The Politics of the Handmade: Textures, Feelings, and the Matter of Trans Art History
This session draws attention to haptic and material engagements in modern and contemporary art history by exploring the handmade as a trans-specific methodology. We ask: How is trans art history made materially through the hand and body? What does trans art history feel like? And how are handmade processes (such as stitching, unravelling, assembling) conceptually useful in bringing art history and trans studies together?
Recent scholarship across art history, craft studies, queer theory and trans studies has revealed a preoccupation with the handmade as a lived practice, creative strategy and curatorial approach. Initiatives including the Museum of Transology and Museum of Trans Hirstory & Art (MOTHA) have used the museum ‘under construction’ to re-imagine institutional structures and classificatory systems rooted in classed, patriarchal, capitalist and colonial ideologies, and reflect trans, nonbinary and gender-diverse communities in non-monolithic terms. These conversations support the burgeoning turn towards other senses and mediatic histories, whether minimalism and abstraction (Getsy, 2015; Metzger and Ringelberg, 2020), the ‘shimmering’ presence of trans life (Steinbock, 2019), the ‘haptic tactic’ and ‘transaffective resistances’ of the archive (Delgado Huitrón, 2019) or the ‘textured labor of transgender embodiment and subjectivity’ (Vaccaro, 2010).
We seek to open up dialogue and explore how the handmade is applied and felt across multiple contexts, making the indexical traces, patterns of labour and seams of exhibitions visible. The panel will feature contributions from scholars and creative practitioners.
Session Convenors:
Daniel Fountain, University of Exeter
Gabe Beckhurst, University College London
Speakers:
Freya Gowrley, University of Bristol
Constructing Queerness: Figuring the Chevalière d’Éon in Dennis Severs’ House
At the centre of a noticeboard covered with papers at Dennis Severs’ House in Spitalfields is a notable inclusion, a copy of the famous print Mademoiselle de Beaumont or The Chevalier d’Eon published in the London Magazine in 1777. Showing the trans spy between and across genders, the image is surrounded by notices, scraps of fabric, and paper pamphlets. Yet the noticeboard is only one of many richly crafted assemblages made by Severs, the presence of which collectively highlight the competing epistemologies simultaneously present and embodied in the space of the House.
While clearly echoing historical forms of representation, the dual realities of Severs’ House are decisively present in his noticeboard assemblage, with modern and historical working together to create one, overlapping and simultaneous reality. Using the placement of the Chevalier d’Eon within Severs’ assemblage as its anchoring focus, the paper argues that this portrayal offers a transhistorical point of queer identification for the artist. Considering the role of the image in Severs’ creation of a space that was at once historical and contemporary, it highlights how he looked backward to an imagined past, and forward to a performative, queer present. In so doing, the paper follows David J. Getsy and Che Gossett’s call to consider trans representation in all its ‘temporal complexities’, as well as Susan Stryker’s transhistorical models of identification and disidentification as forms of radical trans positionality. Building upon work from queer theory that has long established the assembled as an inherently disruptive, interrogative, and thereby queer, mode, I accordingly explore how queerness and its histories can be said to be constructed from the composite.
E.M. Parry, University of Brighton
Porosity and entanglement at the edges of body and object: Gender labour as craft project
This paper explores the trans politics of the handmade through case studies of my own artworks and their reception in public space, as they both speak to and become trans art history. Situated at a collision of industrialised commodification and sensory matter, these works explore historical and contemporary practices of self-fashioning, gendered labour and embodiment, inviting a haptic and experiential conversation between trans history and futurity, navigating the porous margins of body, costume, object and self.
The paper will introduce three projects: 1. Pricklings – first conceived and performed in queer club spaces, and later presented in gallery and museum settings, this performance restages a prefabricated and commodified silicone bodysuit, adapted and worn by the artist, as a site of radical transformation, connection, trans history and futurity, through collaborative acts of crafting. 2. Fag Ends – a performance installation involving thousands of mudlarked clay tobacco pipe-shards, this work invites the audience to participate in a process of collaborative an-archiving, whilst the artist weaves narratives linking these anonymous fragments of forgotten lives with historical practices of gendered labour and embodiment, and their inculcation into systems of early colonialism and capitalism. 3. Queering Piracy – recent and ongoing work as lead artist on community projects at the London Museum and National Maritime Museum, exploring gender labour, queer community-building and space-making through collaborative crafting practices.
Louise Siddons, University of Southampton
Transfer/Transform: Kinship and Trans Identity in Bean Yazzie’s Powwow Participation
The artist Bean Yazzie (Navajo, b. 1978) has been dancing at powwows since they were a young child. Powwows are pan-Indian intertribal gatherings that were developed in response to the need for kinship- and coalition-building after the genocide of Native North American people by European settlers. Every powwow includes a codified set of events including a series of dances that require specific regalia, handmade by participants and/or their family members and friends. The dances have historically been organised along binary gender lines; from childhood, Yazzie has danced in traditionally masculine categories. As they got older, they began to experience harassment at powwows because of their perceived gender transgression. In their twenties, they came out as a lesbian and for some time stopped dancing. Another decade later, they used Navajo constructions of gender, describing themselves as ‘dilbaa’. More recently, Yazzie began to articulate their dilbaa identity in terms of trans experience. In 2024 they re-entered the powwow scene by attending their first two-spirit powwow, where they were caught by surprise when multiple people thanked them for their dancing — a complete reversal of their earlier experience and an expression of the power of chosen kinship in queer community. Afterwards, their brother made them a gift of his powwow regalia — a striking gesture of kinship from Yazzie’s birth family that honoured their trans identity. In this paper, I explore the material meanings embedded in the regalia, its materials, and its deployment in fields of memory, kinship and Indigenous trans identity.
Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell, University of Edinburgh
Does the digital matter? British trans print culture at the fin-de-millennium
Trans media history has tended to map a close association between the emergence of digital media and transformations in trans identity categories at the end of the twentieth century. For Susan Stryker (2008; 2022) and Cáel Keegan (2018), the development of new digital technologies in the 1990s made possible the de-coupling of gender from sex that underpinned the terminological and epistemological shift away from transsexuality and towards transgender within self-identification and organising. Both Stryker and Keegan’s arguments rely, however, on an assumption about the digital’s dematerialisation: where transsexuality represented an analog process of ‘cutting and pasting’ the sexed body, transgender promised the freedom to transcend material limits via novel forms of ideation and perception, what Keegan termed the ‘shimmering excitation of trans*.’ (2018, p.28).
This paper critiques a dematerialised reading of the digital through one object of British trans print culture produced in the 1990s: the Gender and Sexuality Alliance’s (G&SA) short-lived Radical Deviance: A Journal of Transgendered Politics (1996-1999). Produced using a word processor (and designed with the distinctive visual stylings of Microsoft’s WordArt), but printed and distributed through Stockton Council, Radical Deviance imbricates the digital in a materialist history of British trans activism and cultural production in the 1990s. Through reading Radical Deviance’s digital materiality on the printed page, this paper brings approaches from art history to bear on Stryker and Keegan’s narrative of digital optimism, and draws attention to the infrastructural and material conditions that foreclosed upon trans making in the UK at the twentieth century’s end.
Sam Godfrey, University of Exeter
Smocking, net curtains and creeping: A trans creative methodology
In this paper I will discuss the idea of ‘creeping’ as a trans-specific creative methodology, with particular reference to its relationship with craft and trans studies. The etymological connection between the word ‘smock’ and ‘creep’ forms the basis of my inquiry, as I use smocking, pleating and folding as textile techniques in my practice-based research. I will look at how the materials, tools and techniques that I use, as well as the installation and exhibition outcomes and collaborative work with other trans and non-binary artists, all converge in a practice of ‘creeping.’ To illustrate these points, I will be discussing them in relation to three recent installation works: love letters to watery others (2023), kelp reflection room ii (2023) and three familiar waters (2024).
My practice-based research brings together smocking as a textile technique with unwanted and found domestic textiles (mainly net curtains), and I create large scale installations that are designed to be touched, entered and interacted with. These installations incorporate audio and visual work, often using speculative digital underwater environments and sound compositions of watery spaces. I aim to create spaces that one must ‘creep’ into and find ways to move through, imagining the work as ecosystems that represent trans communal embodiment.
Adrien Crossman, McMaster University
Trans material methodologies in the studio practice of Adrien Crossman
For my paper I will present on a cross section of my studio and creative works and how they are informed by the handmade though queer, trans and SM sensibilities. The presentation will take the form of an expanded artist talk exploring the ways that research-creation methods within my creative practice engage with handmade and DIY histories and practices. Exploring what makes a space or object feel queer, I will speak to queer hanging methodologies and the practice of being in queer and transhistorical dialogue through the language of materiality. Within my practice, objects such as nipple clamps and BVD briefs act as indexes of the queer and trans body, while handmade pennants don queer sentiments such as ‘WE ARE EVERYHWERE’, ‘FAILURE’, ‘DEVIATE’, and ‘EXIST’. Cyanotype prints made using nipple clamps explore the tensions between authenticity and visibility and the fear of losing feeling when considering top surgery. I will speak to my work as a writer, curator and DIY gallerist and the ways in which I collaborate with and foster queer and trans arts community locally and across Turtle Island. Inspired by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s essay ‘A slurp ramp of our own’, I will conclude by discussing a new body work that imagines a backroom of a gay bar, which will include custom built architecture intended for folks of varying genders and bodies.