulence in the depiction of her curtains and piano. We read against these everyday sources – specifically newspaper articles and criminal records – that are transphobic and transmisogynistic in character, to look at the ways in which these descriptions of everyday objects embody Jennie and attempt to identify and disentangle her agency from within the materials available. We consider Jennie’s trans livability, considering the objects and artefacts of her everyday life through which she expressed her transness and framed her subjectivity, and in doing so, address questions and challenges around how we can talk about Jennie’s life and gender non-conformity.